Marlene Dietrich has always been a great hero of mine. If there is some sort of illuminati pyramid of cool in my personal pantheon, Dietrich is its apotheosis.
She worked with Hitchcock, Welles and Wilder, but the films she made with Josef Von Sternberg were both the bedrock and zenith of her legend. He didn't exactly discover her (she had made a number of German films) but he saw Dietrich in Marlene before even she did. They made masterpieces like The Blue Angel, Morocco and Shanghai Express, but also some films that didn't quite meet that mark. Their last two projects were The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman, both beacons of high glamour, echt-exotica and design taken so far over the top it becomes both substance and surrealism.
The film was based on the novel Le Femme et Le Pantin by French poet and literary stylist Pierre Louys and a painting by Goya (yeah, this was back before we based movies on video games) but any storyline is simply an excuse for visual audacity. We open with a Spanish Carnival scene, plenty of costumed extras and streamers and confetti and elaborate pan shots and there, in the middle of it all is -- Dietrich! Wearing the most fabulous lace mask and net mantilla. There is not an outfit in this film that is not fully gay-gasp worthy. Cesar Romero is entranced, follows her home and is turned away at the door but learns the lovely lady with the exquisite millinery is one Concha Perez.
He's supposed to hook up with her later, but first he meets his old army buddy Pasquale. Cesar Romero explains that "For the last five years I've known nothing but jail, exile and manifestoes." Yes, certainly a lifestyle that leaves one in tight pants, patent-leather hair, gleaming teeth and a mustache that must have its own personal groomer. But even stranger is Pasquale, played by Lionel Atwill done up to look exactly like Josef Von Sternberg. Naturally, he and Concha have a past.
"She is the most dangerous woman you'll ever meet." Thus comes about a lengthy flashback in which Pasquale Von Sternberg recounts his own run-ins with Concha La Dietrich, a peasant girl with two-inch beaded false eyelashes, a cigarette factory worker in a 15-inch high handcarved tortoiseshell hair comb. She and her ogre of a mother literally reel off a list of bills he is expected to pay. Concha jumps into his lap and kisses him, then jumps off screaming "Don't touch me!" She screeches at him about being unfaithful, throws him out and then is enraged that he has gone away. If none of this sounds like the cynical ice queen Dietrich we know and love, it's because it's not. She looks like Marlene Dietrich, but she acts like Marion Davies.
"How did you earn that money?"
"I? Earn anything?"
Concha -- or, to follow the pretense, Concha's mother ('cause i totally see the family resemblance between them) cleans out their benefactor several times, while Dietrich puckers, pouts and tilts her head back and forth like a flirtatious parrot. But, still, the outfits. Girl lives in the ghetto but rocks nonstop couture: It's okay for your blouse to be torn, if your have fifty bucks worth of flowers in your hair.
Not only that, but she clearly has a hair and makeup staff, as well as at least two wardrobe assistants -- the woman does change outfits from spitcurls to stockings, panties to pumps three times in one day. As always, Dietrich herself was as responsible for her "look" as director Von Sternberg or costume designer Travis Banton. The film can perhaps be best appreciated as one spectacular ensemble after another. (Devil is especially beloved by fashionistas.) Dig this "Queen of Hearts" styling...
Oh, yeah, since this is a Marlene Dietrich film, she winds up headlining a flashy cabaret act. In her run-down Spanish village.
She sings a number called "Three Sweethearts Have I" about all of the gifts she gets from her many suitors. They give her flowers and cakes and vegetables "and other things that aren't so nice." We are left to guess what those things are. A snuggie? Meth? The clap? The unwashed dildo that guy on the right is wearing on his nose? They cut a number entitled "If It Isn't Pain, It Isn't Love." Alas, we will never know what manner of elaborate, haute-chic dommedrag Marlene would have come up with for that one...
Pasquale shells out even more cash, which she passes on to the bullfighter she keeps on the side. Pasquale is angry, Concha La Dietrich is disdainful of his rage: "What right have you to tell me what to do? Are you my father? No! Are you my husband? No! Are you my lover? No! Well, I must say, you're content with very little!" And, with that, she saunters off into the rain and out of his life. In a sequined gown, of course.
Then, of course we're out of flashback -- most of the film is flashback -- and all that is left is for Cesar Romero de Tightpants to have a last meeting with Concha La Dietrich, which is crashed by Pasquale Von Sternberg. Words are exchanged, we have the talk of honor, the slapping of the glove and the duel. That's the men: Concha throws in two more costume changes and twirls her parasol.
This is her "I've come to visit you in prison" outfit. To be fair, it is also her "I'm going to see the governor and flutter my three-inch eyelashes at him until he sets you free" outfit. Eventually, she chooses one of the two men, although the decision seems pretty arbitrary and definitely not permanent.
