If Josef Von Sternberg hadn’t happened to see Marlene Dietrich in a minor role from a now-forgotten musical revue while in Berlin during 1929, it seems unlikely that his most acclaimed filmic creation, The Blue Angel would have come to define the femme fatale in modern cinema. However famously Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, or Sharon Stone would develop the sexual persona of the femme fatale, Dietrich’s performance remains the standard by which all the others are judged.
At the time he discovered Dietrich, Von Sternberg had been directing films for more than ten years. Born in Vienna, Austria (then also known as the Austro-Hungarian or Hapsburg Empire) in 1894, he was brought to Queens, New York at age seven, but later returned to Austria to finish his schooling. Back in New York at age seventeen, he found as a job as a film cutter for a company in Fort Lee, New Jersey. In 1917, he joined the Army Signal Corps and made a number of training films during the First World War. After the war, he became something of a nomad, traveling throughout Europe and the United States working as an assistant to various directors. He finally settled in Los Angeles by 1924 which already was the center of the world’s largest, most prosperous film industry.
Although Von Sternberg signed with the newly minted MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) studios, but his contract was abruptly terminated after his first two assigned pictures. The factory-like production atmosphere and the focus on films as a profit making enterprise was anathema to Von Sternberg who viewed films as works of art – with the director as the leading creative force behind them. He would find more success a few years later at Paramount studios where he was assigned to direct Underworld (1927) the first important “gangster film” which launched a new, exciting – and controversial genre.
By 1929, Sternberg achieved considerable success at Paramount due to the critical acclaim and winning box office numbers of Underworld. Thus, he was allowed a good deal of creative control over his own films (although this was also due in part to concessions with Paramount wherein Sternberg recognized the importance of creating profitable productions). However, producer Erich Pommer arranged for Von Sternberg to direct Emil Jennings, then the most famous German actor in a new film. It was Jannings himself who had seen in the 1905 German novel Professor Unrat, a role which he thought would showcase his talents. In the novel, a bourgeois high-school teacher looses his teaching position because he marries a young woman of loose morals.
Determined to get revenge on a petty and moralizing society, Professor Unrat becomes a gambler and corrupt politician. He then entangles his wife Rosa in scandals that eventually destroy them both. By the time Von Sternberg had refashioned the original film script by Karl Vollmoller to his liking, very little remained of the original novel. The Blue Angel named after the nightclub in which Rosa (now Lola Lola) entertains, would be the first all-talking German film in the German language. Jannings would play the role of the professor, whose named was changed to “Rath.” The character’s original name, “Unrat” had been a pun on the word for excrement in German, which was problematic for a major motion picture in that time period.
The supporting players had been selected, but the filming was delayed because Von Sternberg had not yet found the Lola Lola he envisioned. No actress tested had yet embodied the natural eroticism and mindless charm of a woman capable of unwittingly destroying such a rigidly moralistic professor. In a Berlin musical review called Two Neckties, Von Sternberg was fascinated by the cold disdain and apathy with which a chorus girl seemed to be viewing the antics going on around her. In the little-known Marlene Dietrich, he had finally found his Lola Lola. Over the objections of Jannings and Pommer, he immediately signed her on.
Film historians still speculate on whether or not Von Sternberg had the idea that Dietrich who was paid only $5,000 for her role would upstage Jannings showcase and who earned $200,000. Many film buffs and historians believe he was grooming her for international stardom – which was in fact, exactly what happened. The script as reworked by Von Sternberg had considerably altered the original book in order to serve as the vehicle for Jannings performance. The story now emphasized Professor Rath’s harsh, humorless preaching to his male students, whom he had found ogling and trading naughty postcards of Lola Lola in provocative poses and skimpy outfits. The professor sets out to scold Lola Lola for her shameless, bad influence on his boys. However, one visit to her dressing room changes all that.
Professor Rath arrives expecting the tart he had seen on the postcards. However, Von Sternberg’s use of lighting has created a luminous, almost childlike Lola whose charms melt away the professor’s scorn and long-repressed sexuality. He ends up spending the night with her. The next morning she serves him breakfast and pats his head in a motherly way. The two start carrying on an affair, and the professor ends up by proposing marriage. In a subsequent scene, the professor, now wildly in love with Lola, is forced by his principal to choose between her and his career. He abandons teaching and his social status and in order to please her becomes a member of the troupe. In time, he becomes so degraded by his worst instincts that he ends up becoming a clown in the company’s sleazy vaudeville routines.
When the troupe returns to his native village, the townspeople pack into “The Blue Angel” to witness his final humiliation. Von Sternberg contrives a cruelly sad scene in which the professor, dressed as a rooster-clown, is made to crow at Lola as demented and love-sick. The townspeople eagerly participate in his humiliation, yelling out catcalls and pelting him with vegetables. The poor professor, reduced to near idiocy, finally flees the stage only to find Lola in the arms of another man. After attempting to strangle her, he wanders back through the cold, snowy streets to his former classroom. He dies clutching his desk, the symbol of his former dignity.
Meanwhile, the show goes on. After a fade-out serving to heighten the scene which follows, we see Lola Lola back on stage in her sexiest pose so far. Indifferently straddling a cafe chair, she sings “They Call Me Naughty Lola” and defies others to risk the fate of Professor Rath. She is femme fatale triumphant. The Blue Angel is the most memorable example of German Neo-Realism, depicting the seedy subculture of Depression-era Germany. Von Sternberg was certainly the director who best scrutinized the decadence of the Weimar Republic. However, Von Sternberg’s most enduring legacy in the film is the creation of Dietrich as the first modern femme fatale in world cinema.
