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| From Top: Dishonored, Song of Songs |
Whilst ordering off the TCM site I grabbed the pre-code set of Song of Songs (1933) and This is the Night (1932, reviewed here). And fine as these films are they are not sophisticated in the way Von Sternberg. The Night's a fine example of pre-code Paramount fluffery, with Cary Grant in a minor role as a studly javelin thrower, but Song of Songs, Paramount's first attempt to ween Dietrich away from JVS, is much too naive, with Dietrich an old-fashioned country virgin enamored by the Song of Songs which she recites under her breath like a mantra.
I have compared thee, o my love
to a steed in Pharaoh's chariots
Thy cheeks are comely with circlets, thy neck with beads
We will make thee circlets of gold with studs of silver.
In charge of making this doll-faced hick immortal is a smug sculptor (Brian Aherne) who falls in love with her as she poses for him while we in the audience never learn if she's getting paid for all this nude shivering, certainly not enough for putting up with his Pygmalion-like impudence. He berates her like a child and looks down at her conniving alcoholic aunt Alison Skipworth pimps her out for sacks of Jamaican rum to Aherne's lecherous sponsor Atwill. You'd think Dietrich's first starring role was Heidi instead of the Blue Angel.
Songs could have been a true pre-coder if it wasn't so firmly rooted in the bucolic / provincial morality play silent film era, with Vaseline trees and suffocating outdoor skies, and virgins in white puffy dresses cavorting daintily amid the willows. A predictable mix of Trilby, Pygmalion, Camille-style moral conventions, the film even goes so far as to make Lionel Atwill look like Erich Von Stroheim circa Foolish Wives (1922).
But surprise, Dietrich does some of her best singing, with a genuinely touching and tranquil version of "Roslyn" (?) and a jaded cabaret number later with "Johnny." She also has a really good emotional crying scene wherein you can feel all her skeeved out trauma from working with Von Sternberg come pouring out at last.
While Mamoulian's conception of the pre-code snares of sin and older men's debauchery seems much more compassionate than Von Sternberg's it's also more superficial and exploitative. For JVS compassion is the last refuge of cowards and snivelers, but at the same time he's not exploitative, as in showing lots of leg and nudity. Mamoulian may evince real compassion, as in the heartrending pleas of Hopkins' prostitute for protection from Hyde in his quintessential 1933 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dietrich's meltdown in Song, but he's still winking and leering and making a huge deal of Marlene disrobing in an unheated garret. On the plus side of this obsessive sexual wariness is the way the romance of Chevalier and MacDonald in Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight fades to the dreamy remembrances of the morning, like a very strong dose of MDMA; or the gender-bent stay at the inn in Queen Christina, which despite Garbo being a girl, still seemed like the very first gay romance on the big screen.
I can imagine if Von Sternberg directed Queen Christina (1933, above) that Garbo would stay in drag while making out with Gilbert, right in front of the innkeeper, just for shock value, her eyes taking in his discomfort with a wry smile. For JVS if there is love it's always a renouncement, a sacrifice, done more for the dramatic spectacle than the actual object of affection. Dietrich never even shacks up once with Gary Cooper in Morocco, they keep getting interrupted; she barely knows him, yet she kicks off her shoes and follows him into the Sahara anyway, and then chooses a similar fate in Dishonored.
As Dietrich famously said "in Europe sex is a fact. In America, an obsession." For real Germans like Von Sternberg and Dietrich sex is just an extension of taking off a glove or blowing a noisemaker. Along with the 'fact' is the realization that desire exists primarily as an absence, a dream that can't come true by its own definition. In his films, the sacrifices made in the name of love are less 'for' love itself than for the heady trip of self-sacrifice. For Mamoulian sex isn't so ephemeral and abstract, and as a result it's a trauma. Just compare the gang-imploding whim of lust that gets everyone killed in City Streets or Song's big scenes of renouncement and horror vs. the cool of Sternberg lines like "it took more than one man... to change my name to Shanghai... Lily."
Sternberg's sex-death equation is most clearly showing in his lounging courtesans. For Mamoulian, a Russian, these fallen women are to be pitied and rescued, victims of a corrupt system; for JVS they are half mythic creatures, faeries dissolving slowly from normal girls into shimmering ephemera through excessive absinthe use. (Note their supernaturally louche serenity below.) Which is the most 'compassionate'? I would argue Von Sternberg's, since he gives the ladies credit and allows them to hide in their persona of mystery and allure, while Mamoulian would drag them out to the street and admonish them, like Annie dragging the 'trying to pass' Sarah Jane out of the club in Imitation of Life.
Worlds away from Mamoulian's sexophobic compassion, Von Sternberg cheerfully ignores the bucolic in Dishonored, preferring to focus all his style and shadow on the decadent gambling dens and brothels as opposed to any trite and tedious 'moral center.' JVS hates moral centers! His contempt for Herbert Marshall in Blonde Venus makes that otherwise fleet footed film limp lopsided - but when examined next to the shallow morality critique of the Way Down East type silent era morality play it becomes more understandable. One might even say that without films like Song of Songs the Blonde Venuses seem rather cold and negative. With the bucolic small- town morality plays to look good against, the JVS cynicism sparkles.
