"You'd better go now. I'm... beginning to like you."
Just watched Josef von Sternberg's Morocco and I understand why I've only ever seen the bit at the beginning where Dietrich is in tails and a top hat. The scene is brilliant, and more on that in a bit, but the movie is sluggish, lacks the depth and point of Der Blaue Engel, and Gary Cooper is both the least interesting playboy and the most wooden actor in the history of ever. I don't know if it's a causal relationship, but I don't get it at all.
Marlena Dietrich is lovely and definitely has presence, though I still don't really understand her flatness during musical numbers--I don't mean her pitch, but her affect. It's sort of strange. But the gender politics are cracktastic, at least superficially. Dietrich comes out in top hat and tails, smoking. She sings a song in French, denies the touch of a few men, plucks a flower from a woman's hair and kisses her. She then throws the flower to Gary Cooper, a foreign legionnaire, who puts it behind his ear. It's all very daring and yet heteronormative (it denies heteronormativity only to re-establish it) and her image in this scene is justifiably an icon. (There's also a lovely bit later in her room where he gives her a casual salute upon leaving and she copies it at the closed door.
But the romance, and the love triangle, is entirely dull and I don't really see what she sees in him. I'm actually more interested in what's behind Adolphe Menjou's motives, knowing all along that she doesn't love him. It's a fairly conventional, if sexually charged, love story, but it would have been vastly improved by a leading man with S.A. even remotely approaching Dietrich's.
This entry is also posted at http://my-daroga.dreamwidth.org/269101.html. Feel free to comment wherever you want.
Marlena Dietrich is lovely and definitely has presence, though I still don't really understand her flatness during musical numbers--I don't mean her pitch, but her affect. It's sort of strange. But the gender politics are cracktastic, at least superficially. Dietrich comes out in top hat and tails, smoking. She sings a song in French, denies the touch of a few men, plucks a flower from a woman's hair and kisses her. She then throws the flower to Gary Cooper, a foreign legionnaire, who puts it behind his ear. It's all very daring and yet heteronormative (it denies heteronormativity only to re-establish it) and her image in this scene is justifiably an icon. (There's also a lovely bit later in her room where he gives her a casual salute upon leaving and she copies it at the closed door.
But the romance, and the love triangle, is entirely dull and I don't really see what she sees in him. I'm actually more interested in what's behind Adolphe Menjou's motives, knowing all along that she doesn't love him. It's a fairly conventional, if sexually charged, love story, but it would have been vastly improved by a leading man with S.A. even remotely approaching Dietrich's.
This entry is also posted at http://my-daroga.dreamwidth.org/269101.html. Feel free to comment wherever you want.