Authors: Donald Spoto
His account may be accurate, but over the next several years von Sternberg certainly became the kind of egoist who could have changed his own name. An autocratic and secretive man, he was fond of sporting Oriental dressing gowns, riding boots and even a turban, but he was not simply a flamboyant eccentric. An accomplished painter and photographer, von Sternberg was also an inspired designer of visual effects for motion pictures. By 1929, he had directed seven remarkably original and successful features, one of which (
The Last Command
) had helped earn Emil Jannings the first Academy Award ever given for best performance by an actor.
*
Von Sternberg’s idiosyncratic, often iconoclastic pictures—among them
The Salvation Hunters, Underworld, The Docks of New York
and
The Case of Lena Smith
—were characterized by intense rhythms, structural perfectionism and a pitilessly realistic view of human perversity—all combined with a deeply felt and highly personal romanticism. Von Sternberg, the painter, patiently composed each frame so that his films are astonishing in the way they tell stories by the play of light and shadow on the landscape of the
human face. In these black and white movies he fully exploited the techniques and props of the trade—diffused light, scrims, gauze, smoke, trees and shrubbery; von Sternberg expertly evoked psychological effects by the uncommon arrangement of common elements.
He was also, like many directors, more concerned with the craft of filmmaking than with the special treatment of actors; much less could he be bothered with turning them into stars. Considering indifference to actors essential for the right final visual effect, he once said, “I regard actors as marionettes, as pieces of color [on] my canvas.” Some puppets can be manipulated more easily than others, however. Jannings refused to be one of von Sternberg’s puppets (they fought constantly during the making of
The Last Command
), but he acknowledged his director’s genius and insisted that UFA and Paramount engage him for Janning’s first German talkie.
The project finally selected for this was Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel
Professor Unrat
, about a bourgeois teacher who marries a woman of easy virtue, thereby losing his standing in polite society. He then becomes a gambler and crooked politician, exploiting his wife until their mutual downfall. After some preliminary contributions by writers Carl Zuckmayer and Karl Vollmöller (and by Robert Liebmann, who also wrote the English lyrics for songs by Fredrich Holländer), von Sternberg himself was responsible for the final screenplay and the cinematic form it was to take. He omitted Mann’s social-political diatribe and concentrated entirely on one theme: a man’s self-abasement and ultimate degradation by his fatal obsession for a bawdy cabaret singer. This emphasis was at least partly inspired by Jannings, who had cornered the market on his portraits of pathetically humiliated men—in G. W. Pabst’s
The Last Laugh
, for example, as well as in von Sternberg’s
The Last Command
.
T
HAT AUTUMN, WHILE THE SCRIPT WAS POLISHED
, the sets designed at UFA’s Neubabelsberg studios and a cast gradually assembled, von Sternberg had one persistent difficulty: finding the right actress to play the tawdry Lola Lola (a name he derived from Wedekind’s deadly Lulu). Jannings and Pommer advocated Lucie
Mannheim or Trude Hesterberg for the role, but von Sternberg insisted audiences would find the former too attractive and the latter too familiar. Von Sternberg then decided to see two players he had already contracted for his film (Hans Albers and Rosa Valetti), who were appearing in
Zwei Krawatten
. From that evening, as he said, the film director’s search for Lola Lola was over; he would have no one else but Dietrich in the role. Looking at her, he saw an image of natural eroticism and bewitching indifference, a woman entirely (if unwittingly) capable of effecting a man’s complete ruin.
The following afternoon, von Sternberg brought Dietrich to meet Jannings and Pommer. The star and the producer asked her to remove her hat and pace the room, the usual procedure to determine that an actor at least had hair and no limp. Dietrich casually complied, strolling, as von Sternberg put it, with “bovine listlessness, a study in apathy, her eyes completely veiled.” Jannings and Pommer promptly rejected her for being both too plump and too casual; with equal alacrity, von Sternberg threatened to renounce the project and return to America unless he was accorded the right to give her a screen test. (In his autobiography, Jannings conveniently claimed to have championed Dietrich from the night he took von Sternberg to see
Zwei Krawatten
—a fiction denied by everyone else present at the time.)
