marlene dietrich

My Week with Marlene

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I know for a fact that there was a recent time when Marlene Dietrich’s numerous, star-making collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg were streaming on The Criterion Channel.  I know this because I happened to watch one of the lesser titles from that collection, The Devil is a Woman, during that window.  If I had known how difficult it would be to access the Dietrich/von Sternberg oeuvre just a few years later, I would’ve pushed myself to stream them all when I could, not just the one that jumped out at me because it had “Devil” in the title and was set during Carnival.  Currently, none of von Sternberg’s collaborations with his sexual-anarchist muse are streaming on any online platform (legally, at least), which means you’re either coughing up $100 for Criterion’s DVD box set (The Blu-Ray discs are currently out of print) or you’re waiting patiently for them to return to their streaming platform some distant, wistful year.  Well, I’ve unlocked a secret third option: buying used DVD copies of whatever Marlene Dietrich movies I happen to stumble across in thrift stores.  Sure, I’ve still never seen Morocco or The Blue Angel—two of her most beloved collaborations with von Sternberg—but I’ve managed to pick up a few of their shared titles in the meantime to help me get through this unexpected streaming drought.

1932’s Blonde Venus finds von Sternberg in awe of Dietrich’s charisma . . . and her stockinged gams.  She stars in this pre-Code adultery drama as a woman who is simply too fabulous to cut it as a housewife, too magnetic to not be onstage, so badass it’s criminal (in this case to her marriage’s peril).  As flattering as von Sternberg’s movie is to Dietrich’s plentiful charms, he still dramatically puts her through the ringer.  Blonde Venus opens with Dietrich and fellow, unnamed actresses skinny-dipping – their naked flesh just barely obscured by reflections on the surface of the water.  They’re naturally peeped on by group of horny fuckboys, one of whom is smooth enough to talk Dietrich into a date after her next performance.  Years later, she’s married to the galoot, raising their son, and worried that their family won’t be able to survive the financial burden of her sickly husband’s skyrocketing medical expenses.  Of course, this leads her to return to the stage to earn quick cash (in a time when “dancer” effectively translated to “prostitute”), where she quickly is led astray by a young, wealthy, hunky Cary Grant who throws her marriage into a death spiral.  Blonde Venus is extremely dated to 1930s sensibilities, by which I mean Dietrich’s stage numbers get real racist real quick, with her first performance featuring a gorilla suit and a bevy of buxom dancers in blackface.  It’s dated in all the right ways too, though, laying on so many double-entendre line readings and horned-up “come hither” glances that you’re tempted to say von Sternberg has “The Lubitsch Touch“.  Of course, he’s actually got his own touch, which mostly shows in the lighting’s gorgeous play with silhouettes & shadows and in the drama’s gloomy mood, which is something you won’t find in most of Lubitsch’s pre-Code sex comedies.

Shanghai Express, from the same year, doubles down on the gloomy drama, trapping Dietrich in a series of locked train cars where are no stages for the fräulein with the redrawn brow-lines to model sparkly outfits or sing cabaret.  Instead of locking horns with a fellow horned-up cabaret dancer named Taxi (whom she insults in Blonde Venus by asking “Do you charge for the first mile?” in perfect ice-queen bitchiness), Dietrich is instead paired with an equally gorgeous & charismatic actress who genuinely poses a threat.  Shanghai Express is a rolling cage match in which Dietrich & Anna May Wong are locked in tight quarters to compete for the title of most alluring femme fatale; I’m afraid Orientalism wins out in the end, but it’s still a beautiful fight.  Like in Blonde Venus, things get real racist real quick, with every character casually tossing around the word “chinaman” and musing about the moral corruption of The East in practically every scene of dialogue (and with the villain appearing in yellowface to seal the deal).  I very much understand the movie’s appeal to those who rank it highly in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog, especially as a political thriller in which a train of innocent passengers are held hostage & tormented by corrupt Chinese officials in an increasingly tense stalling of their lives.  The government corruption, moralist Christian hypocrisy, and opium trade maneuvers that drive the plot are all intriguing enough in this Dietrich von Sternberg bottle episode, but I just couldn’t get past the Orientalist stink of the premise & setting.  As perfectly cast as she is, Anna May Wong is herself a victim of that racist streak, with her screentime greatly diminished in comparison to Dietrich, who stars as the infamous “coaster” (coastline sex worker) Shanghai Lily.  Dietrich lands some great zingers about how “respectable people” are “dull” and how she & God are “not on speaking terms”, but they’d all be better served in a film where she’s a bawdy cabaret performer instead of an expatriate political refugee.

