The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Comedy drama

DIRECTOR

Josef von Sternberg

WRITERS

Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, Robert Liebmann (screenplay); Heinrich Mann (novel)

STARS

Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings

BEFORE

1929 Von Sternberg’s first talkie is the US crime drama Thunderbolt.

AFTER

1930 Von Sternberg and Dietrich team up for a second time with the Hollywood romance Morocco.

1932 Dietrich and von Sternberg reunite for Shanghai Express, a huge box-office hit, and the fourth movie of seven the two would make together.

Marlene Dietrich’s Lola-Lola, the showgirl of The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel), is one of cinema’s most indelible sirens. The movie was banned by the Nazis in 1933, but Hitler, a fan of Dietrich, reputedly kept a private copy.

Moral message

Lola-Lola’s decadence and sexually charged ennui are captured in songs that made Dietrich famous: Falling in Love Again became her personal anthem. Ironically, Josef von Sternberg’s movie is also a moral sermon, warning of the dangers of chasing the pleasures of the flesh. Set in Weimar Germany, it tells the tale of Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings), who gives up his respectable job as a schoolteacher to pursue Lola-Lola, a performer at cabaret club The Blue Angel.

Professor Rath journeys through the seamy demimonde of show business, and when Lola-Lola rejects him, he ends up a laughing stock: spineless, emasculated, and powerless, a grotesque shadow of his censorious former self.

Professor Rath (Emil Jannings, right) becomes a humiliated clown in Lola-Lola’s troupe. He is ridiculed by the audience when the troupe visits his home town.

What else to watch: Shanghai Express (1932) ✵ Blonde Venus (1932) ✵ Desire (1936) ✵ Destry Rides Again (1939) ✵ Cabaret (1972)