Dietrich herself claimed that The Devil Is a Woman was her favorite of her films, "because I was most beautiful." She would have done better to claim Shanghai Express in which she is equally breathtaking and actually called upon her to act -- and in something with an actual story, no less! Von Sternberg was notorious for retakes -- in this film, Dietrich demanded her own when an eyelid twitched, a hair fluttered, taking his dictatorial attitude toward her and turning it on herself. As she later said, "The emphasis on the way I looked became a burden to bear, almost to great to enjoy."
Later in life she became one of those legendary beauties like the
Comtesse de Castigilone who, once aged beyond the help of
cosmetics or lighting or artifice or attitude, never leave the house again. So Marlene Dietrich spent the last years of her life
seen by no one. The admiring eyes of all brings privilege but it's
also a prison. It's great when you're proud of what they see and what
you are (at that point, what they see so overwhelms that it is what you are, by default), but when that fades, when you no longer enter a room to admiring eyes but shocked whispers -- or complete indifference -- it's easier to close the door on the world for good.
Part of the problem in this movie is that you don't like anybody. Now, don't get me wrong, i love an antihero as much as anyone and probably more than most. But basically the characters of The Devil Is a Woman can be summed up as Concha is a bitch and everyone else is pathetic. Even when Dietrich's characters were heartless or amoral or simply ice-cold (and they often were), there was a core of nobility to her, a reason for her actions. Concha's only motivation seems to be "I do whatever I want." All well and good, except the only thing she seems to want is to take advantage of the suckers all around her. She is the femme fatale at its most one-dimensional -- a tragic thing in an actress who could convey emotional odysseys with a curl of her lip and entire philosophies with a raised eyebrow.
But perhaps Dietrich was too dazzled by beauty and Von Sternberg was too wracked by the fact that that beauty, the woman who had inspired his greatest art, was about to walk out of his life. One wants to write her off as a narcissist and him as an obsessive but, really, what more perfect relationship could there be? And so The Devil Is a Woman lacks depth but oh, what a glorious surface it is...
Outside, it is as hot as.... well, outside is the desert in August, so you can guess how hot it is. When it's this kind of infernal, one of my favorite ways to imagine myself cool is watching black-and-white movies set in places with abundant snow. Among these are Alexander Nevsky and The Thing, but best of all is The Scarlet Empress. Josef Von Sternberg made seven films with Marlene Dietrich, their pairing was one of the finest examples of folie a deux in the history of film and The Scarlet Empress is Dietrich's iconicism and Von Sternberg's stylization, both cranked up to 11.
The story of Catherine the Great has been told over and over again in film, played by everyone from Jeanne Moreau to Julia Ormond to Jayne Meadows to Bette Davis to Catherine Zeta-Jones to Tallulah Bankhead and even my old boss Viveca Lindfors. Actually in 1934, the year of The Scarlet Empress, The Rise of Catherine the Great also came out, starring Elisabeth Bergner -- ironically, Dietrich had been minor supporting actress to Bergner's leading lady in a production of The Taming of the Shrew back when they were both young actresses in Berlin. But the Von Sternberg/Dietrich version is the one everyone remembers.
We begin with the young German Princess Sophia Frederica, briefly played by Dietrich's cranky-puss daughter, Maria. We then are reminded via intertitle of the barbarism of Russia. This offers an opportunity for Von Sternberg to indulge in some kinky torture scenes, then cutting directly to Shirley Temple -- excuse me, Marlene Dietrich, swinging in a flower-filled garden, a la Fragonard. Dietrich's performance is best described as
smirk-inducing. Seeing the world-weary, cosmopolitan, bisexual, chic
Marlene Dietrich playing wide-eyed, curly-topped innocent is, well, as ridiculous as it sounds.
The emissary of barbaric Russia arrives in the person of Alexei, Fabio-like hunk John Lodge. Lodge's acting career was very brief -- he only made a few films (and actually turned down a role in Mae West's She Done Him Wrong). He went on to become a congressman and governor of Connecticut, as well as ambassador to Spain. He has been sent to bring the young princess to Russia to marry the Grand Duke. There is much riding through great drifts of snow in piles of fur. Lodge leers at Dietrich, Dietrich continues to maintain the affect of someone with mild brain damage. More snow, more horses, more extras, more furs, more leering, more faux-naif Marlene, more snow, more furs, more horses, more snow. Brrrrrrr!
