Marlene Dietrich

  • Morocco (1930)

    Morocco (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2021) I can read about Morocco’s historical meaning as an early blockbuster as well as anyone else, but it doesn’t mean that I appreciate the result. I’ve always had mixed feelings about Marlene Dietrich and director Joseph von Sternberg — there’s something about their acclaimed collaborations that doesn’t work for me. Perhaps it’s because I arrive to their idea of gender-bending with, oh, a perspective that is decades removed. Perhaps there’s something in Sternberg’s approach that doesn’t quite work. Perhaps I just don’t like Dietrich. Perhaps I find lead actor Gary Cooper to be the blandest of the bland stars of early sound cinema. Perhaps I’m not quite as taken by the Moroccan setting as I should be. No matter the reason, I’m not overly impressed by Morocco. Oh, there are still a few good things here: Dietrich is captivating, and the cross-dressing sequence is not bad at all. The Moroccan scenery is a historical document, and it’s not as if you can dislike Cooper. But the overall impact is flat — there’s a lot of fluff to get to what’s interesting about Morocco, and I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

  • The Scarlet Empress (1934)

    The Scarlet Empress (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It may be a few decades in the past, but the working relationship between director Joseph von Sternberg and actress Marlene Dietrich remains a model of successful artistic collaboration. He knew how to build a film around her persona; she knew how to give him exactly what he wanted. They both launched their own careers in Germany with 1929’s The Blue Angel, then went on to make six great Hollywood films at the dawn of the sound age, of which The Scarlett Empress was the fifth. Compared to many other films of the time, this is a film worth digging into, as Garbo portrays the transformation of Russian Catherine the Great from innocent debutante to hedonistic empress. Taking advantage of the rapidly closing Pre-Code era, the film suggests plenty of salacious material with barely repressed glee. Visually, it’s absolutely sumptuous, with a high density of delicately crafted sets, lavish costumes and elaborate camera movements. You can see allegories for early-sound filmmaking, Sternberg’s career, female empowerment and social critique –the demonstration of which has already been completed by scholars far smarter than I am. It does make The Scarlet Empress quite a viewing experience, although the trade-off may be that the film is more interesting than enjoyable – that it’s more fun to discuss than to watch. That’s already not too bad – many films of that time can’t even pretend being worth a look today.

  • Destry Rides Again (1939)

    Destry Rides Again (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It can take a lot for a western film to grab me these days –it doesn’t help that there’s a seemingly infinite number of them in the Classic Hollywood catalogue. Also, perhaps more importantly, I don’t have any basic affection for the genre as I do for musicals or film noir – as a result, I tend to watch westerns and forget them almost immediately. But Destry Rides Again is slightly different. For one thing, it features none other than screen legends James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in the lead roles – for another, it’s a somewhat less trigger-happy take on cleaning up a rowdy frontier town, with a baby-faced Stewart playing a deputy sheriff with an aversion to carrying or using a gun. (This being said, the film makes it crystal-clear that he’s an expert marksman when he wants to, which is a trope that frequently turns up in American “pacifist” fiction.) Meanwhile, Dietrich plays the femme fatale of the local drinking establishment, a powerful influence who could make or break the deputy sheriff’s efforts to get rid of the local lead hoodlum. The absolute highlight of the film comes when the two get involved in a saloon fight – or more specifically when she starts throwing objects at him and he’s bound not to answer in kind. Otherwise, Destry Rides Again does follow a generally satisfying narrative that promotes non-violence in the service of a taming-the-wild-west story. Or rather up to a certain point: true to form for American cinema, there’s a point where guns have to be used and bad people have to die. Still, the result is more memorable than many other westerns from the era.

  • Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

    Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2019) There is a place and a time for everything, including slow-paced dramas dealing with heady questions of shared responsibilities and war crimes. What I’m getting at is that you should give yourself plenty of time to get into Judgment at Nuremberg—at a staggering three hours and eight minutes of mostly courtroom dialogue, it’s a long sit. But you do get a lot for your time—starting with an all-star cast that starts with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster and Marlene Dietrich, all the way to one of William Shatner’s earliest prominent roles. This film is a debate of ideas, as the American occupation struggles with the prosecution of war crimes at a time when Germany is becoming a crucial Cold War playground, and the US can be accused of having inspired some of the Nazi rhetoric. The battle between lawyers gets to some crucial issues, not the least of which is assigning blame for atrocities. Perhaps the most affecting moment of the film comes from well-known material—starkly-presented footage of concentration camps shortly after liberation, with piles of corpses and bulldozers doing mass burials out of health concerns. (Those images aside, be careful about seeing the film as fact—while it’s adapted from real-life events, nearly all the characters are deliberately fictional and condensed from the proceedings.)  Judgment at Nuremberg doesn’t pull any punches in its topic or depiction—it’s cinema as consciously codifying right and wrong, dismissing feeble objections to the contrary. Despite good-faith efforts to make the film cinematic, there is a lot here that could play as a theatrical piece, including a lengthy summation-as-judgment from Tracy that can be seen as a template for director Stanley Kramer’s climactic sequence in the later Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner. The leisurely pace, repetitive material and fixed location doesn’t work against the film as much as you’d think, though: there’s a moral argument here, and it’s not as much about finding right or wrong as it’s about how to establish right in such overwhelming fashion that there can be no lingering doubt about it. Judgment at Nuremberg does amount to an admirable piece of cinema, as compelling today as it was in 1961. But give yourself plenty of time to immerse yourself in it.

