Fun in a Chinese Laundry [*SIGNED*]

New York: The Macmillan Company. Near Fine in Very Good dj. (c.1965). 2nd printing. Hardcover. [nice tight clean copy, one tiny mark on front cover, bookplate of previous owner (the inscribee) and old bookseller's label (Larry Edmunds Bookshop) on front pastedown; jacket shows a little wear along top edge and at ends of spine]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author, the great (and famously cranky) film director, on the half-title page. An idiosyncratic and often acerbically funny autobiography by the "discoverer" of Marlene Dietrich, with whom he made a string of visually stunning films in the early-to-mid 1930s, beginning with THE BLUE ANGEL and concluding with THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN. (Hmmm, "Angel" to "Devil" -- is there a message there?) Von Sternberg devotes most of the first half of the book to philosophical and aesthetic noodlings before he finally buckles down to actually talking about his films and how he made them -- and finally, in Chapter 9 (in case you want to jump ahead), he gets around to a full-bore discussion of his films with Frau Dietrich. (A snippet: "She has never ceased to proclaim that I taught her everything. Among the many things I did not teach her was to be garrulous about me.") Signed by Author .