THE BLUE ANGEL Movie Review
Der Blaue Engel
Near the end of The Blue Angel, disgraced professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is reduced to the lowest point of his life: dressed as a clown and forced to crow like a rooster on the stage of a seedy Berlin nightclub—the Blue Angel—as an audience of former students hoots and taunts him. Rath, the strict disciplinarian who was feared by his students, had first come to the Blue Angel to see if his young charges were patronizing this sinful place, wasting time that should have been devoted to study. But when he got a load of singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) in her lewd costume, her stockinged legs wrapped intoxicatingly around her chair as she sang “Falling in love again … never wanted to …,” Rath helplessly turned control of all discipline in his life over to her. Far more graphically explicit—even hardcore—movies about erotic enslavement will come and go, but there will never be as fully realized a depiction on screen of utter sexual humiliation as the moment of Rath's crowing (during which Lola toys with her lover in the wings). The character had still more depths to plumb (as did the actor who played him), but screen history had already been made; The Blue Angel, the first collaboration between Josef von Sternberg and Dietrich and the director's only collaboration with Jannings, was—and still is—an electrifying melodrama that only gains in power over the years. Von Sternberg (who had been in Hollywood for 15 years already) filmed the project in Germany at the desperate request of Jannings, whose great career in German silent film had crashed with the onset of sound. Incredibly, Marlene Dietrich wasn't von Sternberg's first choice for Lola. (He wanted Brigitte Helm, the blonde who played Maria and her evil robot twin in Fritz Lang's 1925 Metropolis; but the author of the book on which it was based said nein.) This was to be Emil Jannings's last great performance. Following it, he elected to stay in Germany and work for the Nazis, suffering an ignominious death in 1950 not unlike Rath's in the film. After the shoot, von Sternberg hightailed it back to the U.S. with Dietrich in tow, where they later collaborated on stylish melodramas like Morocco and Shanghai Express. The Blue Angel was shot in both German and English versions, but Rath's maniacal obsession with order, discipline, and ritual—finally subjugated by his passion—makes full emotional sense only when heard in the original German.
NEXT STOP … Pandora's Box, The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Last Seduction
1930 90m/B GE Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings, Kurt Gerron, Rosa Valetti, Hans Albers; D: Josef von Sternberg; W: Karl Vollmoller, Robert Liebmann, Carl Zuckmayer; C: Gunther Rittau; M: Friedrich Hollander. VHS, 8mm NOS, FCT, BAR