1931’s Dishonored splits the difference between Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express, combining the best parts of both films to achieve the highest highs of this thrift-store-purchase trio, despite having the lowest name recognition.  Dietrich stars as a sex-worker musician and as a political agitator, using her alluring beauty & party-girl charms to infiltrate Russian forces as lady-spy X-27.  Dishonored is the most visually showy von Sternberg film I’ve seen so far, layering shadows, dissolves, and foreground props in what could’ve been a very straightforward wartime espionage drama otherwise.  It’s also got plenty of pre-Code shocks, most lovably in a rare Carnival sequence that credibly conveys the debauchery of the holiday (even more so than in The Devil is a Woman).  It’s ideal TCM broadcast fodder all around, with lines of dialogue like “I suppose I’m no good, that’s all,” and “The more you cheat and the more you lie, the more exciting you become” registering as all-timers that should be just as iconic as “Here’s looking at you, kid” and “Of all the gin joints in all the world, she walks into mine.”  It’s a bleak, bleak, bleak picture, even for its time – featuring two suicides in its opening half hour and concluding on an unflinchingly brutal execution.  At the same time, von Sternberg leaves plenty of room for ribald joviality, with Dietrich joking about the difference between “serving her country” as a spy vs “serving her countrymen” as a streetwalker.  Like in Shanghai Express, she doesn’t sing any cabaret numbers, but she does play plenty of piano, and her director is going so buck wild with his lingering dissolves and long-distance push-ins that you hardly have time to notice she’s not performing on a stage.

I cannot claim that Dishonored is the best of Marlene Dietrich’s collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, because I am working with an incomplete data set.  I can only report that it’s the best of their collaborations that I currently have access to.  It seems almost criminal that any of the seven films they made together wouldn’t be currently available to the public on a streaming service, but scarcity of access is a constant in any cinephile’s life.  Unless you’re lucky enough to have the made-up, mythological resource of “disposable income”, it’s likely you’re used to having your film selections dictated by access points like library cards, video store rentals, thrift store purchases, and shared streaming-service passwords; I know they’re what drive the programming on this humble film blog, anyway.  I’m committed to catching up with Morocco, The Blue Angel, and The Scarlet Empress the next time they’re conveniently available to me, but I will admit there was an unbeatable thrill to finding used copies of a few other blind spot titles in the Dietrich von Sternberg catalog to hold me over until then – especially since Dishonored & Blonde Venus ended up being such rewarding pre-Code dramas that might’ve felt more anonymous if I watched all seven movies at once.

-Brandon Ledet

Touch of Evil (1958)

