The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel)

 

Director Josef von Sternberg

Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich

Sternberg with Emile Jannings

THE BLUE ANGEL (Der Blaue Engel)                    A                                                          Germany  (104 mi)  1930  d: Josef von Sternberg           

German and English language versions filmed simultaneously, released in Germany first, April 1, 1930, then released in America several weeks “after” Morocco in December 1930    

Among the best representatives of Weimar Republic (1918 – 1933) Berlin in the 1920’s, along with G.W. Pabst’s timeless Silent era classic Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora) (1928), with Louise Brooks as the femme fatale Lulu, a mythic heroine that drains men of their life energy, playing the antecedent to Lola Lola, an image weighing heavily over von Sternberg’s decision to cast Marlene Dietrich, both films taking us inside the notoriously vibrant nightlife of underground theaters, cinema, café’s and bars that stretched the new boundaries of sexuality, flaunting the hedonistic decadence of amorality and debauchery of the era.  Made in Berlin in 1929, with noted playwrights Erwin Piscator, Bertolt Brecht, and Max Reinhardt at the center of the city’s theatrical production, while Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein visited Berlin often, meeting frequently with von Sternberg, it’s the first significant German sound film, though it still has the Silent era feel, with long wordless sequences that play out in silence, filmed by 35-year old Austrian émigré von Sternberg, having already made a name for himself in Hollywood, living in the United States since he was fourteen, even serving in the American army during WWI, yet he returned to Germany to make the film, no longer fluent in the German language.  An Ufa/Paramount production, shot concurrently in English and German versions by Günther Rittau and Hans Schneeberger, shooting each on alternate days, the English version has become truncated and dismissed over the years, due to clumsily spoken English, shortened edits, skipping the opening scenes, rearranging the ending, changing the focus from the male to the female protagonist, viewing the film strictly as a Marlene Dietrich commercial venture, while the original German version now stands alone as the definitive version.  Born out of Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I, it was a period of war reparations and an imposed economic devaluation that led to chaos, hyperinflation, economic collapse, and political upheaval, with the government on the verge of collapse, where much of this film echoes the cynicism and hopelessness of the times.  Out of this moral decline, however, came a decadent social atmosphere of the 20’s, a burgeoning sex industry and internationally renowned cabaret performances, featuring a financially independent “new woman” in Weimar German society.  The constitution of the Weimar Republic was not only Germany’s first Democratic constitution, it also offered German women the promise of legal equity for the first time, with the film symbolizing artistic freedom of expression through cabaret theater in Weimar Berlin (ultimately overshadowed and destroyed once the Nazis began to infiltrate Germany), where the film was meant to be a synthesis of Weimar Berlin and Hollywood of the 30’s.  Enter Marlene Dietrich, whose relaxed, world-weary style represented new realms in sexual freedom, whose mix of glamor and outward indifference set her apart, where her role in this film revealed not only her gift for comedy, but displayed remarkable wit alongside an aloof stage personality, filmed during an extraordinary period of artistic freedom and sexual experimentation, with Dietrich making a living for the rest of her career based on the cabaret songs sung in this film, including her signature song, Marlene Dietrich, Ich Bin Von Kopf Bis Fuss 1. - YouTube (3:19), offering a glimpse of what it was like in German beer halls, with a rowdy interplay between an artist and audience, as she touched a nostalgic sentiment from a long forgotten era.  It also draws parallels with Alban Berg’s 1937 modernist opera Lulu, Lulu (opera), an iconic femme fatale of sexual liberation, murder, impassioned love, and tragic misfortune, which also explores the idea of the femme fatale and the duality between her feminine and masculine qualities, something Dietrich was also associated with, as she was a notorious bisexual with a flair for cross-dressing.  Yet this was her first screen appearance, something of a revelation in her role, not even receiving top billing, as those honors went to German star Emile Jannings, a bisexual actor and frequent visitor of Berlin’s top gay clubs, who won the very first Oscar for Best Actor with his performances in von Sternberg’s THE LAST COMMAND (1928) and Victor Fleming’s THE WAY OF ALL FLESH (1927), eventually growing perturbed by all the attention Dietrich received, throwing temper tantrums on the set, as this film was supposed to solidify his position as an international film star.  Returning to Germany with much fanfare to make his first talking picture, where initially any thought of music would be incidental, Jannings was at the center of the story as the overly repressed, middle-aged university professor Immanuel Rath, yet Dietrich steals the thunder right out from under him as cabaret singer Lola Lola, seemingly rubbing it in when she’s captured onscreen wearing a backless costume, amusingly adjusting her panties before taking the stage.  While her career took off, making six more films with von Sternberg, whose messy affair with his ingénue created quite a tabloid scandal, ending in the director’s much publicized divorce to his first wife, Dietrich was brought to Hollywood under contract to Paramount, where they would film and release MOROCCO (1930) before this film would appear in American theaters in 1931, while the film was banned in Nazi Germany in 1933, largely for its Jewish connection, though it remained a Hitler favorite.  The tragic irony was that the film, the darkest and arguably the best of the Dietrich/von Sternberg collaborations, paralleled in real life the rise of Dietrich and the fall of Jannings in their respective careers, as Jannings fell out of grace, becoming a willing tool of Goebbels, starring afterwards in 1930’s Nazi propaganda films, though he was posthumously honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.  By contrast, Dietrich would repeatedly refuse Joseph Goebbel’s monetary offers to make her a star in the cinema of the Third Reich, wanting to transform her into an Aryan goddess, a vision of Teutonic beauty, and instead became an American citizen and an influential anti-Nazi activist, spending much of the war entertaining Allied troops near the front lines while offering support on radio broadcasts.  More attractively plump than she was allowed to be later in her career, she’s seen casually strolling onto the stage with apparent ease, as if having no cares in the world, shifting her weight from hip to hip, with her pointed, mocking stares exuding sexual defiance.  Siegfried Kracauer was a German writer, journalist, sociologist, cultural critic, and film theorist, also the Berlin correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper when this film was released, describing Dietrich’s first screen appearance, her only role in a major German film in her native language, while also suggesting from his 1947 book, From Caligari to Hitler, that this film predicted the rise of the Nazis by humiliating intellectuals and glorifying the physical through domination, control, and power:      

