The Chicago Tribune - September 28, 2001

By Michael Wilmington, Tribune Movie Critic

Josef von Sternberg's 1930 "The Blue Angel," now re-released and at the Music Box Theatre, in its original German-language version, is one of the great erotic classics in the history of the cinema. Like its famous heroine Lola Lola, the film is both gorgeous and sinister, seductive and dangerous. It gives off the heat of sex and obsession. A masterpiece of visual storytelling, drenched in a late Weimar-era atmosphere of hapless days and wild nights, it's also the picture that made an international icon of the sullenly beautiful 29-year-old German actress Marlene Dietrich. With her low throaty voice, flirty eyes and succulent body -- and a bemused smile that hinted at every kind of lascivious knowledge -- Dietrich made Lola the personification of sex, a cabaret singer whose skimpy costumes and lewd routines inspire universal lust. Watching Dietrich, you can accept her as a down-and-dirty stage trollop in a third-rate traveling show, but also as a wayward goddess who could drive a "respectable" man mad.

In "Blue Angel," her victim was the actor regarded as the greatest film player of his day: Emil Jannings, the portly, rubber-faced star of F.W. Murnau's "The Last Laugh" and "Faust." Jannings had returned to Germany from Hollywood in 1929, after winning the first Best Actor Oscar for "The Way of All Flesh" and "The Last Command," and he brought over Sternberg, his "Last Command" director, for his talkie debut. Having hand-picked a 1905 novel by Heinrich Mann (Thomas' brother), he plays the tyrannical Professor Immanuel Rath -- or "Unrath" ("Garbage"), as his students call him -- with Sternberg's find Dietrich as lusty Lola Lola, the dancer whose legs, smile and fatal sexiness turn Rath (literally) into a clown.

The story has a simple, dark trajectory. Rath, an authoritarian English teacher at the local college, pursues his pupils into Lola's den of smoky sin, the Blue Angel cabaret, and stays to become her husband: her fat doll and tormented plaything. A rigid Teutonic authoritarian obsessed with rules and order, he lets his desire for Lola -- who treats love and sex as enjoyable but immoral games -- consume him. He loses his job, his reputation, his very life. The film's bitter emotional climax comes in the famous scene where Rath dabs on clown makeup before a stage mirror to take his minor, humiliating part in Lola's show.

Set mostly in Rath's sterile classroom and messy private quarters or in the fetid, cavernous confines of the Blue Angel, the film keeps see-sawing between false bourgeois appearances and secret vice. But the intense performances and over-rich backgrounds suggest something larger: the growing moral chaos under Weimar Germany's tight-lipped surface. Frederick Hollander's risque, slightly melancholy song score includes "Falling in Love Again," which became Dietrich's signature tune. And Sternberg's thick, glowing black-and-white visuals -- full of veils, nets and shadows -- give the movie such pungency you can almost smell the reek of the cabaret, feel Rath's desire and humiliation as he sinks into mad disgrace and ruin. How can he -- or any of us -- resist Marlene Dietrich?

Copyright (c) 2001, The Chicago Tribune