Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg, 1931)

Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored

Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Victor McLaglen, Warner Oland, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Lew Cody, Barry Norton. Screenplay: Josef von Sternberg, Daniel Nathan Rubin. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Costume design: Travis Banton. Film editing: Josef von Sternberg. Music: Karl Hajos, Herman Hand. 

Of the seven films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich, Dishonored is probably the weakest. Dietrich is not to blame: Photographed by Lee Garmes and dressed by Travis Banton, she looks as good as she ever did, and the movie gives her a chance to show her talent for comedy for the first time, when she pretends to be a rather bumptious girl from the country. But the story concocted by Sternberg and co-scripted with Daniel Nathan Rubin, a not particularly distinguished playwright, lacks wit and tension. Sternberg's direction allows the pace of the film to go slack, and his decision to edit the film himself doesn't help: His lap dissolves, for example, linger too long on the old scene as the new one fades in, causing visual confusion. Moreover, Dishonored features Victor McLaglen, of all actors, as the romantic lead. McLaglen was skilled as a heavy or a clumsy goof, and John Ford directed him to an Oscar for The Informer (1935), but he's out of place as the Russian spy who gets entangled with Dietrich's Austrian spy. For some reason, he spends a lot of the film flashing a rictus-like grin. Sternberg's story is based on the career of Mata Hari, about whom MGM made a competing movie starring Greta Garbo and Ramon Novarro the same year. Dietrich plays a war widow who has turned prostitute to survive, and is recruited for the Austrian Secret Service by its chief (Gustav von Seyffertitz) when she proclaims, "I've had an inglorious life. It may become my good fortune to have a glorious death." Through her career as Agent X-27 she is accompanied by a cat who is so faithful -- she even carries it in the open cockpit of an airplane -- that it suggests a witch's familiar. She's also a pianist, who encodes secrets in musical notation. (Not that she's a good pianist: At one point she plays the usually quietly serene opening of Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata as if it were the "Appassionata.") Dishonored is no sillier than most of the Sternberg-Dietrich movies, but it doesn't wear its silliness with style the way the best of them do. 

Knight Without Armor (Jacques Feyder, 1937)

Robert Donat and Marlene Dietrich in Knight Without Armor

Countess Alexandra: Marlene Dietrich
A.J. Fothergill: Robert Donat
Duchess: Irene Vanbrugh
Vladinoff: Herbert Lomas
Col. Adraxine: Austin Trevor
Axelstine: Basil Gill
Maronin: David Tree
Poushkoff: John Clements
Station Master: Hay Petrie
Drunken Commissar: Miles Malleson

Director: Jacques Feyder
Screenplay: Frances Marion, Lajos Biró, Arthur Wimperis
Based on a novel by James Hilton
Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr.
Production design: Lazare Meerson
Film editing: Francis D. Lyon
Music: Miklós Rózsa

After the success of his film Carnival in Flanders (1935) Belgian director Jacques Feyder was lured to England by Alexander Korda to make Knight Without Armor, a rather preposterous thriller in which a British spy helps a Russian countess escape from the turmoil of the Russian revolution in 1917. He had two top-rank stars to work with: Robert Donat had just made a name for himself in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935), in which he showed his skill at making outlandish thriller situations plausible, and Marlene Dietrich was looking for roles that would remove the "box-office poison" label that distributors had pasted on her after the failure of her last films for Josef von Sternberg, in which she had become an over-stylized figure. Knight Without Armor allows Dietrich to loosen up quite a bit, to get her hair mussed and her face dirtied as she goes on the run from the warring Red and White factions of the revolution. She does, however, get a chance to glam up, first as the pre-Revolution countess and then, when she's rescued by the Whites, to take a bubble bath and put on a gold lamé gown that has somehow been found for her. But Dietrich in disguise as an ordinary Russian woman is ridiculous: One look at those plucked and penciled-in eyebrows would give her away in a second. It's a silly film, a concoction of cliff-hanging moments, in which the denouement depends on a Russian commissar becoming so sentimental about the imperiled couple that he commits suicide to help them escape. But both Dietrich and Donat are game for whatever the script throws at them, and there are some bright moments. While waiting at a station for a train, they discover that the station master has gone mad: He announces trains that don't appear, and when Donat's character says he doesn't see them, the station master shushes him, explaining, "Trains that are seen get blown up." If Feyder had been able to sustain this sense of the lunacy prevalent in the revolution, Knight Without Armor might actually have been a good film.

