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Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh
For Evelyn Hartogh's review of Dietrich Icon edited by Gerd Gemünden & Mary R. Desjardins, click here


This DVD release incudes both the German and English versions of Josef Von Sternberg’s 1930 classic The Blue Angel, famously filmed virtually simultaneously with minor, although culturally informative, differences. This tale of the femme fatale cabaret star, Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and her corruption and degradation of a respectable professor (Emil Jannings) is often seen to represent feminist independence and a rejection of the authorial power of the male gaze. Dietrich’s position as a feminist and queer icon occurs despite (or perhaps because of) The Blue Angel’s modernist theme of ‘woman’ being representative of the uncontrollable nature that destabilises patriarchal culture. Madman's double DVD set includes incredibly rare and fascinating extras such as Dietrich’s hilarious, and smoky, screen test for Von Sternberg, and some of her later cabaret shows, in which she introduces songs from The Blue Angel with some delightful tongue-in-cheek jokes.

On the whole, the German version with English subtitles is a more enjoyable film to watch. The German version is infamously more raunchy than the censored and watered-down English version, but more importantly, although the picture quality has been restored, the sound quality is poor in many places and makes the English dialogue difficult to hear. However, both are worth viewing due to differences in dialogue and editing.

The differences in dialogue in the first meeting of Lola Lola and the Professor set a different tone in each version of the film. In the English, Dietrich’s first words to Jannings are a demand to speak ‘her’ language, ‘English’, while in the German version, her first words to Jannings are to ask if he is a cop. The English version distinguishes Dietrich as a foreigner to Jannings’s German nationality, while the German places her as a socially transgressive German woman, always in resistance to the authority embodied by the professor’s respectability.

Jannings originally had top billing in this film, as he was, at that time, a famous and successful expressionist actor of silent films. As an early talkie, The Blue Angel (along with her film Morocco released in the U.S. the same year) brought Dietrich international stardom, but did not manage to take Jannings to Hollywood as had been intended. Thus, Dietrich’s demand to speak her language becomes significant on re-readings of the text, as it is heard in the context of what came after: her self-imposed exile from Germany and refusal to support the Third Reich; her Americanisation and talkie fame overshadowing Jannings’s illustrious silent era career; and the development of a transgressive, yet prominent, independent female identity where women could become the autonomous and self defined speaking subject, who looks at herself being looked at, and hears herself being heard.

The more prudish English version depicts the professor as being silent when confronted by a school superior over his subsequent love affair with the irresistible Lola Lola. He is fired instantly and has nothing to say. Meanwhile, in the German version, the school superior actually congratulates the professor on his conquest, but finds it abhorrent when the professor suggests he will marry her. To have one of their professors married to a loose woman of the theatre is unthinkable for the school’s respectability, although casual sex is acceptable. The difference in dialogue means that in the English version it seems that Jannings proposes to Lola Lola because he has been fired, while in the German he is fired because he plans to propose to her.

Predictably, less of Dietrich’s legendary legs are seen in the English version, and lyrics of her songs are slightly more wholesome. However, both versions remain fascinating examples of a powerful woman in charge of her life – and Dietrich’s cabaret performances in this film remain copied today by both women and female impersonators around the world. The current popularity of burlesque, itself a close relation to pre-WWII German cabaret, also contains many echoes of Lola Lola, a role that became such a readily identifiable and significant signature for Dietrich that she kept it alive throughout her career.


The Blue Angel
(1930)

Director: Josef Von Sternberg
Screenwriters: Heinrich Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller, Robert Liebmann
Cinematographer: Günther Rittau
Editor: Walter Klee (English version), Sam Winston
Sound: Fritz Thiery
Cast: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich

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