Josef von Sternberg's debut feature already demonstrates the meticulous composition, gestural rhymes, graphic tension, and plastic force that would soon make him one of cinema's preeminent stylists. Made independently for $5,000 and shot on location throughout the Los Angeles area, the film received the backing of United Artists after Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were cajoled into a private screening (lead actress Georgia Hale would co-star in The Gold Rush the next year). The Salvation Hunters was celebrated at the time for unadulterated realism, but it now seems like a unique synthesis of pictorialist atmosphere, Symbolist psychology, and Expressionist space. Its mood and sensibility anticipate the postwar filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch. Restoration courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Austrian Film Museum. Original Score by Dreamscope Trio.