Martin Roumagnac (Georges Lacombe, 1946)

Watched 10/6/2018

Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin in Martin Roumagnac

Blanche Ferrand: Marlene Dietrich
Martin Roumagnac: Jean Gabin
Blanche's Uncle: Jean d'Yd
The Schoolteacher: Daniel Gélin
The Defense Attorney: Jean Darcante
Jeanne Roumagnac: Margo Lion
Laubry: Marcel Herrand

Director: Georges Lacombe
Screenplay: Pierre Véry, Georges Lacombe
Based on a novel by Pierre-René Wolf
Cinematography: Roger Hubert
Production design: Georges Wakhévitch
Film editing: Germaine Artus
Music: Marcel Mirouze

This overheated and forgettable melodrama should have been better, given that Marlene Dietrich and Jean Gabin were lovers and were both making their postwar returns to European filmmaking. It's watchable but mainly for Dietrich, who was trying to overcome her old image as a Hollywood diva and allows herself to be filmed in natural light for once, and for a mad courtroom scene featuring a defense lawyer who behaves like a Daumier caricature. Gabin grumps about in a role that would have been better if he and Dietrich had the kind of on-screen chemistry that they supposedly had off-screen.

A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder, 1948)

Watched 10/5/2018

Phoebe Frost: Jean Arthur
Erika von Schluetow: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. John Pringle: John Lund
Col. Rufus J. Plummer: Millard Mitchell
Hans Otto Birgel: Peter von Zerneck
Mike: Stanley Prager
Joe: William Murphy

Director: Billy Wilder
Screenplay: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, Richard L. Breen, Robert Harari
Based on a story by David Shaw
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Walter H. Tyler
Film editing: Doane Harrison
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

It occurs to me that it might be interesting to watch Roberto Rossellini's neorealistic drama Germany Year Zero (1948) back-to-back with Billy Wilder's satiric romantic comedy A Foreign Affair, if only to illuminate the respective visions of the two directors. Both are set in the ruins of postwar, pre-wall Berlin, using the ruins of the city as a correlative for the evil of Nazism. But for Rossellini, that evil is persistent, a lurking danger. For Wilder it's something that may persist but also something that can be overcome by good will and humor. A Foreign Affair is sometimes accused of a nasty cynicism about politics, and certainly its embodiment of American democracy, the congressional fact-finding delegation, is seen as rather clueless and superficial. But for Wilder, a good joke is our best defense against even such evils as Nazism, just as it was for Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch in To Be or Not to Be (1942) -- and later for Mel Brooks in his 1983 remake of the Lubitsch film and his own The Producers (1967).

Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936)

Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, John Halliday in Desire

Madeleine de Beaupre: Marlene Dietrich
Tom Bradley: Gary Cooper
Carlos Margoli: John Halliday
Mr. Gibson: William Frawley
Aristide Duvalle: Ernest Cossart
Avilia: Akim Tamiroff
Dr. Maurice Pauquet: Alan Mowbray
Aunt Olga: Zeffie Tilbury

Director: Frank Borzage
Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein
Based on a play by Hans Székely and Robert A. Stemmle
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher
Film editing: William Shea
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

Frank Borzage's Desire was one of the first films Marlene Dietrich made after she and Josef von Sternberg went their separate ways. Though she's still very much in the Sternberg mode in her makeup, her consciousness of the way she's being lighted, and the couture by Travis Banton, she's also softer, funnier, and more human. She also benefits from being re-teamed with Gary Cooper, her co-star in Sternberg's Morocco (1930), and the only leading man with whom she had any real chemistry in the Sternberg films. Desire is still glamorous nonsense, a romantic comedy in which Dietrich plays a jewel thief and Cooper a seemingly naïve American automotive engineer. They meet on the road to Spain, where Cooper's Tom Bradley plans to spend his vacation and Dietrich's Madeleine de Beaupre is meeting up with her accomplice, Carlos Margoli -- a part planned for John Gilbert that went to John Halliday after Gilbert suffered a heart attack. Cooper is delightful as the infatuated American, whose native shrewdness manifests itself eventually. A subtext about the unsettled situation in Europe runs through the film, though there's no direct reference to the civil war brewing in Spain. Tom Bradley is not one to be outwitted by Europeans like Carlos, who, in a conversation about whether the United States would get involved if war breaks out in Europe, observes, "America's a very large country." Tom replies, "Six feet three." Like most good romantic comedies, Desire gets the best out of its supporting players, including Ernest Cossart as the jeweler and Alan Mowbray as the neurologist whom Madeleine plays off against each other to get her hands on the loot, Akim Tamiroff as a police officer, and Zeffie Tilbury as the larcenous, tippling Aunt Olga. Ernst Lubitsch, who produced, also directed some scenes while Borzage was finishing up another film, and his celebrated touch gives Desire some of its vivacity.

