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."

It (Clarence G. Badger, 1927)

William Austin and Clara Bow in It

Betty Lou: Clara Bow
Cyrus T. Waltham: Antonio Moreno
Monty Montgomery: William Austin
Molly: Priscilla Bonner
Adela Van Norman: Jacqueline Gadsdon
Mrs. Van Norman: Julia Swayne Gordon
Elinor Glyn: Elinor Glyn
Newspaper Reporter: Gary Cooper

Director: Clarence G. Badger
Screenplay: Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton; Titles: George Marion Jr.
Based on a story by Elinor Glyn
Cinematography: H. Kinley Martin
Film editing: E. Lloyd Sheldon
Costume design: Travis Banton

Was Elinor Glyn's Cosmopolitan magazine story "It" really a sensation, or is that just hype? Odds are it was the latter, because Glyn, who has a cameo in Clarence G. Badger's film It, billed as "Madame Elinor Glyn," was a master self-publicist. "It" gets several definitions in the course of the film, all of which are really just a relabeling of what has always been called "sex appeal." In the end it boils down to "whatever Clara Bow had." (One of those definitions, delivered by the Madame herself, is "Self-confidence and indifference to whether you are pleasing or not," which actually doesn't fit Bow's character, Betty Lou, who is never indifferent to whether she is pleasing the object of her attentions, Antonio Moreno's Cyrus T. Waltham. She even flings herself on his desk to flirt with him.) It is really just routine rom-com stuff: Girl spots boy, girl lands boy, boy makes a premature move and gets slapped for it, girl rejects boy because he thinks she's an unwed mother, boy pursues girl but she rejects him again when he wants to make her his mistress instead of his wife, girl concocts revenge plot that goes awry so that at the end girl gets boy anyway. Today, It is mostly a rather creaky relic whose interest lies mainly in its display of Bow's abundant charm and comic finesse and in the appearance of Gary Cooper in an uncredited bit as a newspaper reporter -- he barely even gets a foot in the door in the film. The credited director, Clarence G. Badger, had a long and undistinguished career, and even though some of the film is said to have been directed by Josef von Sternberg, it would be hard to single out his contribution. Moreno, the leading man, is stuck with an unfortunately fluffy mustache, and the comic support by William Austin is marred by the fact that the orthochromatic film stock turns his blue eyes almost white, making him look more than a little creepy. The climax takes place on a yacht called -- get it? -- the Itola, which I think was originally the Capitola but had its first syllable lopped off for the sake of the joke.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Lily: Miriam Hopkins
Mariette Colet: Kay Francis
Gaston Monescu: Herbert Marshall
The Major: Charles Ruggles
François Filiba: Edward Everett Horton
Adolph J. Giron: C. Aubrey Smith
Jacques: Robert Greig

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones
Based on a play by Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling

It's a measure of the stupidity of American censorship that this gemlike sophisticated comedy could not have been made in Hollywood two years later, after the Production Code was implemented, but was also withheld from re-release for years afterward, all because it dared to indicate that its adult characters were having sex with one another without benefit of clergy and because the blithely larcenous Lily and Gaston were allowed to get off without apparent punishment -- indeed, with considerable reward -- for their crimes. It's essential for anyone who wants to know why Ernst Lubitsch and his so-called "touch" were so highly prized for so long.

The Love Parade (Ernst Lubitsch, 1929)

Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade

Count Alfred Renard: Maurice Chevalier
Queen Louise: Jeanette MacDonald
Jacques: Lupino Lane
Lulu: Lillian Roth
War Minister: Eugene Pallette
Ambassador: E.H. Calvert
Master of Ceremonies: Edgar Norton
Prime Minister: Lionel Belmore

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Ernest Vajda, Guy Bolton
Based on a play by Leon Xanrof and Jules Chancel
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Film editing: Merrill G. White
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: Victor Schertzinger

