From the Cheap Seats

I’ve been going through the 18 disc Marlene Dietrich: The Movie Collection. It’s a big box filled – as I suspect you’ve already guessed – with 18 films which feature Marlene Dietrich in some capacity. At the time of writing, MovieMail are offering it for about sixty notes, which makes it the bargain of the year (at least). Included are rarities directed by Frank Borzage, Ernst_Lubitsch and Rene Clair and many more. What makes it essential is that it contains six of the seven films the divine Marlene made with her Svengali, Josef von Sternberg, and it’s he who will dominate the rest of this post.

(I had originally intended to use this post to inaugurate a discussion on the subject of ‘style’, but I’ve been so overwhelmed by these films that whatever I have to say about the subject will have to be filtered through the figure of von Sternberg, the stylist supreme.)

So, Josef von Sternberg. The ‘von’ was an affectation, an attempt to claim an blue-blooded pedigree that wasn’t his by birth. He was from more humble stock (Austrian émigrés to New York) and had to work his way up to the directors chair. A series of gangster films made his name as a director blessed with an immaculate visual sense; he first worked with Dietrich when he cast her (against everyone’s advice, he claimed) for The Blue Angel. They became partners off screen too, a union that was as turbulent as it was productive.

Of the films Sternberg made with Dietrich, Dishonored (a spy story) and Blonde Venus (an episodic melodrama) are only interesting, with wonderful moments but not perhaps as cohesive as the others. The Blue Angel (which you’ll have to buy separately) is worthwhile, if optional.

Shanghai Express, however, is excellent. Morocco is a masterpiece: maybe the first talking picture that legitimately deserves that description. That leaves The Scarlet Empress and The Devil is a Woman. They are perfect movies. There is nothing wrong with them. And you know how common they are, don’t you?

It isn’t just that these films look wonderful, although they do: The Scarlet Empress especially is a triumph of design and camerawork. But there is so much more going on in his films than images, more than we can even verbalise. This is a neglected aspect of this director. In part, he was to blame. He disparaged plot and said story meant ‘nothing’ to him, inadvertently suggesting that his work amounted to no more than a collection of pretty pictures.

To watch his films, however, is to realise how mistaken this is. Like any great director, he had themes he returned to again and again. His favourite theme was sex. As well we know in Hollywood movies, when two film characters love each other very much, they hold hands and kiss at the very end, before a discreetly timed fade out sends them off to live happily ever after.

Not in Sternberg’s films, however. His characters are at it like rabbits. Morocco was made in 1930, has a U certificate and is just about the filthiest thing I’ve ever seen. Characters desire each other like in few other films; the lust drives the film. And ultimately, reason loses out to passion. Again and again, he shows how shallow civilised values are in the face of more primal urges. Men abase themselves before Dietrich because they can’t do otherwise.

This is uncomfortable stuff, not least because it acknowledges that affairs of the heart are much less rational than we like to pretend. Again and again, characters are driven to humiliate themselves (Dietrich in Morocco, running into the desert after her beloved) or allow themselves to be humiliated: Catherine, The Scarlet Empress herself, makes sure her lovers know their place. Oh, it’s not explicit – he obeyed the censorship conventions of the day – but what Sternberg suggests is far more potent than what other directors show.

Most of all, there’s The Devil is a Woman, a mordant black comedy of sexual manners that was the last of their collaborations (and, incidentally, drawn from the same novel that inspired Bunuel to make That Obscure Object of Desire.) The male characters are helpless dupes, unable – or unwilling – to resist temptation. It’s hard not to fancy an autobiographical streak: the man who destroys himself for Dietrich is made up to look exactly like the director.

Sternberg was no hypocrite. Unlike most directors who paid lip-service to America’s prevailing conservative moral code in their films, he forgave his characters for their libidinous antics. Dietrich gets a happy-ending reunion with her one true love in both Blonde Venus and Shanghai Express, even though she’d been through a directory of partners since their last union. His studio colleague Cecil B DeMille would have contrived some punishment for her wanton ways in The Scarlet Empress; Sternberg, by contrast, shows her enjoying total victory.

The partnership with Dietrich was Sternberg’s zenith. He worked infrequently afterwards: his arrogant, imperious manner had antagonised the wrong people. The later work is not without merit. I haven’t seen Jet Pilot, so I can’t tell you what his only (credited) colour film is like. However, The Shanghai Gesture is an underrated melodrama, in the opulent tradition of the Dietrich films. Macao is a decent thriller, albeit one heavily re-shot by an uncredited Nicholas Ray. Both these latter films are available on DVD in region one.

Best of all, however, was his final film. The Saga of Anatahan is another masterpiece, about Japanese soldiers marooned on an island and losing the trappings of civilisation. It is as visually striking as his other films, perhaps more so: he filmed it entirely in a studio, revelling in the artifice – he regretting having to use real water. I’ve only seen it once and can’t believe it is still absent from DVD. It’s surely a natural for Masters of Cinema.

While they’re about it, perhaps they can release some of his other stuff too. I have The Salvation Hunters, his debut, on tape and I’m in no rush to see the turgid Thunderbolt again but it’s becoming a matter of some urgency to see his other films – his version of Crime and Punishment or An American Tragedy. (If you do feel generous and want to give me a copy…)

I wonder what Sternberg would make of the irony of his films being sold in a box ostensibly devoted to his ‘puppet’? It’s an unusually poetic marketing decision, unconsciously mirroring how his heroes submitted themselves to Queen Marlene. But it doesn’t matter how these films are arranged as long as we have them. Now we do, and I’m very grateful.