The Devil Is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)

Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman

Concha Perez: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Don Pasqual "Pasqualito" Costelar: Lionel Atwill
Antonio Galvan: Cesar Romero
Gov. Don Paquito "Paquitito": Edward Everett Horton
Señora Perez: Alison Skipworth
Morenito: Don Alvarado
Tuerta: Tempe Pigott
Alphonso: Francisco Moreno

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: John Dos Passos, Sam Winston, David Hertz, Oran Schee
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Josef von Sternberg
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Josef von Sternberg
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: John Leipold, Hans Roemheld

Josef von Sternberg wanted to give The Devil Is a Woman the title of the music by Rimsky-Korsakov on which the film's score is based, Capriccio Espagnol, but studio head Ernst Lubitsch overruled him. The decision probably helped the movie a little at the box office -- though it was a flop that ended Sternberg's career at Paramount as well as helping Dietrich get stigmatized as "box office poison" in an infamous complaint by a distributor. But The Devil Is a Woman really is a "Spanish caprice," a film that has about as much to do with its ostensible setting, Spain, as the earlier Sternberg-Dietrich films Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), and The Scarlet Empress (1934) had to do with North Africa, China, and Russia. They are products of Steinberg's fevered imagination, with baroque settings designed by Hans Dreier in which Marlene Dietrich could wear impossible gowns by Travis Banton. The 1930s moviegoing public may have tired of Sternberg's idiosyncratic melodramas, but they have stood the test of time as consummate expressions of what the Hollywood studio system could do if it gave free rein to one man's tastes and obsessions. Like Sternberg's first film starring Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), The Devil Is a Woman is about masochism, though the same could be said about all of the other films he made with her. In this one, she's Concha Perez, who leads a Spanish officer she calls Pasqualito on a merry-go-round of erotic entanglements, snaring him and deserting him repeatedly. And though Don Pasqual seems to have come to his senses enough to tell his story as a warning to a young political fugitive, Antonio Galvan, who has fallen for her, Concha returns to play with them again. None of this is remotely credible in any realistic context, which is why the Sternberg-Dreier-Banton concoction of a fantastic Spain is essential. The film thus becomes both silly and sublime and, with Sternberg in charge of everything but its title, one of the purest expressions of a director's sensibility available.

Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)

Melvyn Douglas, Herbert Marshall, and Marlene Dietrich in Angel

Lady Maria Barker: Marlene Dietrich

Sir Frederick Barker: Herbert Marshall 

Anthony Halton: Melvyn Douglas 

Graham: Edward Everett Horton 

Wilton: Ernest Cossart 

Grand Duchess Anna Dimitrievna: Laura Hope Crews 

Mr. Greenwood: Herbert Mundin 

Emma: Dennie Moore 

Director: Ernst Lubitsch 

Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Guy Bolton, Russell G. Medcraft 

