You See, I Love Her (Him, Them, It)
Jan. 4th, 2011 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustLast night was Josef von Sternberg night on TCM and, as it turned out, insomnia night at my house; I was up 'til four A.M. for no discernible reason, which mainly sucked, though it did allow me to see the tail-end of Shanghai Express, all of Morocco, the climax of The Shanghai Gesture and part of Macao. This last was interesting in terms of sheer contrast, since it had Jane Russell very clearly cast in and utterly failing to fill the Marlene Dietrich role, which I guess every von Sternberg movie just has to have.
(Who is it in The Shanghai Gesture, though? Poppy Charteris is far too young, while the part of Mother "Gin-Sling" [actually "God-Damn" according to the play, which I used to have a copy of] would have been better played by Anna May Wong, who von Sternberg used to good effect in Shanghai Express [though Ona Munson does as well as can be expected, especially with a shellacked dead black octopus glued to her head]. So...maybe Miss Pomeroy, the affable Joisey ex-chorus girl who warns Poppy that "we've all got feelings, but the least we can do is make things comfortable for each other." She comes closest overall to the unrepentant "adventuress" template von Sternberg carved out for Dietrich, a person who's tough but not hard, unflappable, flip, very aware of her physical charm, and lives her life--however limited--with incredible style.)
Okay, so: With Morocco, Dietrich's first U.S. movie, she's coming straight from her triumph as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel; she's young, has just shed her baby fat, and is so ridiculously beautiful she's all but incandescent. This makes her perfect to cast across from Gary Cooper, then at his most handsome and virile--American's single biggest male box-office star, so powerful he was able to change the film's title from Amy Jolly (her character's name), because he rightly thought it would detract from or scale down his own role in the mix. Apparently, he an von Sternberg didn't get along--he resented the fact that they spoke German together, cutting him out--but he and Marlene did, becoming life-long friends and possibly lovers. That friendship would lead her to agree to take her first film not directed by von Sternberg, co-starried with Cooper again in Desire, which also destroyed she and von Sternberg's working relationship, guaranteeing they would never work together again.
In a way, though, Cooper was right to insist that he and Dietrich get "equal billing"--his Tom Brown, French Foreign Legionnaire, is truly the dynamite to Amy Jolly's spark, the missing other half of her soul. Von Sternberg plays a lot with Cooper's lankiness, cheating roofs, doorways and windows to make him tower over everybody around him, Marlene in particular (especially on the few instances when they stand side-by-side, and he idly pans down to show the height of her spiked heels). Cooper's eyes are heavy-lidded like hers, his lips equally lush, his skin oddly juicy and fine, although everything else about him is unmistakably masculine. When their gaze connects, which is often, neither of them can do anything but smile.
One of Dietrich's lures, here as always, is that it's never a question of "if" her characters are going to have sex with the men they glom onto. Her presence is unique in 1930s films, offering glamour without effort and sin without guilt, which is only abetted by von Sternberg's constant fetishization of her through shot composition, make-up, constume and staging. Her first performance in the Morocco vaudeville club where she and Cooper meet is done completely in male drag, at once unconvincing (spotless tux tailored to show off her curves, her blonde hair unconfined by the silk top hat, high heels instead of men's shoes) and arousingly perfect (her understanding of nuance and gesture, the way she brushes male attention off and goes straight for a woman she doesn't even know in the audience, flirting with her, kissing her on the mouth, then throwing a flower she's begged to Cooper [who wears it behind his ear for the next three scenes!]), after which she changes into a cut-up-to-here circus leotard with stockings and a feather boa to hock apples to the customers. When rich patron Adolphe Menjou gives her a thousand-franc note for one, while Cooper has to borrow two weeks' pay to buy his, she slips Cooper her apartment key as his "change".
So they collide like two meteors, this heartless ladies' man who doesn't think mauch of ladies and the woman who'll give it away, but only to the guys she wants to, and only because she's bored with making people pay for it. Neither thinks the affair will last--in fact, they both spend an amazing amount of time and effort trying to talk themselves out of considering it more than just a fling. When Cooper's bird-dogging with his CO's wife gets him sent out to die in battle, Dietrich allows Menjou to make her his kept woman, mainly to convince herself she doesn't care one way or the other. That works fine until the regiment drums start up in the distance, and she gets a crazy look in her eye, rushing headlong out of Menjou's get-to-know-my-mistress dinner party and going up and down the line until somebody tells her what's happened.
An hour or so later, she strides back in. "Tom's been wounded. I have to go to him."
Menjou: "Very well, we can send a telegram, go in the morning--"
Dietrich: "I'm going now."
She disappears upstairs. Menjou turns back to his guests, telling his chauffeur to bring around the car and his valet to pack a bag. With a gallant little shrug, he says: "You see...I love her. I'll do anything to make her happy."
He can't, though, and he knows it. Just like he knows before she does that in the end, she'll take off her spike heels and go marching off into the desert with the rest of the camp followers, leaving him behind forever.
