The Blue Angel (1930)

Film: The Blue Angel (1930)

Stars: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich

Director: Josef von Sternberg

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

Marlene Dietrich is purposefully getting five Saturday's this month both because she's one of my favorite onscreen performers (I've yet to see a bad performance from her, though double check back with me when the month is done) and because her career was very, very long.  We could honestly do a year on Dietrich and not get to everything.  So we're going to start at the very beginning, with a film that launched her career, and the first feature-length sound film to be shot in German.  The movie was directed by Josef von Sternberg, who would become the "Svengali" to Dietrich early in her career (more on him next week), making seven films together, almost all of which are regarded today as classics.  Dietrich was cast in this film from relative obscurity (she had been doing musicals in Berlin and Vienna at the time in increasingly larger roles), and it made enough money for Paramount (the US distributor of the film) for them to sign Dietrich to a long-term star contract, primarily in hopes that she could do for their studio what Greta Garbo was doing for MGM (the two two stars have had so much gossip written about their relationship it's impossible to tell truth-from-fiction...they were either one-time lovers or rivals that claimed they'd never met).  She would come to equal Garbo, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.  Let's discuss this week the one film this month we'll talk about where Dietrich is speaking her native language of German, The Blue Angel.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses primarily not on Dietrich, but on Oscar-winner (and the bigger star at the time) Emil Jannings, playing a stuffy professor named Immanuel Rath, who one night goes to the club the Blue Angel, which allegedly his male students (who mock him mercilessly but also fear him) have been sneaking off to and are obsessed with a headliner there named Lola Lola (Dietrich).  Rath becomes infatuated with Lola, slowly-but-steadily making rasher decisions (including spending the night with her), which his students find out about, and stage a huge rebellion against him, now basically blackmailing him collectively, which causes him to have his job threatened.  Rather than leave Lola, he marries her and quits his job, but they cannot remain happy.  Lola is not interested in monogamy, and he is consumed by jealousy as he sees her lusted at every night by adoring men, including other men in the troupe who try to bed her.  Humiliated, and dependent on a woman who doesn't respect him for money, he takes a job as a clown in the club, eventually being seen by his former students & fellow professors as a fallen man, all the while his wife is cheating right in front of him (literally, she's kissing another man) while he's trying to make money onstage.  He leaves the club, sneaks back to his classroom, and dies.

The story of The Blue Angel, a fallen man who gives up everything for the love of a woman he doesn't understand, has been told countless times in film history, and I suspect even in 1930 wasn't "new."  The first 45 minutes of this movie, to be honest, is kind of a snore, with Jannings' professor a giant killjoy and the movie not really sure whether to make him truly absurd or just bemused (they fail in the balance there).  The back half is much better, and the tragedy works because Jannings plays his gruff teacher not as someone that automatically invites sympathy (he is, in the beginning, too stuffy & self-righteous), but instead as someone who tried to see the world, but couldn't understand it.  From a modern lens, he is very much a fool, and one who tries to tame a woman who has no interest in being tamed (a look we don't really celebrate in men anymore, and for good reason), but it's hard not to pity him in the final moments, not because of his jealousy, but because he has no concept of what love is, and that is his downfall.

Dietrich has a smaller role here than you'd assume, and were this released today, we'd have a serious argument about whether this is "supporting or lead" in terms of category fraud.  She's good though.  Dietrich was not yet on solid ground with her onscreen persona (that'd take a few more years), but you can see the shock & awe of her here.  Sexy, perfect bone structure, and that sultry baritone already prepackaged, she steals pretty much every scene she's in (and Jannings is good in this movie, so that's not an easy task), playing her character not as someone who is intentionally cruel, but who has such a different worldview than Jannings, she can't comprehend how much more serious he is about her than she is about him.  It's a tough part to play, making Lola not be a true villain (which I think the script wants her to be), but Dietrich is capable in her first major role.