 Starring: Marlene Deitrich, Emil Jannings, Kurt Gerron
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Year Of Release: 1930
Plot: Immanuel Rath is a middle-aged professor at a university who’s used to being the brunt of jokes. When he discovers some of his students frequent a club that has slightly saucy entertainment, he decides to check it out. There he discovers the beautiful burlesque performer Lola. Absolutely smitten, he gradually gets closer and closer to the siren, but as a result his life goes into a downward spiral. |
It’s interesting that The Blue Angel comes directly after
Blazing Saddles in the Movie-A-Day series, as Madeleine Kahn’s character in the Mel Brook’s film is modelled on early Marlene Deitrich movies, with her ‘I’m Tired’ song based on Blue Angels’ ‘Falling In Love Again’, which just goes to show the influence this 1930 German movie has had (it was made in both German and English-language versions to ensure it got the widest audience possible).
The Blue Angel is an interesting movie for a number of reasons. For a start it was Marlene Deitrich’s first starring role and immediately shot her to the top of the business, with her classic Hollywood turns in Morocco and Shanghai Express coming shortly afterwards (in fact her screen test for The Blue Angel still exists, which is pretty astonishing considering how old the movie is). All three of those films were directed by Josef von Sternberg, who also used Blue Angel to make it to the top in Hollywood, bringing his German expressionist style with him and influencing many other directors with his clever imagery and symbolism.
The Blue Angel was also part of a bit of a brief golden age for sexy foreign films in the US. While the emergence of sound had initially seemed like it might sound the death knell for non-US films at the worldwide box office, a rather fortuitous circumstance meant that for several years foreign films did rather well. For a start, at the time it wasn’t uncommon for filmmaking countries around the world to make an English-language version of a movie as well as another native-language version (just as Hollywood often made non-English versions of their big films back then), but the real bonus was the moral panic that was sweeping Hollywood.
In 1915, the Supreme Court in the US decided film was not an artform and therefore not covered by the first amendment’s guarantee on free speech. As a result many groups started campaigning against what they saw as the indecency of movies, especially those that dealt with things like prostitution, adultery and anything to do with sex. There was also little to stop children seeing these morally ambiguous movies, which made some people even more upset.
Because of this, for a few years Hollywood decided to engage in an odd hypocrisy. They knew sex sells, but were worried the government was going to step in and lay down strict rules on what was and wasn’t allowed in US films, so as a result they made an awful lot of movies that said one thing but did another. The basic idea was that you could still have the titillation of scantily clad women who seduced men and generally got up to morally dubious antics, as long as it was eventually shown to be a bad thing.
This ended up with films where seductive women might have an affair and show off their legs and cleavage a lot (I know, shocking isn’t it?), but by the end they had to be shown to be destroyed by their sexually forward antics. Quite often they’d end up forced into prostitution (which was again done to titillate), before realising at the very end they’d have been better as a quiet little housewife, or else living on the street as a vagrant or even dead. The other popular thing was men becoming undone by loose women. As soon as these normally respectable gents got close to one of these sexual spider-women, their fate was sealed and by the end of the movie they’d be destroyed.
It really was a have your cake and eat it situation, where Hollywood could say they weren’t morally corrupt because the movies always ended with the people being ruined by their sexy escapades, while most of the rest of the movie was very obviously just an excuse to get women to run around in frilly pants and act in a sexually alluring manner.
This worked for a while and managed to keep the moral police at bay, but following scandals like the Fatty Arbuckle murder trial in the 20s, the voices of disquiet started getting louder again. As a result it got more and more difficult for Hollywood to deal with sexy subjects, and while they still did it, it was often met with howls of dismay by organisations like the Catholic Legion of Decency. Although the infamous Production Code wasn’t properly enforced until 1934, the industry brought in Will Hays to start cleaning up the industry in 1922, and he gradually began cracking down on anything that might be considered scandalous in Hollywood movies. By 1927 he had a list of banned subjects – which covered virtually everything sexual and more besides – as well as topics filmmakers had to be very careful about, and as a result it got a lot more difficult to be risqué in American film.
However, Will Hays’ attempts to clean thing up it only applied to mainstream American movies and not what came from overseas. While foreign films still couldn’t be too naughty, it was easier for them to get away with risqué subjects, and so for a while there was a very brisk business in sexy foreign films. The Blue Angel very much fits into this, with Marlene Deitrich playing a burlesque singer, whose life is a whirl of men who she seduces but doesn’t care about. She is a sexy temptress, who goes on stage wearing outfits that are designed to accentuate her figure and show of the fact you can see her frilly underwear.
In Hollywood it would have been increasingly difficult to get away with this, but you could do it if the film came from Germany.
The Blue Angel still fits into the old pattern, where much of the film is about ogling Deitrich’s sexy singer, who is a complete sexual harpy as Lola, while the burlesque angle makes the entire thing seem incredibly voyeuristic (as does the fact that parts of the movie are filmed almost like you’re spying on Lola). However the plot is about a man falling under Lola’s spell and being destroyed by getting taken in by such as sexually precocious creature, so again it trades on the hypocrisy that was so loved back then.
The Blue Angel is one of the best examples of this sort of film. It’s been lauded for bringing a new level of eroticism to the screen, but as you couldn’t be explicit, it was all done with a sultry atmosphere and Deitrich’s almost nonchalant attitude to her own sexuality. There’s no nudity or full-on sex, but an erotic feels lies heavily over the entire film, to the point where the professor coming a cropper at the hands of Lola almost feels like an afterthought to get past the censors.
The odd thing is that many of these films are a lot sexier that what we have today, purely because the directors really had to think hard about how to create an erotic atmosphere, rather than relying on the shorthand of sex scenes, nudity and the blunter end of eroticism.
It doesn’t hurt either that the film features Marlene Deitrich, who really is one the greatest stars the silver screen has ever seen, and has a wonderful way of drawing the viewer in by playing characters who are very aware of their own allure, while acting like they just don’t care. She may have put in more sophisticated performances after Blue Angel, but it was perhaps here in her breakthrough role that she was at her most sultry.
However it was films like The Blue Angel that eventually led to the full Hays Office crackdown in 1934, where the Production Code started to be strictly enforced, and which saw everything but the subtlest eroticism disappearing from mainstream cinema screens until the 1960s – no adulterers, prostitutes, or sexually forward women were allowed (except if you read between the lines), and you certainly couldn’t get away with the outfits Deitrich wore in Blue Angel, or the character’s scarlet woman ways. Film still tried to be sexy, but they couldn’t do it in the blatant way they’d done before.
The reason for the crackdown was that despite the studios knowing the moral atmosphere they were up against, with the influx of sexy foreign films in the late 20s and early 30s, they kept trying to cash-in on erotically charged movies, rather than letting foreign studios rake in all the cash. After movies like the Barbara Stanwyck starrer Baby Face and Mae West’s I’m No Angels, the outcry was getting so loud that Hollywood realised they’d have to be far stricter from now on, and so the Production Code became virtual law in US cinema. At the same time it became increasingly difficult for foreign studios to get their sexy films into American theatres, as so while there was a niche business in risqué European movies throughout the production code era; movies like The Blue Angel virtually disappeared.
TIM ISAAC
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