The film’s international success …can be traced to two major reasons, the first of which was decidedly Marlene Dietrich.  Her Lola Lola was a new incarnation of sex.  This petty bourgeois tart, with her provocative legs and easy manners…showed an impassivity which incited one to grope for the secret behind her callous egoism and cool insolence.  That such a secret existed was also intimated by her veiled voice which, when she sang about her interest in lovemaking and nothing else, vibrated with nostalgic reminiscences and smoldering hopes…The other reason for the film’s success was its outright sadism.  The masses are irresistibly attracted by the spectacle of torture and humiliation, and Sternberg deepened this sadistic tendency by making Lola Lola destroy not only Jannings himself but his entire environment.

Displaying a complexity that knows no bounds, the work is loosely based on the 1905 Heinrich Mann novel Professor Unrat, which targeted the ruling elite and their educational system, a biting critique of German bourgeois society, exposing peculiar vices, while a screenplay written by Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, and Robert Liebmann was categorically denied by Sternberg, insisting upon sole writing credits, claiming his artful direction was the writing.  In their combined portrait of a fallen professor who discards all respectability in pursuit of a sexually liberated chanteuse, the depiction of Berlin’s societal decay foreshadows what looms ahead for Germany, as in the fatal pursuit of freedoms and pleasure, social norms and values are discarded, suggesting the Weimar Republic was a prelude to the Third Reich, leading to the catastrophic rise of the Nazi Party to install order, while the sadistic debasement of Professor Rath anticipated similarly depraved methods used in concentration camps toward the Jews.  Few films reveal a social descent with as much brutal humiliation and sadistic disgrace as this film, where the psychological cruelty is in a league of its own, yet it is self-induced.  Professor Rath is the picture of self-righteous respectability, leading a regimented life, prim and proper in every respect, yet he is a caricature of ridicule by his students, who clearly show signs not only of a rebellious insurrection, but lawlessness and chaos, crudely jeering at him, calling him Unrath, apparently the German word for refuse or garbage, reducing his stature until it leads to a riot in his classroom.  Prior to that, however, his life is ruled by appearance and authority, a tyrannical figure in the classroom, whose old-fashioned aristocratic authority represents the staid German tradition of the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle class, requiring absolute obedience.  Apparently his young students didn’t get the message, as he is tormented by name-calling and cheap jokes, continually mocked for the outdated rigidity they were rebelling against, anticipating their willingness to become fodder for the Hitler youth, much like Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (Das Weiße Band – Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte) (2009), with the professor blaming the underlying source of their insolence on their routine visits to the local cabaret, The Blue Angel, which seems to be corrupting their minds, catching them with circulating photographs of Lola Lola, one wearing panties covered by a feathered skirt attached to the photograph that flies up in the air if you blow on it, revealing what’s underneath, which seems to hold a special risqué fascination.  As if proving the point, a washer woman is seen splashing a bucket of water over a poster of Lola Lola outside the club, emphasizing the erotic nature of her allure, like sins that need to be washed away.  