• The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel)

7/20/23 (Thurs)

Having just seen Japan’s first full-length talkie, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (マダムと女房), which is best unmentioned, I decided to revisit Germany’s first major sound film after many decades. I never knew that Josef von Sternberg filmed his 1930 classic in German and English simultaneously; I had always assumed the English version was dubbed, but in fact the main actors were all English speakers and redid all of the dialogue scenes and songs in both languages. Both versions were being streamed, so I watched half of each. The English is a bit shorter – maybe the actors weren’t up to the material, or the material was deemed unsuitable for the US market. The German version is generally considered superior as the actors are more comfortable in their dialogue (some speak German in both). Still, the differences weren’t overly evident.

Emil Jennings was apparently a global star in his day – he won the first Best Actor Oscar – while Marlene Dietrich was an up-and-coming actress chosen only after others were rejected or unavailable. Jennings was apparently jealous of the close relation between the director and actress, and his suspicions seem to be proven right: in a cruel parallel to the movie, Jennings went into decline right after this film (his later association with the Nazis didn’t help), while Dietrich became an immediate sensation and never looked back, including six more films with the director in Hollywood (their next was the hit Morocco) that shaped her image for the rest of her life.

The film comes off as old-fashioned. Some expressionistic touches in the scenery and lighting were interesting, but the story, compelling in summary, is lumbering in execution. A stern college professor learns that his students are sneaking off at nights to a sleazy nightclub. When he goes to catch them there, he falls under the spell of the chanteuse Lola Lola, who plays him like a toy. This is all done in intended comic touches that are overdone in today’s terms, perhaps a fallout from the silent era. His infatuation eventually costs him his job, but that is offset in his mind when Lola somehow agrees to marry him. As he follows the troupe around with little to do, however, he becomes a burden. He is reduced to selling racy postcards of his wife to the audience and eventually takes over as the show clown.

It is here where the movie finally becomes effective in modern terms. When the troupe makes a return visit to his hometown, he is humiliated in front of his former friends and students, who laugh condescendingly at the former esteemed professor now sporting a rubber nose and Bozo wig and getting an egg cracked on his skull. The professor, who is supposed to cluck like a chicken when the egg appears, is instead totally numb at the realization of his situation, staring blankly out at the jeering crowd. Then, spying his wife making out in the wings with a French roué, he suddenly goes mad. Clucking wildly, he runs off stage in his clown outfit and destroys the dressing room, then attacks Lola and chokes her violently. He is subdued by others and put into a straitjacket. In the end, he manages to escape in the middle of the night and return to his old school, where he is found dead the next day in his old chair, clutching tightly to his desk in a Rosebud moment.

The bottled-up prude in a respectable position falling for a sexy vamp – a fly falling for the spider, in one of the film’s songs – is a well-worn theme in literature and film, and the huge commercial success of this rendering has inspired numerous remakes and even a Duke Ellington musical reset in New Orleans. Unfortunately the humor here is labored, and some of the plot developments were questionable. When Lola laughs in the professor’s face at his marriage proposal, I thought we were going to get a Scarlet Street-type twist. Once she quiets down, though, she actually accepts his hand and appears a loving bride in subsequent scenes, which seems wholly inconsistent with her personality to that point. Surely that could have been set up better. In contrast, the professor’s breakdown in clown face on his hometown stage was heartbreaking, a scene that alone made the film worth watching. Still, I was generally left wondering what might have been.

The acting was pretty rudimentary, basically silent-era performances with dialogue added. That includes Jennings, whose star faded quickly in the sound years. His performance after his mental collapse was tremendous and extremely effective in the context of the film’s style, the equivalent of an expressionist painting. At least he went out in global terms on a high.

The exception to the general rule was Dietrich, whose cool, self-assured persona makes it hard to imagine anyone else in the role. In her case, the use of sound helped immeasurably given her distinctive voice and role as a club singer. Her portrayal was pretty much the same in both languages thanks to her ease with English, which undoubtedly contributed to her subsequent worldwide fame. She pulls off her numbers with utter confidence, not least “Falling in Love Again” (“Men cluster to me / Like moths to a flame / And if their wings burn / I know I’m not to blame”), which became her signature song. I recall that Harold Prince rejected Liza Minnelli for the original stage version of Cabaret on the grounds that a performer in a seedy Weimar nightclub would never be that talented. Dietrich’s appearance in this actual Weimar Era film would seem to contradict that. (One of the big numbers in the film version of Cabaret was directly inspired by Dietrich’s performance here.)

The premise of the film is so strong that I’m surprised no modern pop star has remade it. It would be hard to top the powerhouse ending. Still, for the most part, it’s better seen as an historic record than a work on its own merits.