If you’re a fan of actress, camp icon, and anti-fascist Marlene Dietrich or want to learn more about her, you’re in luck. The Metrograph theater in New York City is hosting “Marlene,” a retrospective featuring 19 of Dietrich’s films. The festivities kicked off May 23 and will continue until July 8.
Marie Magdalene “Marlene” Dietrich was born in Berlin in 1901. Dietrich began her career as a vaudeville performer in Weimar Germany. She moved to Hollywood and eventually became a revered film actress, “bisexual sex symbol, willful camp icon, [and] paragon of feminine glamour” — “comfortable in top hat and tails, ballgown, or gorilla suit.” But the actress did not forget about what was happening back home in Germany; Dietrich became involved in the fight against fascism during WWII. She “used her likeness to fundraise for Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany and performed on USO tours, earning her the Metal of Freedom and Légion d’honneur by the French government,” the press release details. Dietrich died in 1992 at the age of 90.
The “Marlene” retrospective will feature Dietrich’s seven films with director Josef von Sternberg: “The Blue Angel,” “Morocco,” “Blonde Venus,” “Dishonored,” “Shanghai Express,” “The Devil Is A Woman,” and “The Scarlet Empress.” The actress’ collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock (“Stage Fright”), Orson Welles (“Touch of Evil”), and Billy Wilder (“A Foreign Affair”) are among the other films screening at the Metrograph. A documentary about Dietrich, Maximilian Schell’s “Marlene,” will also screen. All of the films, besides “Marlene,” will be shown in 35mm.
Head over to The Metrograph’s site for showtimes and more information. The featured films and their synopses are below, courtesy of the Metrograph.
ANGEL
1937 / 91min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: ERNST LUBITSCH
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, HERBERT MARSHALL, MELVYN DOUGLAS
While English statesman Herbert Marshall worries over international affairs, his glamorous wife (Dietrich) concerns herself with, well, international affairs, beginning a tryst with a dashing stranger (Melvyn Douglas) who she only allows to know her as “Angel.” Dietrich’s last film on her Paramount contract is a spry, surprising love triangle, one of the least-known of Lubitsch’s essential works from his Midas touch period.
BLONDE VENUS
1932 / 93min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: JOSEF VON STERNBERG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, HERBERT MARSHALL, CARY GRANT
A.k.a “The One with the Gorilla Suit,” which Dietrich dons to perform her big number “Hot Voodoo.” It’s all for a good cause: she’s an ex-nightclub chanteuse who’s gone back to work to pay for husband Herbert Marshall’s radium poisoning treatments, though she later allows herself to become the plaything of Cary Grant’s dashing young millionaire, earning only contempt for her sacrifice.
DER BLAUE ENGEL
1930 / 106min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: JOSEF VON STERNBERG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, EMIL JANNINGS, KURT GERRON, ROSA VALETTI
Mild-mannered, uptight schoolteacher Emil Jannings lives a faultlessly law-abiding, by-the-book existence, but it’s all over when he gets a glimpse of Dietrich’s nightclub chanteuse Lola-Lola, and is immediately ready to ruin himself for her amusement. The first collaboration between Dietrich and von Sternberg made her an international star, and linked her forever to her seductive, world-weary delivery of the song “Falling in Love Again.” We’re showing the German-language version, preceded by a four-minute-long Dietrich screen test.
DESIRE
1936 / 95min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: FRANK BORZAGE
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, GARY COOPER, JOHN HALLIDAY, WILLIAM FRAWLEY
Dietrich and Gary Cooper reunite in this delightful urbane comedy by Borzage, a master of romantic delirium, here working somewhat after the style of producer Ernst Lubitsch. La Dietrich’s stylish jewel thief stashes a clutch of pearls in the pocket of an upstanding American businessman, and while trying to get back the goods she can’t help but notice the big lug isn’t half bad-looking. An excuse to recall the following lines from the 1936 Times review: “Lubitsch, the Gay Emancipator, has freed Dietrich from von Sternberg’s artistic bondage.” Those were the days.