But it's when there is no moral center at all, even being critiqued, that's when JVS really shines, and Dishonored is one of his best in that regard, with one of the best endings in all cinema. It's on Godard's ten favorite American film list... and that's of all time! And a big part of that is probably the end, a harsh but poetic bit that plays like Kubrick's Paths of Glory trench diggers accidentally tunneled into a high class Austrian brothel.
A loose re-telling of the popular Mata Hari tale (see also 1968's Fraulein Doctor) In Dishonored we have Dietrich as a weary Austrian war widow working at a tony brothel, whose unflappable cool and loyalty leads her to be recruited as special agent X-27. First she uncovers the treachery of military bigwig Warner Oland and later gets information that sends 'thousands of Russians to their deaths.'
The role of female James Bond fits Marlene well, to a point; it's an ideal part and she is so cool and calm that she seems to belong to a whole different species of human, just her and her Russian op counterpart Victor McLagen who are advanced serpentine predators in a world of prey. They are keen observers and always five moves ahead of the pack, yet Dietrich is dumb enough to keep her spying orders (uncoded) in her coat pocket where anyone can find them. McLagen finds them, reads them, replaces them, and promptly heads off to try and catch her in the act on the front line hotel where she's headed. He could easily have killed her on the spot instead, so it's clear that, while not exactly collaborating, Mclagen and Dietrich make it pretty for the other to escape should either fall into the other's clutches.
And that's partly the problem for Dishonored detractors, of which I used to be one: we were appalled that this sensitive seductress would deliberately sabotage her own sworn duty by letting someone as leerful as Mclagen's Russkie spy escape and not even deign to answer their charges of collaboration during the military tribunal. The best she can do is say "I've lead an inglorious life, it might be my good fortune to have a glorious death," she should have added "death scene," for she is acting even within her roles within roles, and through acting she devours the firing squad with the ambivalent curiosity of a cat with a box of regimented mice. Her Dishonored death becomes the equivalent of the walk into the sand at the end of Morocco. She sees a chance to die gloriously for love, and she takes it, regardless of the worthiness of the loved himself. Her true love, it seems, was always death, which is why she was such a very good spy. In using the system's rigid laws to arrange an ideal ending for yourself --one that your own survival instincts and the rigid expectations of society usually deny you --you've really made the grade and filled the Albert Hall with holes. Even in the walk to the firing squad area, her only thoughts are making sure her hair looks good and her lipstick is on straight.
This makes sense, as the very first scene of the film is a woman being taken out of Dietrich's brothel on a stretcher, a victim of self-inflicted gas poisoning. It's a probable suicide amongst the prostitutes, an all too tragic and common occurrence for that lonesome profession. Dietrich watches the morgue wagon parked in the pouring rain in front of the building, from across the street; seeing it perhaps even then as a kind of nihilist limousine to the prom. But her ethical code doesn't permit suicide, so she must wait, apparently until her death can be proper and glorious, with a weeping audience of young soldiers to perform it for.
The big thing censors and Mamoulian never understand is that movies need not reflect real life, and that's why they so very much rock. Dietrich in the JVS movies knows she has only 90 minutes in which to exist, she may as well go out on a butterfly high than preserve herself in some uncertain happy ever-after of old age make-up and bucolic leaf-eating caterpillar drudgery. Song of Songs-brand Marlene cries and grows up and ends the film smashing her likeness, the statue Aherne made of her, undoing all those shivering hours of nude posing. In short he wastes her time on camera becoming an adult instead of living as a wild child, but we never get to see that adult, so why bother? It's like the actresses who step away from their career in its height to have a flock of children and expect our applause and adoration anyway. Bitch, please! That child took you from us! That child robbed us of our sprite, our elvin anima and turned her into... mom, the very figure your youth helped us escape from. In Dishonored Dietrich is savvy enough to sidestep all that --she just plays waltzes on an imported piano right up until the moment she's called to the her demise. And at least her Mamoulian-made sister has her Song of Songs:
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the
cliff,
let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice;
for sweet is
thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
'Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vineyards;
for our vineyards are in blossom.'
My beloved is mine, and I am his,
that feedeth among the lilies
Until the day breathe, and the shadows flee away,
turn, my beloved,
and
be thou like a gazelle or a young hart
upon the mountains of spices.(more)
Comely countenances have nothing to do with it, dearie, clefts are just clefts, and the image just an image, and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. When one makes the clefts and doves and applesuace into moral lessons they are as the blight that spoils the vineyards. Let the foxes take what grapes they may, no matter how crows-only high on the vine. Give the fox a box on which to jump that she may the grapes devour. Let the image breathe like a nitrate fire, free from moral weight, free to bask in deep shadow, and the vineyards free to bleed wine of massive proof. In the senseless spilling, the cup remains full, the nitrate deep and lasting in its transient grace, not burning at all, except in its image on the wall. Take your maidens and your Vaseline lens and exeunt; I'll stay here in the dark and foxy box the shadow of your scornful wince.
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