Monday, March 10, 2014

Movie – The Blue Angel (1930)

After the triumph that was 1928’s The Last Command, which helped garner Emil Jannings the first Best Actor Oscar in history, he and director Josef von Sternberg re-teamed for The Blue Angel.  Joining them this time around was an actress in her first major role who would go on to great fame in the 1930s – Marlene Dietrich.  Because this was the early days of sound the film was shot simultaneously in both German and English.  Because of the heavy accents of most of the performers the English version is considered the lesser of the two.  I watched the German version and that’s what I am reviewing and rating.

Professor Immanuel Rath (Jannings) is a proud man, respected in town as an eminent teacher.  His students don’t care much about his reputation and constantly are misbehaving when he is out of the classroom.  One day the boys have a postcard that they are looking at.  It features a picture of singer Lola Lola (Dietrich) in a revealing outfit.  Professor Rath gets angry at the boys and takes the card away from them.  The boys trip one of the students and a whole bunch of cards like this fall out of his schoolbooks. 

The professor hears the boys talk about how Lola performs at The Blue Angel, a club in town.  They assure the professor they’ve never been there, though.  Rath decides to go confront the people running this club.  When he enters a whole bunch of his students scatter.  They try to hide from him, but all Rath sees is Lola performing on stage.  She captivates him.  Suddenly he does see a student and chases him until he ends up backstage with Lola.  She playfully starts changing costumes in front of Rath, including dropping her undergarments down to him.  This gives him an excuse to go back the next night, ostensibly to return them, but really to see her perform again.

Once again his students are there and have to hide.  They go down to a cellar and through the floorboards can see the professor’s reaction to Lola.  Suddenly the club is raided and the professor also needs a place to hide.  He ends up in the very same cellar with his students.  He can’t very well punish them, though, because he’s caught in the exact same situation.

Up until now the film has been a bit of a slapstick comedy. The students keep running around trying to avoid the professor, all the while leaving taunting drawings on his blackboard.  It’s when they draw once more on the blackboard all the events that happened in the club that things change.  The professor is ruined by this.  The headmaster of the school tells the professor to resign because he has shamed the school.  His reputation destroyed, he turns to the woman he has fallen in love/lust with.  At first she laughs in his face, but then apparently decides that it could be amusing to keep him around for a while.  The rest of the film is seeing the effect that Lola has on the former professor.  It’s very moving at times.

It’s never really explained why Lola does this, other than the same reason a cat toys with a mouse – it’s in her nature.  Dietrich plays Lola with a world-weariness that is much older than her years.  We are left with the impression that she gets amusement from seeing what she can do to Rath.  We are also given hints that she has done it before.

Reportedly, Dietrich only auditioned for the part because von Sternberg wanted her to.  She was bored, figuring she was wasting her time, but that kind of boredom and weariness was what von Sternberg was looking for.  Of course, the fact that the two of them were sleeping together at the time probably didn’t hurt her chances of being picked.  He would go on to cast her in six of her next seven films, too.  Regardless of how she got there, though, she showed she deserved to stay.

The Blue Angel features a fantastic performance from Emil Jannings, topped perhaps only in The Last Command.  And it features Marlene Dietrich in a star-making performance of her own.  She sings, she’s sexy, and she’s oh so dangerous.  There are some good laughs in the earlier part of the picture then the latter part has a very moving story.  It’s not a joyful one, though, once it turns serious.  If you need a happy movie then you may want to skip this one.  For everyone else, I highly recommend it.

Chip’s Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

6 comments:

  1. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen this. My high school German teacher showed us this every year. For two years, we got subtitles. For the second two years, we didn't.

    You're right, though--this one starts as a lot of fun and turns very dark by the end.

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    1. I didn't ever see any foreign films in either my French or German classes at my high school. That would have been interesting. We did see Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar my first two years in English class, though. I had to get my mother to sign a permission slip since it was a Freshman class and the 1968 version of R&J had brief nudity in it. Imagine a teacher trying to show a film with brief nudity to 14 year olds today.

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  2. Highly recommended by me too. Both Jannings and Dietrich are great in this film. Although Rath is a stuffy pain in the ass I cannot help feeling sorry for him. His is the ultimate degradation.

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    1. I completely agree on Rath. He goes through such a downfall that it's impossible not to feel for him.

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  3. Great choice for your theme and one I didn't think of at all. I love this film. I came to it expecting to be blown away by Dietrich but it's Jannings I keep coming back for. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you search for Dietrich's screen test on YouTube. She tries to sing You're the Cream in My Coffee and ends up berating the piano player the whole time. It is easy to see from just the five minutes exactly why she became an international star.

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    1. Thanks, I'll look for that. And if you liked Jannings in this try his film The Last Command. It's a little similar in that it's loosely based on the true story of a Russian general who ended up as a film extra in Hollywood after the Bolshevik revolution.

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