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The recent, ongoing Barbenheimer phenomenon has been a shock for regular moviegoers, since we’ve long gotten used to having vast, empty multiplexes to ourselves, like rats making nests in abandoned hospitals.  The “Think pink!” Barbie army was out en masse on Barbenheimer Weekend, which was healthy for local cinemas’ survival in a post-streaming world and for our own generally anti-social routine of silently watching screens glow, alone in the dark.  This us-vs-them dichotomy was especially vivid to me on that Sunday morning, when I watched Orson Welles’s classic-period noir Touch of Evil at The Prytania.  The century-old single screener’s “Classic Movies” series is the only recurring repertory program in town where you can regularly see gems like Touch of Evil in a proper venue (give or take Prytania’s other, artier weekly rep series, Wildwood).  It’s also the only theater in town that was screening Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on a 70mm film print instead of a standard DCP, which means that a huge crowd of Oppieheads formed in the lobby during the final third of Touch of Evil, increasingly impatient with the opening film’s lengthy runtime.  I’m sure there were a few brave cinema soldiers who watched Touch of Evil and Oppenheimer as a back-to-back double feature that morning, since all-day double features were the commanding theme of the weekend.  Most of the people outside the theater walls likely hadn’t been to a movie since last year’s Top Gun & Avatar sequels, though, judging by the fact that there usually isn’t a line stretching all the way down the block outside The Prytania on Sunday mornings as I make my quick, anti-social exits to my bus stop.  It’s the Barbies & Oppies that allow theaters to stay open for those lesser-attended (but infinitely more precious) Classic Movies screenings, though, so in a way that block-long line out the door warmed my heart even more than watching another Old Hollywood relic in the Renet Brunet Classic Movie slot.

As you can tell by the title, Touch of Evil isn’t much of a heartwarmer anyway.  Welles’s major-studio noir is a shockingly grim & grimy crime picture; it’s also shockingly gorgeous.  It opens with a minutes-long, spectacularly complex tracking shot that follows two unsuspecting couples crossing into America from a Mexican border town, unaware that a bomb has been planted in the trunk of one couple’s car.  It’s a perfect illustration of the Hitchcock method of building suspense, showing the audience “the bomb under the table” long before the characters it threatens are aware of it.  That back-alley bombing is also a great source of political intrigue, leading to a feature-length investigation of the whos, wheres, whens, and whys behind the dynamite.  The detective from the Mexican side of the border is played by Charlton Heston (in a queasily outdated choice of cross-racial casting) as a noble, idealistic rule-follower who believes in the sanctity of the law.  The corrupt cop from the American side is played by Welles himself, matching the immense beauty of his camera work with his immense hideousness as a crooked, racist villain who frames young Mexican men for crimes they obviously did not commit.  In the movie’s view of law enforcement, all cops are bastards, but American cops are the slimiest, most repulsive bastards of all – something Welles conveys in the prophetic prosthetics that exaggerate his own facial features (by guessing exactly what his real-life face would eventually become) and in the exaggerated camera angles that frame that face at monstrous angles in sweaty close-ups.  His villainy really goes overboard when he attacks Heston for the transgression of actually following the law by dispatching drug-cartel biker boys to torment the detective’s naive, newlywed wife – a young Janet Leigh, who hadn’t yet learned from Norman Bates to beware handsome creeps at remote motels.  The whole picture is slimy & ugly in its heart, but stunningly beautiful to the eye.

Like every other Orson Welles picture after Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil suffers from discord between its director and its studio.  The version presented at The Prytania was the one most widely available to modern audiences: a digital restoration of a 1998 re-edit that attempted to reconstruct the film according to an Orson Welles memo to the execs at Universal, detailing how he would like to see it sequenced.  Touch of Evil had a much less prestigious reputation before that late-90s re-issue, since the studio butchered Welles’s vision in the editing room, leaving it just as much of a tattered mess as other notoriously muddled works like The Magnificent Ambersons.  The familiar tropes & rhythms of noir are a useful anchor for Welles’s studio-compromised fragments of genius, though, which you won’t find in Ambersons but is apparent in both Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai.  In the memo-corrected edit, there’s still some initial confusion about what action is set on which side of the border, but it feels like a small concern if you allow yourself to get swept up in the flow of the overachieving camerawork and in the jurisdictional clashes between the two nations’ police.  Thankfully, the Welles memo at least helped re-establish in the current edit that Heston’s investigation of American corruption should be intercut with the harassment & drugging of his wife, whom he’s essentially abandoned so he can play hero.  There’s incredible tension in watching this detective fall further down the rabbit hole while leaving ample time for the vultures outside to pick at his family, which I assume was lost in the initial edit that separated their stories as distinct & sequential rather than rottenly concurrent.  There’s still plenty space for smaller, less expected touches in the current tight-noir edit, though, most notably in Marlene Dietrich & Zsa Zsa Gabor’s small roles as border-town sex workers and in Welles’s own onscreen character-choice grotesqueries.

