Wednesday, June 6, 2012
"The Blue Angel" film starring Marlene Dietrich
The original Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) a Universum Film A.G., Paramount production. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Camera: Günther Rittauwhich, and starring Emil Jannings as Professor Rath and Marlene Dietrich as Lola, the scandalous sexually exciting and previously almost unknown chanteuse. It was produced simultaneously in Berlin and Hollywood in 1930. Based on a novella entitled Professor Unrat by Thomas Mann's younger brother, Heinrich Mann, it was actually the first major German sound film, and it brought fame and fortune to actress Marlene Dietrich.
The Plot:
The Blue Angel follows Immanuel Rath (played by Emil Jannings) through a transformation from esteemed educator at the local Gymnasium(college preparatory high school) to a cabaret clown in Weimar Germany. Rath's descent begins when he punishes several of his students for circulating photographs of the beautiful Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) the headliner for the local cabaret, The Blue Angel. Hoping to catch the boys at the club, and punish them, the stiff authoritarian and puritanical Professor Rath goes there later that evening and meets Lola herself.
Marlene Dietrich was already nearly 30 in 1930 and absolutely dripping with sensuality; because she hadn’t yet been placed on the Hollywood starvation diet, she wasn’t so gaunt and languid; she exudes an athletic frankness that makes her more sexually appealing. As Lola-Lola, the cabaret’s star singer, she spends most of the film in teasing little outfits and belting out tunes like “Falling in Love Again”And she callously rips the heart of the poor bedazzled Professor to shreds.
Consumed with desire and determined to remain at Lola's side, Rath returns to the night club the following evening (to return a pair of panties that were smuggled into his coat by one of his students) and stays the night with her! The next morning, reeling from his night of passion, the discombob-ulated and unkempt Professor arrives late to school, to find his classroom in chaos and the principal furious with his behavior.
Rath subsequently resigns his position at the high school to marry Lola, but their happiness is short-lived, as they soon fritter away his meager teacher's savings and Rath is forced to take a position as a clown in Lola's cabaret troupe to pay the bills. His growing insecurities about Lola's profession as a "shared woman" eventually reduce him to a mere shell of the man he used to be, now consumed by his lust and jealousy.
The troupe returns to his hometown, where he is ridiculed and berated by the Blue Angel patrons, the very people he himself used to deride! As Rath pitifully performs his last clown act, crowing like a love-sick rooster, he witnesses his wife [Marlene Dietrich] embracing and French kissing Mazeppa, the strongman, who is her new love interest.
The former Professor is enraged to the point of insanity, and attempts to strangle Lola, but he is beaten down by some members of the little troupe, and is then forced, against his will, into a straitjacket. Later that night, Rath seeming to have recovered his sanity, is freed, and makes his way through a snowstorm towards his old classroom. Rejected, humiliated, and destitute, he dies there in remorse, clenching the desk at which he once taught. It is a very sad ending at which many tears have been shed in sympathy for this poor victim of a scheming heartless Vamp, whose theme song asserts that continually "Falling in love again," is her bag, and warning the bewitched men who fall for her that they're likely to get"burned like moths, but it's not my fault. It's just my nature!"
Some critics say The Blue Angel is important because it so presciently shows the immaturity and sadism of the German middle class. This is true, beyond any question. In its singular contemplation of the sudden disintegration of a pillar of bourgeois society under the quick, corrosive influence of a strong application of gutter sex, it reveals the imperfection and fraudulence of the facade of middle-class decency and discipline that is ponderous hero represents. It sourly suggests the soggy culture out of which Nazism oozed, and in the sadistic frenzy of the schoolboys to torment and destroy their hated teacher after they have witnessed his weakness for the cabaret girl, we may spot the incipient viciousness of later Hitler Youth.
But I find The Blue Angel most engrossing and fascinating because of its depiction of the whole unheimliche, subterranean area of psycho-neurotic sex. Where the custom in silent pictures had been simply to treat the primal urge of sex as a powerful but usually unholy and sinful appetite that overwhelms men and women by its sheer physical rush and urgency, the revelation in this picture is a sickly image of sex as a passion mixed up with deep obsessions to dominate and get revenge. Whereas up 'till then the evil of it in the silents was mainly its immorality, the evil of it in The Blue Angel is its corruption into a social disease that infects the aggressions of people and causes them to act in debased and vicious ways.
The great Professor Rath, its stern protagonist, is no more than a pretty brute whose badgering and bullying of his teenage pupils is apparently his only means of releasing his inhibitions and rewarding his stuffy bachelorhood. Thus it would seem a mere extension of his desire to rule the boys that causes him to trail some of them to The Blue Angel, a low-class cabaret, when he discovers they are going there to ogle a female entertainer whose photograph he has snatched from one of them. And likewise it would seem but a fervor to show his boastful authority that first sends him to the dressing room of Lola, the sultry singing star.
But, of course, it is the pull of voyeurism and a resentment of her attractiveness that hauls him into her presence, and it is desire to vaunt his masculine command, as much as it is lust for fornication, that makes him fall for her lures to go to bed. Likewise, it is h is ignominy, rather than any vestige of physical desire, that keeps him attached to the woman after she has deceived and degraded him. Similarly, the basic urge in Lola, this insolent cabaret girl with the long legs, the bare thighs, the garters, the provocatively ornamented crotch, the smoldering eyes, the moistening armpits and the husky voice that sings Falling in Love Again, is not merely to enjoy sexual intercourse. It is to vanquish and debase this stupid man who has dared to intrude himself upon her domain with his air of superiority. It is the urge to take vengeance upon him, which is the usual latent urge of prostitutes and, in this particular case, to show contempt for the smug middle class he represents.
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