The film shifts focus out of the classroom to a decorous cabaret setting, with faraway foghorns heard from the nearby harbor as Rath moves through narrow, cobblestoned streets, shot with Expressionistic ambience, soon finding himself in the Amusierkabarett, a sleazier form of entertainment taking advantage of the death of censorship, where working class people visit to guzzle down beer, sing along to naughty German songs, and get a chance to stare at Lola Lola’s racy costumes, along with other scantily clad women onstage wearing feathers and ostrich boas, singing songs and drinking beer to the leering catcalls of men with lascivious thoughts, with Lola Lola at the center of their captivated attention, Marlene Dietrich, 'Ich bin die fesche Lola' YouTube (56 seconds), or in English, Marlene Dietrich, 'Falling in Love Again' YouTube (4:20), singing the songs of Friedrich Holländer, one of the most prolific and popular songwriters in the Weimar Republic.  All musical sequences shot live, the songs were set in a lower register, exploiting the singer’s limited range, often singing in a half-spoken and half-sung manner, yet now they are among the film’s most memorable features, though they were almost an afterthought, as Holländer was initially hired simply as an accompanist for the women auditioning for the role of Lola Lola, who included, among others, Leni Riefenstahl before she embarked upon a filmmaking career.  Dietrich’s screen test, bantering in German with Holländer offscreen, may be seen here, Marlene Dietrich - Probeaufnahme zum Film "Der Blaue Engel" YouTube (3:39).  Sternberg was always known for his striking visual compositions, dense décor, exquisite lighting, luscious close-ups, and relentless camera motion (though in this film it barely moves), evoking scenes with rare emotional intensity, creating a claustrophobic effect where every inch of camera space is filled, with a suffocating eroticism onstage completely overfilled with props, where Lola Lola herself seems part of the décor in her black satin costume and white top hat, with her garter belts in full view while sitting on a beer barrel, raising her knee while frequently exposing her thighs, with the walls of the club lined with theatrical posters that only multiply her image, with staged variety acts luring audiences into this underground netherworld of erotic space, which is simultaneously cheap and exotic, tawdry and enticing, a complete contrast to Rath’s regimented existence.  Foreshadowing what’s to come, audiences are alerted before leaving his home residence, as the professor whistles to his pet canary, but there’s no answer, found dead in its cage, an ominous early warning.  When he decides to visit the nightclub in order to teach his students a lesson, he’s caught out of sorts, like a rat caught in a maze, trapped, trying to find his way out, with each escape route offering a different surprise, Marlene Dietrich, 'Kinder, heut' abend, da such' ich mir was aus' YouTube (2:28), until he finally comes face to face with the performer herself, completely flummoxed by Lola Lola, not only by her audacious sexuality, but her bold self-assurance, unflappably cool and sultry, immediately putting him in his place for not removing his hat.  While trying to blame her for the corruption of his students, she brazenly undresses in front of him, catching him offguard, altering his train of thought.  Completely taken aback, she openly flirts with him in her dressing room while doing costume changes and applying her make up, so when a drunken sea captain attempts to forcibly manhandle her, he defends her honor, kicking him out of her quarters, calling him a “miserable pimp” and a “white slave trader!”  When the police are called, they haul away the poor sea captain, still muttering semi-incoherently under his breath, but this also takes Lola Lola by surprise, as no one’s stuck up for her before.  Her mesmerizing stage performance has a hypnotic effect, leaving the poor professor utterly transfixed, Marlene Dietrich, 'Nimm Dich in Acht vor blonden Frau'n' YouTube (50 seconds), suddenly realizing he’s helpless without her. 