Based on a play by Melchior Lengyel 

Cinematography: Charles Lang 

Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher 

Film editing: William Shea 

Costume design: Travis Banton

Music: Friedrich Hollaender

In Ernst Lubitsch's Angel, you can almost feel the Production Code censors breathing hotly down the director's neck, driving some of the oxygen out of the room. What's meant to be a light and airy sophisticated comedy, like for example Lubitsch's pre-Code masterpiece Trouble in Paradise (1932), often feels starchy and coy. The emigrée grand duchess played by Laura Hope Crews is clearly a high-class procuress and her "salon" a very upscale brothel that enables a "fling" by Lady Maria Barker with a curiously naïve Anthony Halton. Their affair never seems to get consummated, although there are the usual narrative jumps when the relationship seems to come to the boiling point. And of course the Code's aversion to divorce and abhorrence of any sign that adulterers might get away with it unpunished means that the film must end with Lady Maria and Sir Frederick happily reconciled. We're used to such evasions in Hollywood movies of the 1930s through the 1950s, but it's a little depressing to see them stifle Lubitsch's usually sublime naughtiness. Sometimes it feels as if Marlene Dietrich is to blame: She never really strikes sparks with either Melvyn Douglas or Herbert Marshall -- certainly not the way Greta Garbo does with Douglas in Ninotchka (1939) or Miriam Hopkins with Marshall in Trouble in Paradise. But lovers of Lubitsch have plenty to enjoy in Angel, chiefly the way the director subverts expectations. When Sir Frederick invites Halton, an old war buddy, to dine with him and his wife, who neither man knows is the "Angel" Halton met in Paris and has been rhapsodizing about ever since, we expect a big explosion, especially when the husband points out his wife's picture to her lover. But just as Halton is about to look at the photograph, Lubitsch cuts. We don't see the awkward encounter between wife and lover we expect when she comes downstairs to meet the guest. Instead, we pick up with them later and realize that both have exerted exceptional self-control at the meeting. And we don't see the three of them at the dinner table; instead, Lubitsch takes us into the kitchen, where the servants are wondering why neither Lady Maria nor Mr. Halton has touched their food. Lubitsch leaves to our imagination scenes that other directors would have milked shamelessly. In another example, at their first encounter Maria and Halton are in a Parisian park at night, and after he proclaims his love for her he spots an old woman selling violets. He goes to buy the flowers, but Lubitsch holds the camera on the old woman, whose expressions tell us what's going on: Maria has chosen the moment to disappear and we hear Halton calling out "Angel!" in his pursuit of her. The flower seller sighs and picks up the dropped bouquet, dusts it off, and puts it back with the other flowers, then turns and walks away. Similarly, Lubitsch doesn't linger on the reconciliation scene between Maria and Frederick: They simply walk out the door, headed for Vienna and what we hope is a revived marriage. In the end, these "Lubitsch touches" aren't quite enough to lift Angel out of the middle tier of the director's films, but they constitute its saving grace notes.  

Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus 

Helen Faraday: Marlene Dietrich
Ned Faraday: Herbert Marshall
Nick Townsend: Cary Grant
Johnny Faraday: Dickie Moore
Ben Smith: Gene Morgan
Taxi Belle Hooper: Rita La Roy
Dan O'Connor: Robert Emmett O'Connor
Detective Wilson: Sidney Toler
Dr. Pierce: Morgan Wallace
Joe, a Hiker: Sterling Holloway
Cora: Hattie McDaniel

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman, S.K. Lauren, Josef von Sternberg
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Wiard Ihnen
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold, Paul Marquardt, Oscar Potoker