DESTRY RIDES AGAIN
1939 / 94min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: GEORGE MARSHALL
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, JAMES STEWART, MISCHA AUER, CHARLES WINNINGER
Jimmy Stewart, still in his rangy, impossibly-good-looking phase, is a marshal who sets out to clean up the wide-open town of Bottleneck without firing a shot in this charming Western musical comedy. The local roughnecks present him one kind of challenge; Dietrich’s saloon singer Frenchy, belting out her rowdy standard “The Boys in the Back Room,” quite another.
THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN
1935 / 80min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: JOSEF VON STERNBERG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, LIONEL ATWILL, EDWARD EVERETT HORTON
Dietrich and von Sternberg’s final collaboration, and an apotheosis of sorts. In Spain in the early years of the 20th century, Lionel Atwill’s loyal suitor Pasqualito and the revolutionary Cesar Romero are teased into a frenzy by legendary coquette Concha (Guess who?). The coolly scrolling camera and baroque compositions are courtesy of an uncredited Lucien Ballard and Von Sternberg himself, doing double duty as cinematographer.
DISHONORED
1931 / 91min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: JOSEF VON STERNBERG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, VICTOR MCLAGLEN
Dietrich plays X-27, a Mata Hari-esque spy for the Austrian Secret Service tasked with using a bevy of costume changes (Russian peasant, feathered helmet, leather jumpsuit) to gather information on the Russians during World War I. Outrageous plotting, high chiaroscuro style, and the star’s earthy sensuality mark this unforgettable pre-code treasure, beloved by Godard and Fassbinder both. Says Victor McLaglen: “the more you cheat and the more you lie, the more exciting you become.”
A FOREIGN AFFAIR
1948 / 116min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: BILLY WILDER
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, JEAN ARTHUR, JOHN LUND, MILLARD MITCHELL
Against the backdrop of a ruined postwar Berlin, another conflict is just heating up, as Dietrich’s cabaret singer with rumored Nazi ties vies with Jean Arthur’s Iowa congresswoman-on-a-fact-finding-mission for the affection of American officer John Lund. Wilder’s penultimate collaboration with co-writer Charles Brackett is a black comic delight full of crackling, piquant dialogue, and Dietrich’s knowing slow-burn has never been better.
JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG
1961 / 186min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: STANLEY KRAMER
CAST: SPENCER TRACY, BURT LANCASTER, RICHARD WIDMARK, MARLENE DIETRICH, MAXIMILIAN SCHELL, JUDY GARLAND, MONTGOMERY CLIFT, WILLIAM SHATNER
Dietrich’s last truly substantial screen appearance came as part of the ensemble for Kramer’s courtroom drama, playing the widow of a German general executed by the Allies who’s befriended by investigating judge Spencer Tracy in this fictionalized retelling of the events of a 1947 military tribunal addressing war crimes by civilians under the Third Reich. Rounding out the all-star cast are Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, William Shatner, and Maximilian Schell, who would win the Academy Award for Best Actor, and later directed a portrait of Dietrich.
THE LADY IS WILLING
1942 / 92min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: MITCHELL LEISEN
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, FRED MACMURRAY, ALINE MACMAHON, STANLEY RIDGES
Leisen, considered a comic talent on-par with Lubitsch during the screwball era, lends characteristic sparkle to this mid-career attempt at reconfiguring Dietrich’s very 1930s star persona to fit the needs of the 1940s women’s picture; here she plays a glamor-gal diva whose life changes when she discovers a baby on Eighth Avenue and decides to adopt, passing through melodramatic coincidences and a vale of tears before falling into the arms of Fred MacMurray.
LOLA
1981 / 113min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER
CAST: BARBARA SUKOWA, ARMIN MUELLER-STAHL, MARIO ADORF, MATTHIAS FUCHS
Dietrich had for all purposes retired from the screen by the time that Fassbinder began his frontal assault on West German popular culture, but her image and her unlikely combination of cool irony and torrid emotion left a profound mark on his films. Lola, the candy-colored, late-1950s-set capstone of his “BRD Trilogy” in particular draws heavily from The Blue Angel, with bordello singer Barbara Sukowa torn between Mario Adorf’s sugar daddy and Armin Mueller-Stahl’s incoming building commissioner in boomtown Coburg.