The film blurs the lines between a brothel and a cabaret stage, as Lola Lola may be a prostitute as well as a chanteuse, exposing her body as a way of selling her business, an object for sale, as its clear how money is the currency that speaks in this establishment, where the feeling is anything’s possible if the money is right.  Her work in the cabaret, according to her, is art, yet in reality, she is there for men who pay for her.  Accordingly, nothing is known about Lola Lola’s past, where she comes from, not even her real name, with everything shrouded under a veil of deceit, much like the fishing nets that surround the club interior, as if ensnaring the customers in a spider’s lair.  Yet she is based upon an archetypal figure of dangerous female sexuality, seductive yet also castrating, mythical sexual creatures who aimed to destroy men, where Lola Lola, the androgynous Weimar siren becomes the emblem of Nazism, as the nightclub singer seen onstage in garters, corset, and top hat was a proto Nazi emblem recreated in a multitude of films that would have to include Helmut Berger in full drag in Visconti’s THE DAMNED (1969), Liza Minnelli in Bob Fosse’s CABARET (1972), Charlotte Rampling in Liliana Cavani’s THE NIGHT PORTER (1974), Hanna Schygulla and Barbara Sukowa in Fassbinder’s LILI MARLEEN (1981) and LOLA (1981), and more recently Carice Van Houten in Paul Verhoeven’s BLACK BOOK (2006), all films that make connections between the cabaret scene of Weimar Germany and the Nazi Party.  Sound is a prominent feature in this film, experimenting with something new, and it’s used cleverly in a variety of ways, with one being the back and forth dialogue between performer and audience, often yelling things up to the stage, while another is the device of closing the dressing room door, which completely shuts off all sound, distinguished by an expressive use of prolonged silence, allowing conversations to be heard, while opening the door returns the crass sounds of the musical act onstage.  Von Sternberg uses this repeatedly to project a state of mind of various characters, with the music crashing in on their consciousness, altering their train of thought, becoming immersed in the mindset of the cabaret show and its ragtag collective of vaudeville acts, while a German beer-hall crowd shouts out at the women, apparently liking what they see, encouraging what’s viewed as subversive behavior, where art is transporting viewers directly behind the curtain of a complex cabaret show, a collective of different acts and different voices, all meshed together, providing entertainment in a novel and unique manner, with cinema approaching an artform.  The English and German versions of the songs often have starkly different meanings, but this would only be understandable to German audiences, while the director also cleverly places recognizable German choruses at various moments, offering a perceptive commentary on a character’s state of mind, much like the use of a Greek chorus.  Von Sternberg was rightly praised as a visual artist, but few provide similar praise for his innovative use of sound.  Lola Lola’s sexual enticement is presented like the Siren in Greek mythology who lured sailors to their destruction by the sweetness of her song, yet in her own words, “they always come back to me.”  Knowing no shame and having no secrets, she has a mystifying power to captivate men, “Men cluster to me/Like moths around a flame/And if their wings burn/I know I’m not to blame,” exuding utter confidence in her voice and demeanor, utterly tantalizing men, holding them under her power, where her irresistible sexuality is cruelly mingled with unconstrained promiscuity, simply using men whenever she needs them before throwing them away.  Of note, one of the captured men is the muted figure of the clown (Reinhold Bernt), who never utters a word, who wanders in and out of the stage rooms, seemingly at will, more like a ghost than a person, never recognized by anyone, ignored completely, as if he was invisible.  The camera always finds him, staring pathetically at Lola Lola and the men she enchants, later revealed to be one of Lola Lola’s discarded lovers, pathetically reduced to a near formless figure who comes to personify the feeling of hopeless longing and despair.  He represents, in spirit, the helplessness of men who can’t resist her, but can’t have her either, as they are simply paralyzed, like damaged goods cast aside, no longer who they once were.  This silent resignation may also signify the passivity of the German people as the Nazi’s become a totalitarian power from 1933 to 1945.  Professor Rath’s infatuation with Lola Lola ends his teaching career, preferring to marry her and travel on the road, running away with a showgirl, moving from town to town, and while there’s an instantaneous uplift in the musical chirping of her pet canary after their first night together, with Lola Lola apparently taken by his innocence, this also triggers the downward spiral of his life and fortune. Both blind and deaf to the truth she reveals in song, he finds himself imprisoned, like a bird in a cage.  Jumping ahead four years, they are about to return to The Blue Angel in his home town, something he dreads with panicked anxiety, particularly since he’s become a headliner, part of the magician’s act that centers around Rath’s ability to crow like a rooster, inhabiting the role of the clown, humiliated at the thought of the once proud professor, an icon of professional literacy, a thinker and theorist in classical literature, the embodiment of middle class virtues and values, now reduced to a mere laughingstock figure, jeered and howled at by his former students, having fallen in stature to such an extent that he’s barely recognizable anymore, his face smeared with greasepaint, wearing a grotesque wig, dying a slow death even at the thought.  It’s a complete breakdown of a once prominent figure, transformed into masochistic submission, a hollow shell of his former self and the final assault to his dignity.  As they are arriving into town, the strong man, Mazeppa (Hans Albers), is pushed out the door, but as he’s leaving he catches a glimpse of Lola Lola, immediately smitten, love-bit and aroused with interest, where the attraction seems mutual, so as Rath is attempting to go onstage and humiliate himself, his wife, so it seems, is making eyes at her new love interest, seemingly inseparable, taking advantage of Rath’s stage appearance for a brief love rendezvous, only enraging Rath at the thought, unable to concentrate, raging with jealousy, yet at the same time, helpless to stop it, even as he crashes through a locked door in a state of panic and frenzy, violently attacking them both, destroying the dressing room while attempting to strangle his wife, where only a straightjacket will calm him down, helplessly consumed by his abysmal failures.  The full scale of his epic demise is only magnified by the finale as he slinks out of the club, as if in a trance, seeing his wife perform her signature song one last time, coldly offering no hint of remorse, comfortably at home in her milieu as he returns to the university where he once taught, making his way to his empty classroom in the middle of the night, with a night watchman following him there, but he can’t pry his fingers away from the desk, shining a flashlight onto his face with the clock chiming midnight.  Rath is viewed as a solitary figure resting his weary head on the desk, finally asleep, perhaps, or even more sinister, never awakening, as the camera pulls away, retreating to the back of the room, his misery apparently ended, but at what cost?     

