Marlene Dietrich 1901-92
‘I am not a myth,’ she said - one of her least convincing statements. Born in Berlin, the daughter of a military family, she broke on to the international scene with the coming of sound as the nightclub performer Lola Lola, humiliating and destroying schoolteacher Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel (1930), a role on which she was to play variations for the rest of her life. The film was directed in Berlin by Joseph von Sternberg, the Hollywood aristocrat born into a working-class Jewish family in Vienna. Both self-creations, their conspiratorial Svengali-Trilby relationship continued back in the US with six exotic, erotic melodramas at Paramount, in which exquisite decor accompanied the subversion of social decorum. Most of the films were produced before the Hollywood code was strictly enforced. Blonde Venus (1932), for instance, begins with Marlene and five other fräuleins bathing in the nude observed by six American hikers.
Her first line in that picture, first in German then in English, was: ‘Won’t you go away?’ She subsequently delivered a succession of unforgettable lines both on stage and off, including: ‘It took more than one man to make me Shanghai Lily’ (Shanghai Express) and ‘He was a great detective, but a lousy cop’ (Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil). Over 40 years she launched a succession of songs that were to become her cabaret repertoire when public performance took over from the movies: ‘Falling in Love Again’ (The Blue Angel), ‘The Boys in the Backroom’ (Destry Rides Again), ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ (the big post-war hit that brought her back home after having renounced her German citizenship in 1939 to become a major figure in the anti-Nazi crusade).
She was a complicated, contradictory person. She was feminine and androgynous, spontaneous and calculating, heavily made-up yet natural, at ease in period costume but most relaxed off-screen in flared trousers. Her best work was done with fellow European émigrés - Sternberg, then Lubitsch (Desire, Angel), who brought out her flair for comedy, Mamoulian, (Garden of Allah), Wilder (who exploited her corrupt innocence in A Foreign Affair and Witness for the Prosecution) and Fritz Lang, briefly her lover, who eventually directed her in the cult western Rancho Notorious, a definitive role in a picture she loathed.
Hemingway said ‘If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and the timeless loveliness of her face. It makes no difference how she breaks your heart if she is there to mend it.’
Kenneth Tynan said ‘She has the bearing of a man: the characters she plays love power and wear trousers. Marlene’s masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men.’
Marlene said ‘America took me into her bosom when there was no other country worth the name, but in my heart I am a German, German in my soul.’
Essential DVDs Marlene Dietrich Collection (Universal, 18 films); Rancho Notorious (Optimum ), The Blue Angel (Eureka) A Foreign Affair (Universal)
Next week: Joel McCrea