Lisa Lieberman's Blog - Posts Tagged "josef-von-sternberg"

“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” Marlene Dietrich tells her former lover in Shanghai Express (1932). This was before the Hays Code — just — when an actress could get away with a line like that.



Read the review on Deathless Prose.

The Shanghai casino run by Mother Gin Sling is like Disneyland for the depraved. “It smells so incredibly evil,” says Gene Tierney, who’s there to do a little slumming. “I didn’t think such a place existed except in my own imagination. . . Anything could happen here.”

Read the rest on Deathless Prose

You can watch this film to see naughty Marlene Dietrich and you can also watch it to see how the studio tried—and failed—to rein her in. The cabaret singer we met in The Blue Angel, the cold-hearted seductress who wears a man’s top hat, reappears here in a glittering white tuxedo. Marlene swings both ways in Blonde Venus (as the actress did in real life). Sauntering onstage in the Paris nightclub where she’s become the star attraction, she frankly admires another showgirl, giving her a fleeting caress in passing, as if to say, I’ll catch you later, sweetie. And yet she also manages to convey an aloofness. It’s part of her allure. Nobody steals her heart, but she dares you to try. (According to her biographer, Donald Spoto, French actor Jean Gabin was the only one to succeed.)

Josef von Sternberg may have been trying to rehabilitate Dietrich’s image with this film, but nobody was buying it. If the poster isn't suggestive enough, take a look at the tagline: From the lips of one man to the arms of another.

Read the full review on Deathless Prose.