Lisa Lieberman's Blog - Posts Tagged "marlene-dietrich"

Isherwood didn't think much of the stage or film version of Cabaret, but then, he was hard on his younger self for having created "a sanitized picture" of the Weimar era. At the end of his life, he was brave enough to look back and see what he'd missed as a young man in Berlin, and honest enough to acknowledge his blindness and self-absorption. "Berlin was a place of great hardship and suffering but you don't see much of that [in The Berlin Stories]," he said in Christopher and His Kind.

The prostitutes who walked the streets, the blond working-class boys who were the objects of Wystan's and Christopher's lust, were driven less by pleasure than poverty, I suspect. Focusing on the decadence of Berlin's café culture, whether to celebrate or condemn the sexual hedonism that drew foreigners to the city, obscures the harsh reality of the time, the extreme deprivation felt by millions of Germany's citizens.

Read my latest column on 3 Quarks Daily.

“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.

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.

Destry Rides Again doesn’t take itself too seriously. That’s got a lot to do with the director, George Marshall, who went from making traditional Westerns during the Silent era to making comedies with Laurel and Hardy (among others) in the 1930s. Here he assembles a quirky cast, actors you wouldn’t expect to see in the same picture.

Read the rest on my blog.

But there’s Marlene Dietrich, sultry as ever, performing in the Lorelei Club—a postwar version of the seedy nightclub where the German actress was introduced to us in The Blue Angel (1930). “Falling in Love Again,” the melancholy torch song composed for her in that film by Friedrich Hollaender, feels positively upbeat when compared to the numbers Hollaender composed for this one:

They had a touch of paradise, a spell you can’t explain. For in this crazy paradise, you are in love with Pain. — “Illusions”

Read the full review