I didn’t walk out of The Prytania into the Sunday afternoon sunshine feeling “good”, exactly, even if it’s always a treat to watch such a formidable Old Hollywood classic for the first time on a proper screen.  There’s plenty to feel queasy about in Touch of Evil beyond Heston’s “respectful” brownface performance and the ogling of Leigh’s writhing, incapacitated body.  Welles leans into the downbeat misery of noir pretty hard here, the same way he leans into his camera’s extreme Dutch angles.  The movie’s not supposed to leave you feeling good about the American “justice” system, an effect Welles ensured would come across by playing the ugly, sweaty face of that system himself.  So, I desperately needed the little pick-me-up of seeing a huge crowd gather outside to watch Oppenheimer (another massive downer) on 70mm: a sign that The Movies aren’t fully dead yet, and that I’ll get to see a projection of some other butchered-by-the-studio Orson Welles picture in the future, thanks to the real money-makers like Barbenheimer.  

-Brandon Ledet

The Devil is a Woman (1935)

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Old Hollywood icon & sexual anarchist Marlene Dietrich first earned her legendary status through a run of collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, to the point where their names are near inseparable. The actor-director pair churned out seven feature films together in the 1930s — a catalog of sexually daring pictures set in exotic locales, each featuring Dietrich as a classic femme fatale. The Devil is a Woman is far from the most prestigious or technically accomplished of those collaborations. It doesn’t approach the controversial seduction & glamor of better-respected pictures like The Blue Angel, Morocco, or Shanghai Express. Despite the severe, sensational misogyny of its title, it’s a surprisingly goofy film, one that cannot be taken nearly as seriously as the more sublime achievements of the Dietrich/von Sternberg canon. It’s also one that distinguishes itself through the jubilant novelty of its setting: turn-of-the-century Spanish Carnival.

Marlene Dietrich stars as a Marlene Dietrich type: a seductive woman who bleeds men dry for her own amusement while modeling outrageous outfits and enjoying the lawless free-for-all of Spanish Carnival. An older, disgraced military officer warns his young friend about the dangerous seductive powers of all women, then of Dietrich’s soul-draining (and money-draining) villainy in particular. It’s a cinematic trope that dates at least as far back as Theda Bara’s iconic role as The Vamp in 1915’s A Fool There Was, equally as misogynistic as it is aspirationally cool-as-fuck. Dietrich oddly doesn’t approach the role with any of her usual laid-back cool, however. She’s supposed to be a femme fatale, but plays it more like a proto-Lucille Ball sitcom scamp. She empties men’s pockets and manipulates them to fight for her affections (and amusement), sure, but she does so with a dialed-to-11 temper tantrum humor that I’m not used to seeing from her. Her casting as a Spanish seductress is pretty absurd on its face, but I also grew up in a time when Schwarzenegger routinely played an American everyman, so whatever. The real absurdity is in her broadly comedic interpretation of the role.

Of course, the “exotic” (to Hollywood) Spanish setting is mostly interesting for the visual feast of its Carnival celebrations, and the movie starts with a doozy — drunken revelers storming the studio set with giant paper-mâché heads and multi-colored streamers. The masquerade provides an excuse for costumed lushes & outright criminals to run wild circles around the sordid “love” triangle at the film’s center, and that revelry never loses its novelty. It’s also an excuse for Dietrich to model over-the-top Spanish gowns, starting with a show-stopper piece made of cascading black pompoms. It’s a beaut. I would more readily recommend the film for the novelty of that setting than I would for its significance in the Dietrich/von Sternberg canon, but that’s not to say it’s entirely frivolous. If anything, there’s something oddly subversive about how playful & lighthearted Dietrich plays the supposed femme fatale, a point that’s driven home when she admonishes one of her frustrated beaus, “You mistake your vanity for love.” It’s not her fault that men keep throwing all of their money & attentions at her feet, so why shouldn’t she get to enjoy the rewards during the year’s biggest party? Someone’s gotta pay for those gowns.