  • Stage Fright (1950)

    Stage Fright (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2019) If there was one wholly mediocre Hitchcock film, then Stage Fright would be it. It’s not necessarily notable for being so ordinary, but for being ordinary in 1950, before and after some far more successful efforts from the legendary director. The film is notorious among Hitchcock fans for being among the first to outright present footage later revealed to be a lie, something that didn’t go over well then but doesn’t necessarily do any better today. But there are a number of other issues with the film, ranging from severe tonal shifts (“lucky duckies”) to not quite knowing what to do with Marlene Dietrich as she overpowers the rest of the cast but doesn’t have much on her plate. The Hitchcock wit is still present, but seem diluted compared to movies made before and after. It does wrap up in a perfunctory manner, good enough to offer closure, but not well enough to satisfy. No surprise if Stage Fright is consistently ranked in the middle-to-lower tier of Hitchcock movies, considerably lower than you’d expect from his chronology.

  • Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930)

    Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) Anyone getting pulled into serious film history will eventually watch films not for their entertainment value, but because of their historical importance, however loosely defined that can be. In the case of The Blue Angel, the film is most often cited as being important for being the first German full-length sound picture, and perhaps more importantly featuring Marlene Dietrich in her first big-screen role. Much has also been written about the very close relationship between Dietrich and director Josef von Sternberg—there’s clearly a near-voyeuristic quality to the film as it captures her cabaret act. It’s all meant to be sexy, but for a very narrow definition of it—and since I’m neither a big fan of Dietrich nor the androgynous look she often sported, the effect is somewhat lost. It doesn’t help that The Blue Angel plays like a warning against the siren call of her appeal—our poor protagonist goes from being a respected teacher to a miserable cuckolded cabaret clown throughout the entire film. I found Dietrich far more interesting in the later Shanghai Run, or the much later Witness for the Prosecution, but hey—this is an imposed viewing. I’m not any fonder of the film’s mortally slow pacing, in which roughly a minute’s worth of plot takes ten minutes to complete—the film may have been with sound, but it kept the pacing problems of the silent era. None of this was helped by a terrible viewing experience: the film I watched had major, major sound issues, with sound interruptions and major crackling issues to the point where I muted the film. When I turned it back on later during the film, the broadcast was entirely silent. I’d normally blame the broadcast, but this was on Turner Classic Movies, which takes great care to show movies in the best available format. No matter where or how or why, I didn’t get much out of The Blue Angel other than a sense that I could cross it off my list and be done with it.

  • Shanghai Express (1932)

    Shanghai Express (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2018) There’s a remarkable amount of exoticism on display in Shanghai Express, which follows a few characters are they board a train from Pekin to Shanghai and get caught up in the Chinese civil war. Trains are good for taking characters a long way while remaining in manageable locations, and so the movie does feel far more expansive than its limited sets suggest. (Although there is one notable outdoors sequence showing the train leaving Pekin.)  Notably helmed by Josef von Sternberg before the Hays Code crackdown began, Shanghai Express features a courtesan as heroine, opium dealing, forced sex, civil war dealings and one big murder. Marlene Dietrich is spectacular as the morally compromised “Shanghai Lily”, with a then-rare leading role for Asian-American performer Anna May Wong. While the first half of the film is a bit melodramatic and seems content to see its ensemble cast just chat away, the film gets far more interesting as a thriller once the train is stopped by government forces and the characters are kicked out of their comfortable berths. Great cinematography helps propel a morally ambiguous subject matter that still feels decently modern. It wraps up satisfyingly, which is true for the film as a whole: Made in 1932 but almost just as interesting today, Shanghai Express is a welcome reminder that the basics of cinema were all understood even as early as the early thirties.

  • Touch of Evil (1958)

    Touch of Evil (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2018) Much has been written and said about Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, and nearly all of it supports the assertion that it is a late film-noir classic. I certainly won’t dispute the critical consensus: From its landmark first extended shot, Touch of Evil is the work of a master filmmaker, deftly guiding us through a familiar plot with enough energy and precision to make it look at fresh and new. By the late fifties, film noir was growing aware of its own stylized approach, and Welles had ballooned up to his late-day persona. Both are used effectively, with Welles delivering plenty of visual style as a director, while turning in a remarkably disquieting performance as a deeply corrupt police officer. The film effectively uses actors such as Marlene Dietrich, but somehow convinced itself that Charlton Heston would make a convincing Mexican under layers of makeup. This misstep stands out but does not really damage the film, which is good enough to stand on its own. The sense of palpable desperation certainly associates Touch of Evil with prototypical film noir—it remains a must see for fans of the genre.

  • Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

    Witness for the Prosecution (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2018) I haven’t watched that many movies starring Marlene Dietrich yet, but Witness for the Prosecution is the first when I really get what Dietrich was about—it certainly helps that it flashes back to a cabaret sequence. Looking spectacular in her mid-fifties, she feels actively dangerous as the titular witness willing to do what it takes to achieve what she wants. Not that she’s the sole highlight of the film—Charles Laughton is incredibly likable as a barrister taking on a difficult case and never quite certain of everyone’s motives. The script, adapted from an Agatha Christie short story, is nicely paced to introduce the characters before getting down to the business of thrills and unexpected plot twists. Witness for the Prosecution does amount to a satisfying film, perhaps too brightly lit as a court drama to be pure film noir but certainly willing to get its inspiration from the depths of human cruelty. If director Billy Wilder has made a bad movie, I haven’t yet seen it.