At once fascinating and perfectly ridiculous, Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus is a domestic melodrama with music and a bit of road movie thrown in. For most viewers it's chiefly of interest as an opportunity to see Cary Grant before the familiar "Cary Grant" persona had fully developed. He's a little rough around the edges still, slipping from an attempt at a fully American accent back into whatever his particular blend of British and American accent is, and his gift for looking faintly amused at absurd or difficult situations -- with which he's often confronted in Blond Venus -- hasn't quite emerged yet. At this stage of his career, he was little more than a useful leading man -- or second lead, in this film -- on the order of a John Lodge or a John Boles, there to show off the real star of the film, like Mae West in I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933) or Loretta Young in Born to Be Bad (Lowell Sherman, 1934) or Jean Harlow in Suzy (George Fitzmaurice, 1936). Or, of course, Marlene Dietrich, who is the reason Blonde Venus was made at all. Sternberg's obsession with Dietrich is on full display here as he crafts another story about a man willing to sacrifice his own love to make a woman in love with another man happy -- the role played by Adolphe Menjou in Morocco (1930) and here played by Grant, whose Nick Townsend, a rich playboy (he's identified as a "politician" in the screenplay, but we never see him either run for office or perform the duties of one), who gives up Dietrich's Helen Faraday twice: both times to let her return to her husband, played a little stodgily by Herbert Marshall. Of course, the real man in Helen's life is her son, Johnny, played by the terminally cute Dickie Moore. I like the way Sternberg both exploits and undercuts Moore's cuteness, as in the scene in which Johnny wears a hideous Halloween mask on the side of his head that's usually facing the camera. But then the whole film is full of Sternbergian tricks, such as the two amazing narrative jump cuts. The film opens with the meeting of Helen and Ned as he and some other hikers come upon her as she's swimming nude in a pond with her fellow chorus girls. She sends him away, though he discovers where she's performing before he goes. Cut from the girls splashing in the pond to Johnny splashing in a tub as Helen bathes him. Sternberg and his screenwriters omit what might have been a movie in itself: the second encounter of Helen and Ned, their courtship and marriage. Similarly, after much ado has reduced Helen to poverty and implied prostitution, there's a scene in which she gives a fellow derelict the $1500 Ned has paid her off with and goes off to, we assume, commit suicide -- or "make a hole in the water," as she has put it. Cut to a shot of an expanse of water, but then to a montage which tells us that Helen has resumed her career as a cabaret performer and has become the toast of Paris. Again, stuff that might have been almost an entire movie on its own has been (fortunately) elided. If Sternberg's tricks had been applied to a story that made more sense to start with, Blonde Venus might have been something of a classic. Instead, it's an extraordinary but often entertaining mess.

Morocco (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco

Tom Brown: Gary Cooper
Amy Jolly: Marlene Dietrich
La Bessiere: Adolphe Menjou
Caesar: Ullrich Haupt
Mme. Caesar: Eve Southern
Sgt. Tatoche: Francis McDonald
Lo Tinto: Paul Porcasi

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a play by Benno Vigny
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Karl Hajos

At one point in Josef von Sternberg's Morocco, Tom Brown literally sweeps Amy Jolly off her feet and then tries to guess her weight. She scoffs at his estimate of 120 pounds and says his low estimate must be because he's so strong. In fact, Marlene Dietrich had slimmed down noticeably since she made The Blue Angel for Sternberg only a few months earlier in Germany, though she's still not quite as svelte as she would become after his transformation of her into a Hollywood icon was complete. The pounds are gone in her first American film, as are the realistically tawdry cabaret costumes Lola Lola wears in the German film, replaced by a wardrobe designed by Travis Banton. She is also filmed lovingly by Lee Garmes, who helped her locate the key light whenever the camera is on, a lesson she never forgot long after Sternberg's star-making was over. Morocco was a sensation, earning Dietrich her only Oscar nomination, though it's hardly her best performance or even a very good film. Sternberg still maintains the slightly halting pace of a director making a transition from silent films to talkies, chopping up Jules Furthman's dialogue by pausing too long between lines, losing the snap that would be present when Sternberg and Furthman worked together two years later on Shanghai Express. What action there is in the story, such as the attack by thugs outside Amy's apartment or the taking out of the machine gun nest, is tossed off casually, all in service of romance. And even the celebrated ending, with Amy kicking off her shoes to join the camp-followers into the desert, is more likely to elicit laughs today. As handsome as Gary Cooper's legionnaire is, it doesn't seem likely that a tough cookie like Amy, once capable of tearing up La Bessiere's card into small pieces while he's watching, would be such a careless lovesick sap. Still, Morocco is worth sitting through for its legendary moments, including the celebrated appearance of Dietrich's Amy in men's evening wear, taking a flower from a woman whom she kisses on the mouth and then tossing it to Cooper's wryly amused Tom, who tucks it behind his ear. It's an entertaining flirtation with what the Production Code would, in just a few years, and for several dreary decades, egregiously label "sex perversion."

