portrayal of Prof. Rath and Marlene Dietrich's
performance as LOLA, in the 1930s Blue Angel film
so insightful that I want to share it with you:
Thus the crux of the drama is the explosion of this ridiculous conceit with the denouement of Lola's cruel perversion of the purpose of sex. Suddenly and shockingly she shows Rath on their wedding night that her seeming interest in him was but means to delude and dominate. By making him pick up the bundle of lewd photographs of her that he has spilled on the floor in indignation, she drives home the devastating point that her sex is but an article in commerce and she uses it as she will. From his smug and smiling contentment, shown in the way he smokes a fat cigar, he is suddenly dumped into a strange state of shock and bewilderment. The flimsy props of his illusions are knocked out from under him, and he finds himself stricken and helpless in an alien and hostile milieu.
From: Bosley Crowther's The Great Films (G,P, Putnam's ,1967)
"In his portrayal of the arrogant and lust-filled Professor Rath Emil Jannings gives us an excruciating understanding of vanity, lust and brute aggression that drives this man to his ruin. And he finally presents a haunting picture of the last stage of Rath's decay in a fit of maniacal cock-crowing on the cabaret's smoky stage before an audience of his former pupils who have come to hoot at him.
But the air of evil and corruption that wafts so heavily through this film comes from the sultriness of Lola, from the intensity with which she is played. How much of this is Sternberg, his sense of the mechanics of a slut and his skillfulness in surrounding such a creature with a noxiously steamy atmosphere, and how much of it is Miss Dietrich is hard to analyze. Sternberg suggests she was the puppet, that he manipulated the strings.
Certainly he was the master who had her do such impertinently obscene things as the business of tossing the panties, grossly spitting into her mascara box, dropping cigarettes under her dressing table and making Rath get down and pick them up so that he will be within inches of her bare legs and her contiguous erogenous zone. It was Sternberg who gave her the cruel line, "You've come back; they always do," when the ponderously proud schoolmaster returns to her dressing room. And it was he who directed Lola's sudden and viciously autocratic switch from seductress to commanding virago on their fatal wedding night.
But it is Miss Dietrich's own magnetism, her weird way of sinking her eyes behind an enigmatic curtain, her ability to blend just the right tones of come-hither and go-to-hell in that Falling in Love Again song that put individuality into the character the director shaped for her.
It is notable that Sternberg does not give us any scenes of Rath and Lola making love, none of the sort of erotic acrobatics that have shown up in later sex-charged films. This is tremendously important, for it is all too suggestively implied in the few shots he shows of the teacher fumbling clumsily and grossly with the slut that any sex act between them would be disgustingly callow and crude, totally without pleasure for either of them. This leads us back to the premise that it is sex in its more neurotic form that is the essence of this picture. It is the lust-bloated arrogance of a man who thinks he can impose his domination and his whole stuffy, sterile way of life simply by having a woman go to bed with him.
The clue to this fatuous self-deception is the early attitude of Rath that he can have relations with Lola in the conventions of the hide-bound middle class. When he wakes up in the morning after his first night with her in her room, he has the indolent air of a burgher after a stodgy rut with his frau. Likewise, he is deluded when the manager of the Blue Angel boasts that his own special skill as a magician puts him in the professorial class. Rath actually thinks his stuffy status as a "herr professor" is looked up to in this place. And he falls for the mocking deception of Lola wearing a proper bridal gown for their obscenely vulgar wedding. He still thinks he has conquered her.
From here on, the morbid demonstration is the sucking of this brutally deflated man into the maw of the vulgar environment that Lola and the Blue Angel exploit—the environment of common, sex-starved people gorging sausages, swilling beer and ogling the fat, concupiscent women who rouse their animal appetites. It is an environment from which the broken bourgeois ironically crawls at the end to die at his desk in the schoolroom from which he detached himself so arrogantly.
This being an early talking picture, it is interesting to see how economical Sternberg is with talk. He packs some essential information and personality into the dialogue, which is as it should be, and he develops a great deal of stimulation with Lola's naturally included song. But most of his best communication of character and atmosphere come in the pictorial presentation that is done with silent techniques. So able is Sternberg with details, so graphically does he describe the setting of The Blue Angel, its personnel and its clientele, that one can almost sense the body odors, the stink of stale beer and cheap perfume. It is as though he has commanded in this picture not only the dimension of sound but that of smell. This is one of the things about The Blue Angel that makes it an extraordinary film."
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