Presuming that she was being considered for yet another minor role, Dietrich returned so they could hear her singing voice, but she appeared even more bored and unprepared than before, and was without the sheet music they had requested. She admitted that she had doubts as to how well von Sternberg could handle women onstage. And, in addition to all this, she had worn a characterless dress that hung formlessly from her body, but covered about twenty excess pounds. Von Sternberg, undeterred by her indifference, pinned the dress seductively and poured the right lights on her; by such technical wizardry, Dietrich seemed suddenly alive and casually carnal. She then sang, not beautifully but with a kind of defiant allure, a song about the end of an affair. “She came to life and responded to my instructions,” von Sternberg recalled. “Her remarkable vitality had been channeled.” Dietrich’s critics capitulated—Jannings presciently muttering that her sex appeal might threaten
his dominance in the film—and at once Lucie Mannheim and the other aspirants were dismissed. From that moment, according to Dietrich, “von Sternberg had only one idea in his head: to take me away from the stage and to make a movie actress out of me, to ‘Pygmalionize’ me.” This was true, but theirs was a complex collaboration, which could not be so easily categorized.
Once she learned she was to play the leading role of a tarty
femme fatale
, Dietrich was both exhilarated and nervous, afraid she would look and sound inadequate alongside seasoned professionals like Jannings, Albers and Valetti. But she and her director worked brilliantly together, and he quickly allayed her anxiety—while she, eager to please, offered herself to him as Galatea, pupil and lover. “Even while rehearsals were in progress, they seemed to live for each other only,” according to Willi Frischauer, who was present during the making of what was soon called
Der blaue Engel
(
The Blue Angel
), after the cabaret where Lola Lola sings. Indeed the director and star did live for each other; everyone on the film knew von Sternberg and Dietrich met privately in his hotel suite, sometimes in the morning, often after the day’s work. Rudi knew of this at once, for his wife blithely introduced them, telling Jo she hoped one day the Siebers could meet Mrs. von Sternberg, who was in California. As Marlene hoped, the two men became quite friendly; thenceforth—because the Sieber marriage was now only a legality—there was in fact no rivalry between them. “At first,” according to Stefan Lorant, “Rudi was naturally let down: I think he always hoped for some kind of romantic reconciliation between them. But when it became clear she was on her own he settled for a good friendship. After all, he had Tamara, and probably some other partners, too.”
F
ILMING OF
T
HE
B
LUE
A
NGEL
LASTED FROM
N
OVEM
ber 4, 1929, to January 30, 1930, a span necessitated by the filming and recording of each scene in German and English (because post-dubbing was not yet possible). From the first scenes, the picture stresses the teacher’s harsh and humorless moralism with his students, boys who trade postcards of the naughty Lola Lola in top hat, short skirt, bare thighs and a provocative gash of black garters. Professor
Rath sets out to scold the theatricals and the shameless woman for her bad influence, but after only one visit to her dressing room his long-repressed libido is hopelessly demolished by her sensuality. Amused and touched by the attentions of a scholar, Lola Lola spends the night with him. He subsequently proposes marriage, she accepts, and he abandons his profession to become a member of her tacky, peripatetic little repertory company.
Eventually, Rath is so degraded by his passion for Lola Lola that he becomes a clown in cheap vaudeville routines; she, true to her bawdy nature, blithely turns to other lovers for excitement. At the conclusion, the professor returns to the town where he taught and they met, only to find that he’s become a laughingstock. Mad with jealousy and rage, he nearly strangles Lola Lola after seeing her once again in the arms of another man. Finally he wanders distractedly back to his old classroom, where he dies clutching the desk that once represented dignity. Lola Lola, however, calmly survives, and at the end we see her provocatively straddling a chair at the Blue Angel, defying her cabaret audience to risk the fate of Professor Rath.
B
OTH
D
IETRICH
’
S FEARS AND AMBITIONS PARALLELED
her desire to please von Sternberg, whom she idolized. “Her behavior,” he recalled,
was a marvel to behold. Her attention was riveted on me . . . She behaved as if she were there as my servant, first to notice that I was looking about for a pencil, first to rush for a chair when I wanted to sit down. Not the slightest resistance to my domination of her performance. Rarely did I have to take a scene with her more than once.