Postscript

It’s important to note that The Blue Angel was run by the magician Kiepert (Kurt Gerron) and his wife Guste (Rosa Valetti), with Valetti, one of Germany’s top cabaret performers, producing her own cabaret show Café Grössenwahn in the 1920’s, one of the most important literary and political cabarets in Weimer Berlin, and was one of the original performers in Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera in 1928, escaping the Nazis and successfully going into exile in 1933.  Kurt Gerron was known for his portly frame, large jowls, and top hat, becoming a prominent theater actor for Max Reinhardt in the 1920’s, while also one of the original performers in Three Penny Opera, the first to sing the song Mack the Knife, also escaping the Nazis by moving to the Netherlands in 1933, but that country was eventually occupied by the Wehrmacht, with Gerron and his wife transferred to Theresienstadt where he was forced by the Nazis to direct a propaganda film, The Führer Gives a City to the Jews, that depicted Theresienstadt as a model concentration camp, a community strewn with flowers, with people smiling and generously fed, before they were transferred to Auschwitz and tragically murdered in the gas chambers.  Equally appalling, Károly Huszár, aka Charles Puffy, who plays the innkeeper, was fleeing the Nazis from Hungary, trying to travel to Hollywood, where at least according to von Sternberg’s autobiography, he was captured by the Red Army and interned in a Gulag in Kazakhstan by the Russians where he starved to death.