Marlene Dietrich

Amongst the most pleasing acquisitions this year at Auteur House has been a box set of Marlene Dietrich material.  For those not in the know - and I’m assuming that’s most of you - Dietrich was a German actress who achieved the kind of mythic status only possible if you worked in Hollywood in the Golden Age of early sound cinema.  She had her own Svengali, an Austrian born director called Josef Von Sternberg.  In 1930, after Dietrich had been working in movies for seven years, Von Sternberg turned the throaty beauty into an ‘over night’ sensation, casting her as the sensual cabaret singer Lola Lola in “The Blue Angel”.

Lola Lola is a kind of proto femme fatale, an object of desire that causes the downfall of a respectable bourgeois professor.  She sings a song that in English at least is called “Falling in Love Again” (the German lyrics are far less romantic).  She parades around in her underwear, showing lots of thigh.

When Von Sternberg returned to Hollywood just as “The Blue Angel” was being released he took Dietrich with her.  Their American collaboration began later in 1930 with “Morocco”, a simple romantic drama in which her nightclub entertainer is caught between a physical attraction to Gary Cooper’s legionnaire and the security offered by Adolphe Menjou’s middle-aged tycoon.  Astonishingly beautiful, impeccably paced, “Morocco” set high aesthetic standards, ones equalled and occasionally surpassed in titles like “Blonde Venus”, “Shanghai Express” and the incredible “Scarlet Empress” where Dietrich plays horse-loving Tsarina Catherine the Great.

The director/actress partnership came to an end in 1935.  Briefly thereafter thought ‘box-office poison’, Dietrich bounced back in the first quality comic western, “Destry Rides Again”.  Later triumphs include work with Billy Wilder - as a Nazi floozy in the underrated “A Foreign Affair” and in a dual role in “Witness for the Prosecution” - and a choice cameo in friend Orson Welles’ late noir masterpiece “Touch of Evil”.

After a certain point in her career films began incidental to the legend that was Dietrich.  She toured the world in one-woman shows until her mid-70s, an ageless mistress of make-up, wigs and lightening forever perpetuating Von Sternberg’s glamorous vision.