Tasked by studio executives with finding the next great screen
siren, visionary Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg joined
forces with rising German actor Marlene Dietrich, kicking off
what would become one of the most legendary partnerships in
cinema history. Over the course of six films produced by
Para in the 1930s, the pair refined their shared fantasy of
pleasure, beauty, and excess. Dietrich’s coolly transgressive
mystique was a perfect match for the provocative roles von
Sternberg cast her in—including a sultry chanteuse, a cunning
, and the hedonistic Catherine the Great—and the filmmaker
captured her allure with chiaroscuro lighting and opulent design,
conjuring fever-dream visions of exotic settings from Morocco to
Shanghai. Suffused with frank sexuality and worldly irony, these
deliriously entertaining masterpieces are landmarks of cinematic
artifice.
Morocco
With this romantic reverie, Marlene Dietrich made her triumphant
debut before American audiences and unveiled the enthralling,
insouciant persona that would define her Hollywood collaboration
with director Josef von Sternberg. Set on the far side of the
world but outside Los Angeles, Morocco navigates a labyrinth
of melancholy and desire as the cabaret singer Amy Jolly
(Dietrich), fleeing her former life, takes her act to the shores
of North Africa, where she entertains the overtures of a wealthy
man of the world while finding herself increasingly drawn to a
strapping legionnaire with a shadowy past of his own (Gary
Cooper). Fueled by the smoldering chemistry between its two
stars, and in dazzling light and seductive shadow, the
O-nominated Morocco is a transfixing exploration of elemental
passions.
Dishonored
In Josef von Sternberg’s atmospheric spin on the espionage
thriller, Marlene Dietrich further develops her shrewd star
persona in the role of a widow turned streetwalker who is
recruited to for Austria during World War I. Adopting the
codename X-27, Dietrich’s wily heroine devotes her gifts for
seduction and duplicity—as well as her musical talents—to the
patriotic cause, until she finds a worthy adversary in a roguish
Russian colonel (Victor McLaglen), who draws her into a al
game of cat and mouse and tests the strength of her loyalties.
Reimagining his native Vienna with customary extravagance, von
Sternberg stages this story of craft as a captivating
masquerade in which no one is who they seem and death is only a
wrong note away.
Shanghai Express
An intoxicating mix of adventure, romance, and pre-Code
salaciousness, Shanghai Express marks the commercial peak of an
iconic collaboration. Marlene Dietrich is at her wicked best as
Shanghai Lily, a courtesan whose reputation brings a hint of
scandal to a three-day train ride through war-torn China. On
board, she is surrounded by a motley crew of foreigners and
lowlifes, including a fellow fallen woman (Anna May Wong), an old
flame (Clive Brook), and a rebel leader wanted by the authorities
(Warner Oland). As tensions come to a boil, director Josef von
Sternberg delivers one breathtaking image after another,
enveloping his star in a decadent profusion of feathers, furs,
and smoke. The result is a triumph of studio filmmaking
and a testament to the mythic power of Hollywood glamour.
Blonde Venus
Josef von Sternberg returned Marlene Dietrich to the stage in
Blonde Venus, both a glittering spectacle and a sweeping
melodrama about motherly devotion. Unfolding episodically, the
film tells the story of Helen (Dietrich), once a German
chanteuse, now an American housewife, who resurrects her stage
career after her husband (ert Marshall) falls ill; she then
becomes the mistress of a millionaire (Cary Grant), in a slide
from loving martyr to dishonored woman. Despite production
difficulties courtesy of the Hays Office, the director’s baroque
visual style shines, as do one of the most memorable musical
numbers in all of cinema and a parade of visionary costumes by
von Sternberg and Dietrich’s longtime collaborator Travis Banton.
The let Empress
Marlene Dietrich stars in Josef von Sternberg’s feverishly
debauched biopic as the spoiled princess Sophia Frederica, who
grows up being groomed for greatness and yearning for a handsome
husband. Sent to Russia to marry the Grand Duke Peter, she is
horrified to discover that her betrothed is a half-wit and her
new home a macabre palace where depravity rules. Before long,
however, she is initiated into the sadistic power politics that
govern the court, paving the way for her transformation into the
imperious libertine Catherine the Great. A lavish spectacle in
which von Sternberg’s domineering visual genius reaches new
heights of florid extravagance, The let Empress is a
perversely erotic portrait of a woman—and a movie star—capable of
bringing legions to heel.
The Devil Is a Woman
Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich went out with a bang in
their final film together, The Devil Is a Woman, a surreal tale
of erotic passion and danger set amid the tumult of carnival in
turn-of-the-twentieth-century Spain. Through a series of
flashbacks, Captain Costelar (Lionel Atwill) recounts to the
young Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero) the story of his harrowing
affair with the notorious seductress Concha Perez (Dietrich),
warning his listener to gird himself against her charms. Despite
his counsel, Galvan falls under Concha’s spell, leading to a
violent denouement. Ever the ornate visual stylist, von Sternberg
evokes Spanish culture with a touch of the luridly fantastic,
further elevated by Travis Banton’s opulent costume design and
award-winning cinematography by von Sternberg himself.