The Case of Lena Smith is a 1929 American silent drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg, starring Esther Ralston and James Hall, and released by Paramount Pictures.

Commenting on the experience in Sight & Sound (February 17, 1949), Harrington wrote: The Case of Lena Smith may be regarded as von Sternberg’s most successful attempt at combining a story of meaning and purpose with his very original style.

The young officer has arranged employment for Lena in his parents' petty-bourgeois household, who know nothing of their servant's clandestine marriage to their son, nor that they are grandparents a little Franz.

Nonetheless, Herr Hofrat confines Lena to her room at night, and sternly reminds her that he is the chief of Vienna's Bureau of Morals.

When Lena, distracted, appeals to administrators at the Bureau of Morals to discover the whereabouts of her little Franz, they disclose that she has been deemed an “unfit” mother.

[7][8] The main story of the movie unfolds in Vienna of 1894 (the year of von Sternberg's birth) during a period which saw a doubling of the city's population as agricultural workers from the realms of the decaying Austria-Hungary empire - Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia and Hungary – migrated to the urban centers.

[9] Sternberg presents the full range of social types who inhabited “the ethnic melting pot of the Viennese population” at the turn of the century.

[10] The character of Lieutenant Franz Holrat, Lena's first husband, is based on the novelist Arthur Schnitzler’s protagonist in Leutnant Gustl (1901).

[12][13] Film historian Andrew Sarris reports that Sternberg's depiction of the Prater is "one of the most admired sequences in the film" and quotes at length the director's vivid recollection of the Wurstelprater in his memoirs: Mine was every crevice of the vast amusement park, the like of which never again existed...Hundreds of shooting galleries, Punch and Judy and the inevitable Satan puppet, chalk-faced clowns in the dominoes...leather-faced dummies that groaned when slapped, pirouetting fleas, sword swallowers, tumbling midgets and men on stilts, contortionists, jugglers and acrobats, wild swings with skirts flaring from them...forests of balloons, tattooed athletes, muscle-bulging weight lifters, woman who were sawed in half...grunting knife throwers with screaming targets whose hair flowed down to the hems of their nightgowns, hatchet-throwing Indians and phlegmatic squaws, double-headed calves, members of the fair sex, fat and bearded, with thighs that could pillow and army, magicians who poured jugs of flaming liquid down their throats...and the Chinese mandarin with drooping moustache longer than the tail of a horse revolving on a merry-go-round to the tune of Ion Ivanovici's Donauwellen - and what more could I have asked?

The earliest scripts of the film is marked “Brief Synopsis of a Ralston-Mother Story” indicating that Sternberg had the actress in mind from the start.

[19] While American film enthusiasts were very impressed with The Case of Lena Smith, the trade papers offered mixed reviews.

[20] Variety (January 16, 1929) considered the film's story, theme, acting and production "admirable" but regretted that "its realism is pretty remote from the tastes of most movie-goers" and "the picture hasn’t a spark of light to relieve the shadow.

"[21] The Los Angeles Times (January 20, 1929) appreciated Sternberg's original style, but complained that "Lena Smith fails to satisfy, for it reaches no rounded-out conclusion."

"[22] Motion Picture News reported that Sternberg's Lena Smith "missed the mark" as a form of "mass entertainment ... the title misleading.

"[24] Mary Porter Russell, writing for the Washington Post (February 25, 1929) thought the film "strikingly original in its treatment ... Not once did it become stickily sentimental over Lena’s plight or make a deliberate effort to play on the emotions ... An excellent picture, unless you insist on a good time.

"[25] Lacking "simple themes" and "uncomplicated action", the movie was not a box-office success, and like most silent films distributed during the transition to sound, The Case of Lena Smith "fell by the wayside".

Critic and novelist Hans Sahl of the Montag Morgan (February 3, 1930) approvingly called the movie “one of the sharpest, most embittered settling of accounts with the spirit of the dapperly uniformed pre-war Habsburg monarchy.”[27] Editor Heinz Pol of the Vossische Zeitung (February 3, 1930) praised Sternberg for transforming an otherwise light love story into a tragic tale of a woman's struggle to regain custody of her child.

Pol's estimate of Sternberg's talent included praise for “that razor-sharp line between art and non-art.”[28] Politically conservative critics expressed displeasure with the films depiction of the Viennese social order, particularly the scenes portraying Austrian petty-bourgeois under the Habsburg monarchy.

The Deutsche Tageszeitung of January 31, 1930 criticized Sternberg for indulging “in his blind (possibly self-inflicted) hate of pre-war Austria.” The journal Der Montag (February 3, 1930) accused the director of “portraying the inhabitants of Vienna as “cold-hearted...which does not seem to us to be the most prominent Viennese characteristic.”[29] The Vienna censorship board briefly barred The Case of Lena Smith in May 1929 during the initial review due to its "unsuccessful portrayal of milieu" and "unsuitable intertitles in Viennese dialect.

Within a week all showings were discontinued and replaced with Wolf Song, a Gary Cooper and Lupe Vélez vehicle: “Suburban theatre operators wanted productions suitable to show off their new sound reproduction equipment.” Of Sternberg's The Case of Lena Smith, “the daily papers in France took hardly any notice.”[34] This is now considered a lost film.

[37] Assembling 150 original stills and set designs, numerous script and production documents and essays by eminent film historians, the book Josef von Sternberg.