MARLENE DIETRICH: A Star Is Born
Welcome.
This month, THE TOWER is concentrating on one particular subject. It is Hollywood stardom, and one star in particular.
“ Star” is a different term from “celebrity”. The celebrity is a product of media abundance, where the state of being well known is quite commonplace. By contrast, the star is a thing of the past. He or she is one in an age of media scarcity, where cinema was physical act, one went to a theatre, sat on a seat, and breathed in a special atmosphere. Above all, a star made the audience feel different. Clark Gable was one of these. So was Marilyn Monroe. Perhaps the last is Tom Cruise.
Anyway, welcome to…
Marlene Dietrich at Paramount and Universal
No one “makes” a star. In his autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (1965), the director Josef von Sternberg claimed he was the sole creator of Marlene Dietrich. “I taught her everything she knows,” he bragged. “I gave her the look, the manner, the voice, the soul. She had no soul before I met her.”
This is an overstatement, to say the least. Although he was instrumental in the creation of the Dietrich persona, von Sternberg was hardly Galatea to Marlene’s Pygmalion. Indeed, there are many contributory and complex factors in the creation of any Garbo, Dietrich, or Monroe. Most important in the era we are talking about was the Hollywood studio system, in this case Paramount Studios, which, in the 1930s, pioneered what has come to be called “vertical integration”.
This meant that the studio not only made films, but was responsible for the distribution to cinemas, some of which were owned by a parent company. With Paramount, the umbrella organisation was called Paramount Publix.
As Thomas Schatz shows in The Genius Of The System: Hollywood Filmmaking In the Studio Era (1988), each company – be it 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Universal, or Warner Brothers – made films specifically for the audience that the theatre owners wanted to target. In particular, Paramount was a glamour studio. So was MGM, though visually it tended to be heavy-handed. By contrast, its rival was light, mysterious, and otherworldly. It was the studio style, as much as von Sternberg’s contribution, that helped to make Marlene the star she was.
After von Sternberg had discovered Dietrich in a Berlin cabaret, he cast her in his film, The Blue Angel (1930). The success of that film led to both crossing the Atlantic and becoming part of the Paramount Studios machine.
Once in Hollywood, they made five very successful films: Morocco (1930), Dishonoured (1931), Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus (both released in 1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil Is a Woman (1935).
All these are delirious fantasies, soaked in opulence and possessing an almost pornographic button attention to detail. Whether viewers are beguiled by the back lot depictions of Moroccan souks, the jabbering mania of railway stations in Shanghai, or the grotesque fancy dress in Madrid at the height of the Carnival, they are instantly drawn into a world of high artifice and low morals, at the centre of which is Dietrich, who transforms these plotless nothings into transfixing art. One is tempted to call her special quality “glamour”, or “charisma”, but these words don’t begin to evoke her power, her hyper- femininity, and her transgressive allure. Above all, she is a cinematic gesture, a product of light and shadow, the editing of the images, even the limitations of early sound, which captures her voice in boxy mono, making her heavily accented English more languorous and alluring. Everything in these productions (including Marlene herself) is idealised and moulded by von Sternberg’s obsessed . Yet where would he have been without the resources and personnel at Paramount?).
After the duo had split up, Dietrich spent some time in the wilderness. Her next choice of studio was surprising. She signed with Universal, an operation that was the polar opposite of Paramount. Whereas the latter had oozed Continental sophistication, the former was a much rougher affair, offering its core audience of farmers and the inhabitants of small towns the rough and tumble of Abbott and Costello, the chills of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula.
The first film she made at Universal was a shoot-‘em-up Western, Destry Rides Again (1939). Co-starring James Stewart, it marks Dietrich’s swift transition from the European Other she had embodied during the Paramount era into a full-blown American icon. In the film, she plays Frenchy, who hails from exotic Louisiana. Though Dietrich rather confusingly retains her German accent, she places herself squarely in an American frontier town, where she spends most of her time in the local saloon, knocking back beer with the lads, getting into frenetic brawls and singing up a storm with a number, “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.” With the able assistance of director George Marshall and producer Joe Pasternak, she adopts this new persona with great ease, using Stewart, as she is later to use other male co-stars, as a way of absorbing herself into the American way of thinking, living and dreaming.
Dietrich:
All the von Sternberg/Dietrich Paramount films can be found at the American Internet Archive, but I’ve chosen what I think is the duo’s best collaboration, Shanghai Express (1932). It is here:
https://archive.org/details/shanghai-express
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Until then,
Mind you go…