OVP: The Spoilers (1942)

Film: The Spoilers (1942)

Stars: Marlene Dietrich, Randolph Scott, John Wayne, Margaret Lindsay

Director: Ray Enright

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Marlene Dietrich: click here to learn more about Ms. Dietrich (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We have alluded a lot this month to Marlene Dietrich's legendary personal life.  Dietrich's sex life is arguably the most storied in terms of rumor & legend, and it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.  There are the affairs that pretty much everyone agrees happened (Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Yul Brynner) and those that are harder-to-track-down, but are too salacious not to at least mention (Frank Sinatra, Claudette Colbert, Joseph P. Kennedy...and his son President Kennedy).  Dietrich is inarguably the actor I most wish had had a tell-all interview with Oprah.  

One of the actors that pretty much everyone agrees that Dietrich had an affair with was John Wayne, with whom she made a series of pictures in the wake of the success of Destry Rides Again.  After the success of Destry, the studio was adamant to get her back into a western, and Dietrich (according to legend) selected Wayne as her leading man by telling producer Joe Pasternak "Mommy wants that for Christmas" after seeing Wayne for the first time in the Universal Pictures commissary.  The pair made three films together, two westerns (Seven Sinners and The Spoilers) and a rags-to-riches drama called Pittsburgh, and of the trio I thought The Spoilers looked the most interesting (and was an unsee part of the OVP) so we're going with that for our movie today.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in Nome, Alaska, the movie is honestly kind of a mess of a plot, but I'll sort through it just to ground you.  Dietrich, as is her wont in this era, plays a saloon proprietor who has a heart of gold.  That heart belongs to Roy Glennister (Wayne), her old beau who is back from a trip to Europe with a more proper match, the judge's niece Helen (Lindsay).  However, the judge, like most in the film, is corrupt and Roy finds this out too late when he sides with him and the new gold commissioner Alex McNamara (Scott) rather than his old mining partner.  The partner forgives him, and (after donning blackface) they try to disguise themselves and steal back their money from the judge.  The movie ends with Randolph Scott punched in the face, and Dietrich left in Wayne's arms.

The movie doesn't work, and it's partially because the plot is absurd, and occasionally offensive.  Marietta Canty, who plays Dietrich's maid, is arguably the best-in-show in a stereotypical role, getting most of her one-liners out well, though she has to pretend that Wayne in blackface is an actual African-American man which...no.  Not acceptable.  Weirdly, despite real-life heat between them, there's no chemistry between the cavier-and-corn chips pairing of Dietrich & Wayne onscreen.

The movie's sole Oscar nomination was for Art Direction, and I get it.  The beach landing sequence, in particular, is impressively shot and you almost feel like it's actually in an Alaskan shore, it gives off the aura of being properly cold.  But the real achievement is the costume design.  Dietrich's costumes are INSANE, with her wearing ornate choker necklaces and solid gold dresses in the middle of the 19th Century wilderness of the Alaskan Territory, looking like she'd just gotten done cleaning out Bergdorf Goodman.  Costume hadn't been created as a category yet by the Academy, but if it had, it'd have been easy to look beyond the historical inaccuracies & given this a nomination because Dietrich looks that good.