Seen Falling in Love Again and the Blue Angels
"The Blue Affections" will always have a place in movie history as the film that brought Marlene Dietrich to international distinction. At the time information technology was made, at the nascence of the sound era in 1929, it was seen as a vehicle for Emil Jannings, the High german actor who had but won the outset Academy Award for best actor (for both "The Last Command" and "The Way of All Mankind") later starring in such silent landmarks as "The Concluding Express mirth" and "Faust." Dietrich's overnight stardom inspired distributors to recut the film, ending it with one of her songs instead of his pathetic closing moments, and this restored version shows the entire picture show for the first fourth dimension in years.
Even then in that location is a choice to be made. Jannings and his director, Josef von Sternberg, had established themselves in the silent era, when films knew no language barriers, and they shot the picture in both English and German language. This is the English version, with Dietrich and Jannings fluent (the Austrian Jannings claimed, falsely, that he had been born in Brooklyn), but many prefer the German language version because the actors experience more than at habitation with the dialogue.
Whatever its linguistic communication, "The Blue Angel" looks and feels more like a silent movie, with its broad performances that underline emotions. Von Sternberg, who was raised in Europe and America and began his career in Hollywood, was much influenced by German expressionism, as we meet in early street scenes where the buildings tilt toward each other at crazy angles reminiscent of "The Chiffonier of Dr. Caligari." He was a bold visual artist who liked shots where the actors shared infinite with foreground props and dramatic shadows, and he makes the dressing room beneath the stage of the Blue Angel nightclub into a haunting psychic dungeon. Lotte Eisner observes in The Haunted Screen, her study of German expressionism, that von Sternberg was more at ease with sound than many of his contemporaries (this was his 2nd talkie), and was perhaps the start director to deal with how offstage sounds alter as doors are opened and closed. Audio itself was seen as cocky-sufficient in the before days, but von Sternberg was already modulating it, tilting it toward realism.
His story involves the fall and humiliation of Prof. Immanuel Rath (Jannings), a respected high school professor who ane day confiscates a postcard showing Lola Lola (Dietrich), the dancer at a local nightclub. Visiting the club to reprimand whatever students he might find there, the professor falls under the spell of Dietrich, who looks fleshier and more than carnal than she later appeared. Soon he is lost. He marries her (in a testify-biz hymeneals of grotesque toasts and whispered gossip), goes on the route, and returns to his hometown some years later as a bit player in her stage prove--the stooge of a magician who produces eggs from the professor's olfactory organ and cracks them on the old man's caput.
Jannings specialized in roles where he was humiliated; "The Terminal Laugh," where he plays a proud hotel doorman who loses his position, is the near famous. His performance in "The Blue Angel" is odd; he plays a high school instructor and is presumably intelligent, even so his thoughts and actions seem slowed down and laborious, as if he'south puzzling things out as he goes along. Dietrich had made seven silent films before this 1, but seems to accommodate easily to the quickened step of talkies, and of course her stardom depended on sound; her singing of "Falling in Love Once more" in this motion picture established it as her trademark. (Three years subsequently, in von Sternberg's "Shanghai Express," she would utter that masterpiece of understatement, "It took more than ane man to change my proper noun to Shanghai Lily.") The puzzle throughout "The Blue Angel" is why Lola Lola marries the sad, besotted professor. Information technology appears they have a sex life, at least for 1 dark, although information technology is not highly-seasoned to imagine its nature. At that place are times when she seems fond of him, times when she is indifferent, times when she is unfaithful, and yet she has a sure stubborn affection for this pathetic effigy. Perhaps he acts as a forepart for her shadow life of discreet prostitution; perchance, in a earth that regards her as a tramp, she values the one man who idealizes her.
Dietrich in any upshot never seemed to embody romance; the sexual identity she offered, in film afterwards movie, was that of a predator, disillusioned past men, satisfying her physical needs simply indifferent to their providers. She seems to have all of the equipment of a woman except for the instruction manual, and it's interesting that Dietrich is a favorite role for female impersonators, in movies like "The Damned," and in life; if you are a man who wants to play a woman, Dietrich meets y'all halfway.
"The Blueish Affections" lumbers a little on its style to a preordained conclusion, just is intriguing for its glimpses of backstage life in shabby High german postwar vaudeville, and for Dietrich'south performance, which seems to float above the action as if she'south stepping fastidiously across gutters. The concluding humiliation of the professor is agonizing and protracted, and Siegfried Krakauer, in his written report From Caligari to Hitler, establish it one more example of the way German movies mirrored their society in humiliating intellectuals and glorifying the physical. You lot can glimpse the sadomasochism of the Nazi pose in the strange relationship of Professor Rath and Lola Lola.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the picture critic of the Chicago Sunday-Times from 1967 until his decease in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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The Blueish Angel (2001)
106 minutes
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