The set design of The Scarlet Empress is legendary, setting some kind of benchmark for the bizarre and it's when we hit Russia that it goes full-on bonkers. Doors 15 feet high and eight feet across that require a bevy of hoopskirted extras to open and close. Gargoyles looming over the tops of chairs, life-size skeletons serving as candelabrum: This is gothic home decorat it finest!
This motif continues with the post-wedding banquet scene. Surrounded by servants, statues, skeletons, violinists and multiple forms of roast beast, we see the contrast between the elegant Grand Duchess Catherine and the pig's head-chomping lesser nobles, the contrast between the bug-eyed, drooling Grand Duke and the suave, sexy Alexei. We will be reminded of this over and over.
Dietrich is still keeping up her ditzy sophmore act at 33:26, but at least her costumes begin to improve and are a little less "the village idiot dressed in a bassinet," as her daughter Maria described it -- the black velvet riding habit with metallic trim and white ostrich plumed-tricorn hat is fabulous. Maria wrote a semi-vicious biography of her mother, but even when exposed on the page, Marlene reaches from the grave to still awe and enchant both reader and author. Thus the Mommie Dearest segments don't stick as much as the stories of film shoots, which largely hinged on costume selections. Dietrich worked closely with Travis Banton on the designs.
But, even in a pair of diamond-buckled mules that would make Christian Louboutin weep, Dietrich is still simpering and lisping and playing the fool. "A luvah? [blink blink, purse lips, blink] Why, what may that beeeee? [blink, blink, toss curls] How schocking!" This is possibly the most sophisticated woman who ever lived carrying on like this for forty-five minutes!
Finally, mercifully, after some rolling in the hay (Interrupted by a horse -- ha ha! Don't tell me Von Sternberg didn't intend that.) and some note-passing with Alexei (Love, love, love the fur-trimmed ballgown.), she finally hooks up with a passing guardsman and, lo! an heir to the throne is born. Just in time, since the Czarina of Cleveland is getting old -- "Empress, bah! I haven't the power to iron out a single wrinkle!" -- and infirm. Well, that's what you get from a life of red meat, vodka and screaming at people. (Don't get me wrong: I fully endorse all of those things.)
Dietrich's post-birth scene is another virtuosic Von Sternberg shot, traveling through multiple layers and foci. (Fun Fact: Josef von Sternberg's fondness for shooting through and around veils, lace and gauze migfht be traced back to his youthful day job in a lace store.) And, finally! We have Dietrich. No more curls, no more whispering, no more cluelessness, no more Baby Spice. It's back to the Dietrich voice, the Dietrich wit, the Dietrich appraising gaze. And, oh, what a confection of white plumes and satin she has to do it with. And the wig! She looks like a Macchiavellian survivor version of Marie Antoinette. (Which, in a way, as another foreign princess sent to rule a hostile new court in late eighteenth-century Europe, Catherine the Great actually kind of was.)
"I have weapons that are far more powerful than any political machine." Spoken with the assurance of a woman who had Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Yul Brynner, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Erich Maria Remarque, Edith Piaf, Alberto Giacometti, Edward Murrow, John Gilbert, Colette, George S. Patton, Jean Gabin, and both Joe and Jack Kennedy!
Dimwit Grand Duke and his Court Tramp (who does rock a great smoky eye,
though) threaten Catherine, but she is unimpressed -- actually, she
manages to read them both to filth without saying a word and that, children, is why Marlene Dietrich was and is one of the greatest stars of all time.
Dietrich consolidates her power one man at a time. The Scarlet Empress is where that classic "reviewing the troops" bit that the great Madeline Kahn did so well was born. More outfits! There's a sheer black peignoir trimmed with black and white feathers that would make Dita Von Teese squeal and clap her hands and which Marlene uses to help consolidate her, erm, military support. She gets the church on her side by slinging a few 36-strand pearl bracelets at them "for the poor." And, as you can imagine, everyone is Russia is swayed by her fabulous fucking style.
Finally, with the backing of the army, church, the people, and fashion bloggers everywhere, Catherine takes over Russia. The film closes with
another of Von Sternberg's word-free visual mini-symphonies, Marlene in
white military uniform leading the troops up the stairs of the Winter
Palace...
I couldn't say whether The Scarlet Empress is my favorite Dietrich/Von Sternberg film. (And if Edie Sedgwick was the muse of my teenage years, Marlene Dietrich remains who i want to be when i grow up.) Shanghai Express has existentialist Dietrich in amazing deco fashions, sharing a cabin on the train of doom with her friend, the icily gorgeous and just as cool Anna May Wong. Or the finally-out-on-DVD Dishonored, in which fatalistic spy Dietrich displays a world-weariness and steely resolve that makes Angelina Jolie look like a simpering bint. But, on an August in the desert day, i'll take The Scarlet Empress.
