The feature stars Georgia Hale and George K. Arthur, and would bring Sternberg, "a new talent", to the attention of the major movie studios, including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures.

Four characters, “humans who crawl close to the earth” occupy the brooding landscape: The Boy, a fainthearted and feckless youth, wanders aimlessly amid the wreckage.

The Girl, older and hardened by her impoverishment, has “sunk as low as her socks.” Maintaining a sullen dignity in her solitude, she spurns The Boys diffident advances.

The Man stops her: “Hunger will whisper things in their ears that I might find troublesome to say.” As the hours pass, The Girl becomes increasingly anxious due to The Child's pleas for food.

The Boy indulges in a vivid fantasy, in which he, The Girl and The Child are transformed into wealthy aristocrats, who arrive at their estate escorted by servants dressed in faux-military livery.

Triumphantly, the trio – now a family –strides into the sunset, “children of the sun.” English actor and producer George K. Arthur approached Sternberg to film a comedy entitled “Just Plain Buggs".

Sternberg had recently served as assistant-director and writer on Roy William Neill’s film By Devine Right (1924) and accepted the offer, with the caveat that they substitute his own screenplay, The Salvation Hunters, to which Arthur agreed.

[8][9][10] Due to budgetary restraints, Sternberg and Arthur employed Hollywood extras, so-called "supers", rather than featured players.

Stuart Holmes, who played The Gentleman, was an exception; a well-known screen "villain" - and famous sculptor - he was paid $100 in advance for his brief, but effective, appearance in The Salvation Hunters.

Nationwide, attendance was “unspectacular.” As Sternberg, at the Hollywood premiere remarked, “The members of the cast were in the audience, which greeted my work with laughter and jeers and finally rioted.

[14] Subsequently, The New York Times Sunday entertainment section of February 1, 1925 carried the following announcement: ”The Salvation Hunters directed by Josef von Sternberg, a young Austrian, is to be presented at the Mark Strand this week.

Mr. Chaplin was particularly enthusiastic about the picture.”[1]At years’ end Film Mercury movie critic Anabel Lane included The Salvation Hunters in the top-10 list for 1925:[1] 1.

[1][6] “The underlying theme of Sternberg’s cinema,” observes critic Andrew Sarris, is the relationships of men and women “or more precisely, man’s confrontation of the myths of womanhood.” His oeuvre demonstrates this “from The Salvation Hunters to Anatahan”, his last film.

“[T]hough eager to sleep with The Girl, he never loses his dignity or bearing [and] respects her reluctance when he discovers she is driven by hunger”, as well as concern for her younger companions.

Pabst’s treatment of Louise Brooks and her respectful lovers in Diary of a Lost Girl and Pandora's Box” in the late twenties.

“The real drama of The Salvation Hunters is not concerned with the rise of the downtrodden, but rather with the moving (emotion in motion) spectacle of a Girl waiting for a Boy to grow into a Man.”[17] Citations