It irritates me a little to think that MGM, thanks largely to those That's Entertainment clip shows in the 1970s, is celebrated for its movie musicals, when in fact the genre was pioneered and perfected at other studios: Warner Bros. with its Busby Berkeley dance spectacles, RKO with its Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers cycle, and Paramount, where Ernst Lubitsch virtually invented the story musical with The Love Parade and subsequent re-teamings of Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. (Oddly, today MacDonald is better known for her inferior and unsexy MGM teaming with Nelson Eddy.) MGM didn't achieve musical greatness until the end of the 1930s, when after the success of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), the studio put its associate producer, Arthur Freed, in charge of the film musicals unit. True, MGM had won a best-picture Oscar with The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont, 1929), but that was a standard backstage musical, not one in which the songs and dances are fully integrated into the plot. Besides, it's almost unwatchable today, whereas thanks to the charm of Chevalier and the sexiness of MacDonald in her revealing pre-Code frippery, but most of all to what is known as "the Lubitsch touch," The Love Parade is still enjoyable. Lubitsch's "touch" as a director was based on a sly conviction that the audience would get the joke, usually a naughty one, and it was perfected during the silent era, when things had to be shown, not told. So the film opens with a mostly silent demonstration of why Count Alfred Renard has caused such a scandal with his dalliances in Paris that he has to be recalled to Sylvania and rebuked by Queen Louise. But this is also a film that wittily integrates sound into its sight gags, as the entire Sylvanian court eavesdrops on the burgeoning love of Alfred and Louise. The plot, derived by screenwriters Guy Bolton and Ernest Vajda from a French play, is standard, slightly sexist stuff about the prince consort, Alfred, feeling miffed by the fact that his marriage to the queen leaves him with nothing to do, but it's carried off well by the leads, as well as the saucy servants, Jacques and Lulu, and a court full of skilled character actors like Eugene Pallette, Edgar Norton, and Lionel Belmore. It's too bad that the song score by lyricist Clifford Grey and composer Victor Schertzinger isn't better -- there are too many reprises of "Dream Lover," for example -- but Lubitsch's staging compensates for its weakness.

The Story of Temple Drake (Stephen Roberts, 1933)

William Faulkner claimed that he wrote the novel Sanctuary for the money, which may have some truth in it -- it was one of his few best-selling novels. But if it's not on a par with The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying or Go Down, Moses, it's a well-wrought book with a good deal more art than its sensational plot suggests: Temple Drake is a hedonistic Ole Miss coed who winds up at a bootlegger's hangout after an automobile accident and is abducted by a thug called Popeye who rapes her with a corncob (he's impotent) and forces her into prostitution. Naturally, Hollywood jumped at the chance to capitalize on the book's reputation, and equally naturally found itself unable to do anything but bowdlerize the story. Temple (Miriam Hopkins) is still a "bad girl," but gone are Popeye's impotence and the corncob, along with his name (presumably to avoid a lawsuit from the holders of the copyright on the cartoon character). In the movie he's called Trigger (Jack La Rue), and although the rape takes place (after a fadeout) in a corncrib, there's no hint of his incapacity. And in the end, Temple gets a chance to redeem herself in court at the trial of a man accused of the murder that Trigger actually committed -- a complete reversal of what happens in the book. Nevertheless, the film became one of the most notorious of the Pre-Code films that led to Hollywood's rigorous system of self-censorship. The problem is that it's a rather muddled movie. Roberts was a second-string director, and he fails to impose shape or coherence on the story, which was adapted by Oliver H.P. Garrett. Hopkins, in her 30s, is miscast as the flighty young Temple, and William Gargan, who plays the lawyer Stephen Benbow, alternately chews the scenery and fades into the background. La Rue, on the other hand, had a long career as a heavy and brings real menace to the part of Trigger, almost evoking Faulkner's description of Popeye's "vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." The best performance, though, is probably Florence Eldridge's as the downtrodden Ruby, who grudgingly tries to protect Temple from Trigger and the other men at the bootlegger's hangout. There is some Paramount gloss on the film: When she isn't in her underwear, Hopkins wears gowns by Travis Banton, and the cinematography by Karl Struss gives the movie a more sophisticated look than it really deserves. But the general feeling one gets is that Faulkner has once again been badly served by the movies.