-Brandon Ledet

Stage Fright (1950)

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The opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950s thriller Stage Fright begin with a theatrical “safety curtain” lifting to reveal the city of London instead of a stage. This is not only a winking foreshadowing of that safety curtain’s central role in the film’s conclusion, but also immediately opens the film to a Shakespearean “All the world’s a stage” mindset, deliberately so. Stage Fright gleefully traffics in the meta commentary inherent to all movies & plays about stage actors, setting its murder mystery thriller plot in the posh world London theatre. Instead of bringing real world conflict to the artificial environments of a playhouse, however, Hitchcock brings character study stage acting to real life city streets, teasing out information on a first act murder through a series of false identities & well-formed lies. It isn’t until the film’s conclusion that most of the action is confined to an actual theatre and by then that interior space just feels like an extension of the larger city that houses it. It’s a brilliant inversion of what was already well-established trope over half a century ago.

Jane Wyman (of All That Heaven Allows fame) stars as a young character actor in training who’s stuck on a puppy love crush with a boy who’s in big trouble over his actual lover, a famous actress of high society prestige played by Marlene Dietrich. Through an early flashback, we see the young fugitive fleeing a murder charge for the death of Dietrich’s wealthy husband, clutching a bloody dress that would link his lover to the crime. Wyman’s aspiring young actor stashes the fugitive away at her low level smuggler’s home and decides to clear his name herself while the police hunt him down. Her smartass father (a scene-stealing Alastair Sim, who resembles a hybrid between Alec Guinness & John Lithgow) worries that using her stage acting skills to create false identities as a means to gather information is “transmuting melodrama into real life.” He jokes that she’s gathered up a plot, an “interesting” cast, and even a costume (the bloody dress), but is forgetting the real world dangers her “performance” is flirting with. He’s, of course, exactly correct. The actor’s web of lies only lead her further into danger, lust, and mystery as her real world stage play spirals out of her control and one of the great Hitchcock twists entirely disrupts the narrative she had been constructing to absolve her beloved.

Besides the film’s genuinely surprising twist, there are plenty of Hitchcock charms that help distinguish Stage Fright as a notable title among the director’s lesser works. The meta settings of an acting class and a cramped props closet leave plenty of room for Hitchcock’s usual sly, winking-at-the-audience humor. An umbrella-obscured sequence set at a rained-out garden party allows for the director’s mechanically precise craft of set piece staging to come to the forefront. He finds room to play with his usual visual trickery elsewhere as well: a character’s POV fuzzing with prescription glasses, imagined bloodstains on various dresses, a faked split diopter shot (that honestly resembles bad Photoshop in a modern context), etc. These are all minor Hitchcock pleasures, however. For all of Stage Fright‘s small scale successes in meta theatricality & Jane Wyman sleuthing, its biggest draw is the gleeful way Hitchcock shoots & highlights Marlene Dietrich. She doesn’t get nearly as much screentime as Wyman, as she must remain a mysterious figure for the film’s “All the world’s a stage” plot to work, but she still commands the film’s spotlight. Shots of Dietrich smoking under a veil or singing a lengthy Cole Porter number about how she’s too lazy to fuck are what elevates Stage Fright above meta-theatrical murder mystery to something slightly more distinct. Hitchcock did an excellent job of exploring her presence without overplaying her schtick and I’d much more readily recommend the film for someone looking for Top Shelf Dietrich instead of the director’s best. In the end, Dietrich is the star attraction her pompous character believes herself to be and the movie’s meta stage play theatrics are more or less lagniappe.

-Brandon Ledet