The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)

Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel

Prof. Immanuel Rath: Emil Jannings
Lola Lola: Marlene Dietrich
Kiepert, the Magician: Kurt Gerron
Guste Kiepert: Rosa Valetti
Mazeppa, the Strongman: Hans Albers
The Clown: Reinhold Bernt
Director of the School: Eduard von Winterstein
School Caretaker: Hans Roth
Angst, a Student: Rolf Müller
Lohmann, a Student: Roland Varno
Erztum, a Student: Carl Balhaus
Goldstaub, a Student: Robert Klein-Lörk
Innkeeper: Károly Huszár
Rath's Maid: Ilse Fürstenberg

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, Robert Liebmann
Based on a novel by Heinrich Mann
Cinematography: Günther Rittau
Art direction: Otto Hunte
Film editing: Sam Winston
Music: Friedrich Hollaender

Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel still has some of the earmarks of a film made during the transition from silence to synchronized sound, namely the tendency to hold a shot a beat or two longer than is actually necessary, so the narrative doesn't always move along at the speed we anticipate. But Sternberg is clearly ready for sound, as the final scene shows. The camera tracks back from the dead professor, clutching his old desk so tightly that the caretaker who found his body has been unable to loosen his grip. Meanwhile, we hear the clock striking midnight, with the twelfth stroke barely audible as the screen fades to black. It's a touching moment, made possible by the several shots and sounds of the clock* that occur through the film as a kind of indicator of Rath's decline from precise and punctual to dissipated and tardy. Otherwise the sound on the film is sometimes a little harsh to the ear, which makes Sternberg's relatively sparing use of it welcome. Many scenes are staged in near-silence, letting the action rather than the dialogue carry the story.  Marlene Dietrich's baritone recorded well, which is one reason her career took off when sound was introduced, but early in the film she's allowed to sing in an upper key which is more than a little off-putting. Fortunately, by the time we get to Lola Lola's big number, Friedrich Hollaender's "Ich bin von Kopf zu Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" (the subtitles use the English language version, "Falling in Love Again" instead of a literal translation), Dietrich is back in the correct register. The Blue Angel thrives on Dietrich's performance, which eclipses Emil Jannings's overacting, though he does provide some genuine pathos toward the end of the film. I don't quite believe the ease with which the professor falls from grace, but I'm not sure whether the fault lies entirely with Jannings or with the screenplay.

*I don't think there's ever an establishing shot of the tower where this clock resides, only closeups of its face and the procession of figures below as the hour strikes. Is it perhaps on the town hall, the Rathaus, in which case there's a kind of submerged pun at work?

The Scarlet Empress (Josef von Sternberg, 1934)

Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress

Princess Sophia Frederica/Catherine II: Marlene Dietrich
Count Alexei: John Lodge
Grand Duke Peter: Sam Jaffe
Empress Elizabeth Petrovna: Louise Dresser
Prince August: C. Aubrey Smith
Capt. Grigori Orloff: Gavin Gordon
Sophia as a Child: Maria Riva

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Manuel Komroff, Eleanor McGeary
Based on a diary of Catherine II of Russia
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Josef von Sternberg, Sam Winston
Music: W. Franke Harling, John Leipold

The Scarlet Empress may be the silliest movie ever made, and never sillier than when Marlene Dietrich, her hair done up all in curls, pretends to be innocent and naive by opening her eyes wide beneath her penciled-in eyebrows. Now mind you, I have nothing against silliness; some of of my favorite movies are silly, like Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), which may be the silliest great movie ever made. (Or the greatest silly movie, depending on which way you come at it.) So I love The Scarlet Empress, for all its outrageous camping-up of 18th-century Russia with cartoon icons and ubiquitous gargoyles -- the greatest of which is Sam Jaffe's grinning idiot of a grand duke. But we all know that Catherine II didn't earn the sobriquet "Great" just by sleeping with her soldiers (and perhaps some of the horses we see clattering up the palace staircases in the movie). So you really have to suspend a lot of disbelief and accept Josef von Sternberg's film for what it is: an outrageous parody of the historical epic, the sort of thing that people were expected to take seriously when, for example, Norma Shearer played Marie Antoinette for W.S. Van Dyke four years later. If The Scarlet Empress was a box office failure at the time it was because audiences weren't keyed in to the joke. Now we are, so we can revel in Hans Dreier's febrile vision of a Russian palace and the music arrangers' delirious pastiche of Tchaikovsky mingled with Mendelssohn and laced with a bit of Wagner's Valkyries (for when those horses are galloping through the halls). 