Ah, it's a great damn movie! Everybody's insane and beautiful and screwed to the nines. They really do not make 'em like that anymore.;))
(Who is it in The Shanghai Gesture, though? Poppy Charteris is far too young, while the part of Mother "Gin-Sling" [actually "God-Damn" according to the play, which I used to have a copy of] would have been better played by Anna May Wong, who von Sternberg used to good effect in Shanghai Express [though Ona Munson does as well as can be expected, especially with a shellacked dead black octopus glued to her head]. So...maybe Miss Pomeroy, the affable Joisey ex-chorus girl who warns Poppy that "we've all got feelings, but the least we can do is make things comfortable for each other." She comes closest overall to the unrepentant "adventuress" template von Sternberg carved out for Dietrich, a person who's tough but not hard, unflappable, flip, very aware of her physical charm, and lives her life--however limited--with incredible style.)
Okay, so: With Morocco, Dietrich's first U.S. movie, she's coming straight from her triumph as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel; she's young, has just shed her baby fat, and is so ridiculously beautiful she's all but incandescent. This makes her perfect to cast across from Gary Cooper, then at his most handsome and virile--American's single biggest male box-office star, so powerful he was able to change the film's title from Amy Jolly (her character's name), because he rightly thought it would detract from or scale down his own role in the mix. Apparently, he an von Sternberg didn't get along--he resented the fact that they spoke German together, cutting him out--but he and Marlene did, becoming life-long friends and possibly lovers. That friendship would lead her to agree to take her first film not directed by von Sternberg, co-starried with Cooper again in Desire, which also destroyed she and von Sternberg's working relationship, guaranteeing they would never work together again.
In a way, though, Cooper was right to insist that he and Dietrich get "equal billing"--his Tom Brown, French Foreign Legionnaire, is truly the dynamite to Amy Jolly's spark, the missing other half of her soul. Von Sternberg plays a lot with Cooper's lankiness, cheating roofs, doorways and windows to make him tower over everybody around him, Marlene in particular (especially on the few instances when they stand side-by-side, and he idly pans down to show the height of her spiked heels). Cooper's eyes are heavy-lidded like hers, his lips equally lush, his skin oddly juicy and fine, although everything else about him is unmistakably masculine. When their gaze connects, which is often, neither of them can do anything but smile.
One of Dietrich's lures, here as always, is that it's never a question of "if" her characters are going to have sex with the men they glom onto. Her presence is unique in 1930s films, offering glamour without effort and sin without guilt, which is only abetted by von Sternberg's constant fetishization of her through shot composition, make-up, constume and staging. Her first performance in the Morocco vaudeville club where she and Cooper meet is done completely in male drag, at once unconvincing (spotless tux tailored to show off her curves, her blonde hair unconfined by the silk top hat, high heels instead of men's shoes) and arousingly perfect (her understanding of nuance and gesture, the way she brushes male attention off and goes straight for a woman she doesn't even know in the audience, flirting with her, kissing her on the mouth, then throwing a flower she's begged to Cooper [who wears it behind his ear for the next three scenes!]), after which she changes into a cut-up-to-here circus leotard with stockings and a feather boa to hock apples to the customers. When rich patron Adolphe Menjou gives her a thousand-franc note for one, while Cooper has to borrow two weeks' pay to buy his, she slips Cooper her apartment key as his "change".
So they collide like two meteors, this heartless ladies' man who doesn't think mauch of ladies and the woman who'll give it away, but only to the guys she wants to, and only because she's bored with making people pay for it. Neither thinks the affair will last--in fact, they both spend an amazing amount of time and effort trying to talk themselves out of considering it more than just a fling. When Cooper's bird-dogging with his CO's wife gets him sent out to die in battle, Dietrich allows Menjou to make her his kept woman, mainly to convince herself she doesn't care one way or the other. That works fine until the regiment drums start up in the distance, and she gets a crazy look in her eye, rushing headlong out of Menjou's get-to-know-my-mistress dinner party and going up and down the line until somebody tells her what's happened.
An hour or so later, she strides back in. "Tom's been wounded. I have to go to him."
Menjou: "Very well, we can send a telegram, go in the morning--"
Dietrich: "I'm going now."
She disappears upstairs. Menjou turns back to his guests, telling his chauffeur to bring around the car and his valet to pack a bag. With a gallant little shrug, he says: "You see...I love her. I'll do anything to make her happy."
He can't, though, and he knows it. Just like he knows before she does that in the end, she'll take off her spike heels and go marching off into the desert with the rest of the camp followers, leaving him behind forever.
Ah, it's a great damn movie! Everybody's insane and beautiful and screwed to the nines. They really do not make 'em like that anymore.;))
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 11:30 pm (UTC)http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/stories/s657300.htm
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Date: 2011-01-04 11:20 pm (UTC)That is the only piece of the film I've seen; it screened as part of a TCM feature on Gary Cooper. Yeah.
Ah, it's a great damn movie! Everybody's insane and beautiful and screwed to the nines.
I shall track down the DVD.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 02:44 am (UTC)