As for Dietrich, she admitted forever after, “I didn’t know what I was doing. I just tried to do what he told me.” Her obedience guaranteed him complete control over every facet of her appearance, from which he drew the character of Lola Lola just as he designed the cabaret and the smallest prop. Everything was subject to his command and approval—her voice, walk, gestures and clothes.
Still embarrassed by what she considered her broad Slavic nose (despite surgery), Dietrich approached von Sternberg. “He pulled out a small vial of silver paint and drew a line right down the middle of my nose. Then he climbed up onto a catwalk and adjusted a tiny spotlight to shine directly on the silver line from above my head. It was like a miracle: he had reduced the width of my nose by nearly a third.” By such simple techniques can an actress’s lifelong gratitude be secured. Over the next six years, his authority and her docility would assure Dietrich’s complete education in the craft of film.
On the other hand, her acquiescence and subservience on the set of
The Blue Angel
(and her lifelong admission that she owed her entire career to him) was in clear contrast to her loud offstage complaints about the horrific torture to which she was daily subjected on the set. She complained to all who would listen that von Sternberg controlled her every gesture, every word—in German as well as in English—and predicted that the film would be an utter failure. She also broadcast Jannings’s almost pathological jealousy (which in fact led him to perform the attempted strangulation of Lola Lola somewhat too realistically).
But what really caused the actress such profound anxiety was an unforeseen conflict derived from her awareness that von Sternberg was making not so much a film about Lola Lola as about Marlene Dietrich herself. “I did not endow her with a personality that was not her own,” he always insisted. “I gave her nothing that she did not already have. What I did was to dramatize her attributes and make them visible for all to see.” And what he portrayed represents his sly, almost clinical amusement over Dietrich’s backstage life—not only as he knew it from his own affair with her, but also from her dedication to free love, something widely known because she made no secret of it. “The truth of the matter,” according to her good friend Stefan Lorant, “was that she was quite a free agent, although in this regard she was not exceptional. Berlin in the 1920s was a very free and open society, and theater people more than any others were committed to an unpuritanical pursuit of such love affairs as seemed mutually agreeable.”
In
The Blue Angel
, Dietrich/Lola Lola is like a force of nature, as the film’s most famous song says—“from head to toe primed, geared
for love . . . and that is my world.” She is indeed a saucy little strudel, but her impact is not so much calculated as inevitable, like the doom of certain men at her mercy. She simply
is
, without premeditation and certainly without malice, although not without tragic effects on the unwary.
In the melding of von Sternberg’s Lola Lola with Dietrich, her life fused with his romantic-realist fantasies, creating a coalition of motifs that came to dominate each of the succeeding Dietrich-von Sternberg films. Thus the director’s frequent statement—“I am Miss Dietrich, Miss Dietrich is me”—has great significance. His personal supervision of every detail in his films made von Sternberg’s work remarkably confessional and accounts for his reluctance to discuss any aspect of his pictures except matters technical. This dominion over a product (justifying the designation of what the French critics call a movie
auteur
) depended on a kind of creative freedom and control rarely found in the business of filmmaking then or later. This unusual prerogative, independent of pressure from studio executives, was exerted only by von Sternberg and a few other great filmmakers—perhaps most notably Alfred Hitchcock, whose work is everywhere as emotionally and spiritually self-revealing as von Sternberg’s. Hitchcock, too, resolutely refused to discuss anything except technical matters, lest he make explicit the self-disclosure he had already presented onscreen. This unusual degree of control was permitted by studio executives only because their films, completed on time and within budget, were financially successful.
T
HE OVERARCHING MOOD OF
T
HE
B
LUE
A
NGEL
IS
one of careless cruelty in a Berlin of dangerously loosened instincts. The film opens as a woman throws a bucketful of water against a window, behind which stands a defiantly risqué poster advertising the appearance of Lola Lola in cabaret. Moments later, Professor Rath discovers his canary dead in its cage: “No more singing,” his housekeeper sighs, calmly tossing the bird in the stove. This seemingly negligible opening actually announces the major linking device of the picture, for Lola Lola is soon singing to the staid professor—thus
becoming his little birdie, as he becomes her strutting, crowing and ultimately dead mate.