Shanghai Express (Josef von Sternberg, 1932)

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express

Shanghai Lily: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Donald Harvey: Clive Brook
Hui Fei: Anna May Wong
Henry Chang: Warner Oland
Sam Salt: Eugene Pallette
Carmichael: Lawrence Grant
Mrs. Haggerty: Louise Closser Hale
Eric Baum: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Maj. Lenard: Emile Chautard

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: Jules Furthman
Based on a story by Harry Hervey
Cinematography: Lee Garmes
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Frank Sullivan
Music: W. Franke Harling

There's something claustrophobic about Shanghai Express: Its characters are always enclosed -- in train cabins, in interrogation rooms, even in crowds of other people. Even the titular train gets itself into a tight spot, navigating the narrow passage through the streets of what the film calls "Peking." Which makes it all the better for Lee Garmes's camera, tasked as it is with making the most of Marlene Dietrich's face. Garmes (with director Josef von Sternberg looking over his shoulder) always finds ways to frame that face with veils and feathers and furs, with the actress's own hands, with misted windows, and when nothing else will do, a simple shaft of light caressing those eyelids, cheekbones, and lips. Fortunately, the movie is more than glamorous poses: There's a good deal of snappy dialogue and some wily character acting from the likes of Eugene Pallette, Louise Closser Hale, and -- in a role that seems to have been a kind of audition for his most famous one, Charlie Chan -- Warner Oland. I only wish that a leading man more attractive, or less plummily British, than Clive Brook had been provided for Dietrich. The story is nonsense, of course, and it verges dangerously on colonialist poppycock in its treatment of the Chinese, though even there it pulls back somewhat by turning Anna May Wong's Hui Fei from a stereotypical dragon lady into a genuinely heroic figure. It must also be said that Shanghai Express was made at the right time: A couple of years later, the sexual adventurism of its women would have been taboo under the Production Code and Hui Fei would have been made to pay for murdering her rapist.

Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952)

Mel Ferrer and Marlene Dietrich in Rancho Notorious

Vern Haskell: Arthur Kennedy
Altar Keane: Marlene Dietrich
Frenchy Fairmont: Mel Ferrer
Beth Forbes: Gloria Henry
Baldy Gunder: William Frawley
Maxine: Lisa Ferraday
Mort Geary: Jack Elam
Wilson: George Reeves
Preacher: Frank Ferguson
Harbin: Francis McDonald
Comanche Paul: Dan Seymour
Kinch: Lloyd Gough

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Daniel Taradash
Based on a story by Silvia Richards
Cinematography: Hal Mohr
Music: Emil Newman

Arthur Kennedy was one of those reliably good Hollywood actors who never made it to the first rank of stardom though he received five Oscar nominations during his 50-year career on screen. He gives what is perhaps the most convincing performance in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious as the Wyoming cowboy who obsessively tracks down the man who raped and murdered his fiancée, but convincing acting perhaps isn't to the point when you're up against Marlene Dietrich, one of those larger-than-life movie stars who can upend a scene just by tossing back her shoulders, unleashing her familiar hooded gaze, and letting a famous leg slip from the slit in her skirt. The part of Vern Haskell needs a Gary Cooper or John Wayne just for balance. Nor does Mel Ferrer, his reliable blandness offset by frosted highlights in his hair, fare particularly well as Frenchy Fairmont, the current lover of Dietrich's equally absurdly named Altar Keane. But Lang keeps Rancho Notorious from steering too far into the direction of camp, offsetting its Western clichés with some well-staged action scenes and a steady pace that briskly ties up the plot in just under 90 minutes. Unfortunately, Rancho Notorious, which was originally titled Chuck-a-Luck, was tricked out with a narrative ballad accompaniment, "The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck" by Ken Darby, with the unsingable refrain, "Hate, murder, and revenge," that pops up every time you think you can keep a straight face. Still, the film is as watchable as it is incredible.

