Marlene Dietrich’s iconic cabaret singer is as mesmeric as ever in Josef von Sternberg’s tale of a teacher’s foolhardy infatuation
In 1930, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich became pioneers of movie sexuality with The Blue Angel, now on rerelease. It was the first full-length German talking picture, and it fused the erotic and economic dimensions of “Weimar sexuality” in all its decadence and despair.
It was directed by Von Sternberg and written by him with dramatist Carl Zuckmayer and others, adapting Professor Unrat, the 1905 novel by Heinrich Mann. Dietrich is Lola, the alluring cabaret singer at a sleazy nightclub called The Blue Angel, and Emil Jannings plays Professor Immanuel Rath, the pompous but poignantly lonely middle-aged schoolmaster who is outraged to find smutty postcards of Lola in his pupils’ possession, storms into her dressing room to confront her and falls under her mischievous, sensuous spell. His motives for showing up at this den of iniquity had been of course entirely clear, as he boggled in private over the confiscated photos. Soon, poor Professor Rath throws everything away for his doomed love, loses his teaching job and reputation, and humiliatingly winds up playing the clown in the cabaret act while Lola canoodles with a new lover in the wings.
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