MARLENE
1984 / 94min / Digital
DIRECTOR: MAXIMILIAN SCHELL
More than twenty years after Schell had co-starred with Dietrich in Judgment at Nuremberg, during which period she’d retired to a life of very private seclusion, he tried to get her to participate in a documentary about her life. She finally gave in — sort of. Dietrich offered only her memories and her famous voice, refusing to appear on camera, but necessity became a boon to the resulting film, a sort of guided tour of Dietrich’s life and work, which simultaneously reveals much and deepens her mystery.
MOROCCO
1930 / 92min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: JOSEF VON STERNBERG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, GARY COOPER, ADOLPHE MENJOU
After The Blue Angel, shot in Germany, was a hit, von Sternberg was given full run of the Paramount backlot, where he would conjure up all manner of exotic destinations out of thin air. First stop: North Africa, where French legionnaire Gary Cooper competes with sugar daddy Adolphe Menjou for the favors of Dietrich’s cabaret star Amy Jolly, who in one scene famously rocks a men’s tailcoat and plants a smooch on a female fan.
RANCHO NOTORIOUS
1952 / 89min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: FRITZ LANG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, ARTHUR KENNEDY, MEL FERRER, WILLIAM FRAWLEY
Teutons Lang and Dietrich team up in a Technicolor wild west of deliberate, garish artifice in this singularly claustrophobic oater, in which a revenge-mad Burt Kennedy goes looking for his fiancée’s killers at a hideaway inn run by Dietrich, and discovers dangerous, unbidden desires instead. As the chant of the film’s recurring, persecutorial Brechtian ballad goes: “Hate, murder, and revenge.”
THE SCARLET EMPRESS
1934 / 104min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: JOSEF VON STERNBERG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, JOHN LODGE, SAM JAFFE, LOUISE DRESSER
Have ever a screen persona and a historical personage found such a hand-in-glove-fit as did Dietrich and Empress Catherine the Great of Russia? While the Motion Picture Production Code was preparing to chasten American movies, Dietrich and von Sternberg got together to throw one last lavish S & M orgy, a flamboyant film of 18th century palace intrigues and ludicrously lapidary décor.
SHANGHAI EXPRESS
1932 / 82min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: JOSEF VON STERNBERG
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, CLIVE BROOK, ANNA MAY WONG
“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” proclaims Marlene Dietrich with the disdain of an empress, though in fact she’s a high-class courtesan, re-encountering former lover Clive Brook on an express train rolling through civil war-wracked China. The fourth of Dietrich and von Sternberg’s collaborations is a riot of delirious chinoiserie artifice and sculpted shadowplay — Dietrich’s co-star Anna May Wong was never again shot so caressingly.
THE SONG OF SONGS
1933 / 90min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: ROUBEN MAMOULIAN
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, BRIAN AHERNE, LIONEL ATWILL
So often the instrument of corruption, Mamoulian’s film allows Dietrich to be the corrupted one, playing a country girl, Lily, who comes to big-city Berlin and quickly becomes the model and muse of sculptor Brian Aherne. Lionel Atwill’s preening decadent Baron von Merzbach admires Lily’s nude form in marble, and decides to bring the original home with him, where she slips into the role of the cynical sophisticate, though her heart remains with the artist.
STAGE FRIGHT
1950 / 110min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: ALFRED HITCHCOCK
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, JANE WYMAN, MICHAEL WILDING, RICHARD TODD, ALASTAIR SIM
Hitchcock’s last film in his native England until 1972’s Frenzy is an audaciously-structured thriller, making use of an extended flashback and a whiplash narrative about-face. Acting student Jane Wyman tries to save beau Robert Todd from taking the fall for a murder committed by stage star Dietrich, who shows her hypnotic charm in a show-stopper performance of “I’m the Laziest Gal in Town.”
TOUCH OF EVIL
1958 / 95min / 35mm
DIRECTOR: ORSON WELLES
CAST: MARLENE DIETRICH, CHARLTON HESTON, JANET LEIGH, ORSON WELLES
It’s not the size of the part, but what you do with it. Playing a brothel keeper in a seedy border town in Welles’s magnificently baroque late noir, Dietrich only has a clutch of lines, but they’re the ones you remember, whether her famous requiem for crooked cop Hank Quinlan, or her reading of his “fortune”: “Your future’s all used up.” Bold and self-evidently brilliant, you could use Touch of Evil to explain the concept of great cinema to a visiting Martian.