Turner Classic Movies

Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950)

Marlene Dietrich and Jane Wyman in Stage Fright

Eve Gill: Jane Wyman
Charlotte Inwood: Marlene Dietrich
Ordinary Smith: Michael Wilding
Jonathan Cooper: Richard Todd
Commodore Gill: Alastair Sim
Mrs. Gill: Sybil Thorndike
Nellie Goode: Kay Walsh
Mr. Fortescue: Miles Malleson
Freddie Williams: Hector MacGregor
"Lovely Ducks": Joyce Grenfell
Inspector Byard: André Morell
Chubby Bannister: Patricia Hitchcock
Sgt. Mellish: Ballard Berkeley

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Whitfield Cook, Alma Reville
Based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson
Cinematography: Wilkie Cooper
Art direction: Terence Verity
Film editing: Edward B. Jarvis
Music: Leighton Lucas 

The first stage of Marlene Dietrich's Hollywood career, when she was under the tutelage of Josef von Sternberg, ended with her being labeled "poison at the box office" by a disgruntled exhibitor in 1938, a label that helped push many of her contemporaries -- Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Luise Rainer -- into early retirement. Dietrich was made of sterner stuff, and after a celebrated turn entertaining American troops during World War II, she carved out a second film career by taking on character roles in films by major directors like Billy Wilder in A Foreign Affair (1948) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Fritz Lang in Rancho Notorious (1952), Orson Welles in Touch of Evil (1958), and Alfred Hitchcock in Stage Fright. Of these, the Hitchcock film is surprisingly the least memorable. It may be that Dietrich, who had learned everything she could about lighting and camera angles from Sternberg and cinematographers like Lee Garmes, was too much the diva for Hitchcock, who liked to be in control on his sets. But the fact remains that she is probably the most interesting thing about Stage Fright, a somewhat overcomplicated and sometimes scattered mystery in which we pretty much know whodunit from the beginning. Her appearances often come as a welcome relief from the rather tepid romantic triangle involving the characters played by Jane Wyman, Richard Todd, and Michael Wilding. Dietrich sings -- if that's the right word for what she does, being more diseuse than singer -- a few songs, including "La Vie en Rose" and Cole Porter's "The Laziest Gal in Town," and wears some Christian Dior gowns as Charlotte Inwood, the star of a musical revue in London, who bumps off her husband with the help of her lover, Jonathan Cooper, who is also the lover of a young student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Eve Gill. But Eve also gets caught up in the murder plot when she falls for the detective investigating the case, Wilfred Smith. Also providing relief from the romantic plot are Alastair Sim and Sybil Thorndike as Eve's separated and slightly eccentric parents, and some funny cameos by Miles Malleson and Joyce Grenfell. There are some clever Hitchcockian moments, including a flashback that turns out to be a complete misdirection and some skillful tracking shots by cinematographer Wilkie Cooper. But Wyman, the only American-born member of  the cast, feels out of her element, and Wilding turns his character into a moonstruck milksop. (Whatever did Elizabeth Taylor see in him?)

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

For a forthcoming review, I recently read the third volume of Simon Callow's projected four-volume biography of Orson Welles, in which Callow says, "murky though the world it discloses may be, every frame of Touch of Evil celebrates the art of film." I think that's exactly right, and it may be why so many of us love it -- and why it leaves many others cold. Touch of Evil is as mannerist as a Caravaggio painting, a dazzling demonstration of style and technique that takes precedence over character, over narrative, even over the performers on screen. The movie is, again in Callow's words, "mercurial, fluid, inventive, constantly morphing stylistically in dream-like fashion." Who else but Welles could have made so much of Charlton Heston in brown-face as a Mexican cop? Who else would have scattered so many familiar faces, from Akim Tamiroff to Zsa Zsa Gabor, throughout a film without turning it into a gallery of cameos? Who else would have encouraged Dennis Weaver to give such a hilariously jittery over-the-top performance? And is there a better curtain line than the one spoken by Marlene Dietrich as the bloated corpse of Hank Quinlan (Welles) lies wallowing in the canal: "He was some kind of a man.... What does it matter what you say about people?" It's a film populated by grotesques -- even the "normal" people like Vargas (Heston) and his wife (Janet Leigh) have something askew about them. The only authentic human emotion on display in the movie is that of Menzies (Joseph Calleia), whose love for Quinlan comes to such a bad end. What we see today is a restoration, made in 1998 in a laudable act of corporate responsibility by Universal, which had botched the release of the movie 40 years earlier. It follows the suggestions made by Welles himself in a 58-page memo after Universal hacked up the original release version. Among other things, the restoration removed the credits that had been superimposed over the celebrated three-minute, 20-second tracking shot that begins the film. The restoration also allows us to see Russell Metty's cinematography in pristine condition.