The film was shot simultaneously in German- and English-language versions, although the latter version was thought lost for many years. The German version is considered to be "obviously superior";[4] it is longer and not marred by actors struggling with their English pronunciation.[5]
Plot summary
Marlene Dietrich in her classic cabaret pose. Her reclining position with one leg elevated was selected after a dozen other attitudes were tested and discarded.Marlene Dietrich as Lola: "She straddles a chair...imperiously, magisterially, fully the measurer of men in the audience..."
Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is an educator at the local Gymnasium (high school for students expected to go to university) in Weimar Germany. The boys disrespect him and play pranks on him. Rath punishes several of his students for circulating photographs of the beautiful Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), the headliner for the local cabaret, "The Blue Angel". Hoping to catch the boys at the club, Rath goes there later that evening. He does find some students there, but while chasing them, he also finds Lola backstage and sees her partially disrobing. When he returns to the cabaret the following evening to return a pair of panties that were smuggled into his coat by one of his students, he ends up staying the night with her. The next morning, reeling from his night of passion, Rath arrives late to school to find his classroom in chaos; the principal is furious and threatens to fire Rath.
Rath gives up his position at the school to marry Lola. Their happiness is short-lived, however, as Rath becomes humiliatingly dependent on Lola. Over several years, he sinks lower and lower, first selling dirty postcards, and then becoming a clown in Lola's troupe to pay the bills. His growing insecurities about Lola's profession as a "shared woman" eventually consume him with lust and jealousy.
The troupe returns to his hometown and The Blue Angel, where everyone turns out to see the professor they knew play a clown. Once onstage, Rath is humiliated, not only by a magician who breaks eggs on his head but also by seeing Lola embrace and kiss the strongman Mazeppa. He is enraged to the point of insanity. He attempts to strangle Lola, but the strongman and others subdue him and lock him in a straitjacket.
Later that night, Rath is released. He leaves and goes to his old classroom. Rejected, humiliated, and destitute, he dies clutching the desk at which he once taught.
The film also features the famous carillon of the Garrison Church at Potsdam, playing "Üb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit" (Always Be True and Faithful), as well as an orchestral version of the tune. The original melody was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for Papageno's aria, Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen, in The Magic Flute. In the German Reich and subsequently the Weimar Republic, the lyrics of "Üb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit" (Use always fidelity and honesty / Up to your cold grave; / And stray not one inch / From the ways of the Lord) symbolized the very embodiment of Prussian virtues.
Background
By 1929, Sternberg had completed a number of films for Paramount, none of which were box office successes. Fortunately for Sternberg, Paramount's sister studio in Germany, UFA, offered him the opportunity to direct Emil Jannings in his first sound film. Jannings was the Oscar-winning star of Sternberg's 1928 movie The Last Command, and had specially requested Sternberg's participation, despite an "early clash of temperaments" on the set.[9][10][11]
Though The Blue Angel and Morocco, both from 1930, are often cited as his first sound films, Sternberg had already directed "a startling experiment" in asynchronous sound techniques with his 1929 Thunderbolt.[12]
Casting Lola Lola
Singer Lucie Mannheim was favored by UFA producer Erich Pommer for the part of Lola, with support from leading man Emil Jannings, but Sternberg vetoed her as insufficiently glamorous for a major production. Sternberg also turned down author Mann's actress-girlfriend Trude Hesterberg. Brigitte Helm, seriously considered by Sternberg, was not available for the part. Sternberg and Pommer settled on stage and film actress Käthe Haack for the amount of 25,000 Reichsmarks.[13]
Biographer Herman G. Weinberg, citing Sternberg's memoirs (1966) reports that the director had his first look at the 29-year-old Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich at a music revue named the Zwei Krawatten (Two Neckties), produced by dramatist Georg Kaiser.
Sternberg began immediately to groom Dietrich into "the woman he saw she could become".
Critic Andrew Sarris remarks on the irony of this singular director-actress relationship: "Josef von Sternberg is too often subordinated to the mystique of Marlene Dietrich...the Svengali-Trilby publicity that enshrouded The Blue Angel – and the other six Sternberg-Dietrich film collaborations – obscured the more meaningful merits not only of these particular works but of Sternberg's career as a whole."[14]
Production
After arriving at Berlin's UFA studios, Sternberg declined an offer to direct a film about Rasputin, the former Russian spiritual advisor to the family of Czar Nicholas II. He was intrigued, however, by a story from socialist reformer Heinrich Mann entitled Professor Unrat (Professor Filth) (1905), which critiques "the false morality and corrupt values of the German middle class" and agreed to adapt it.[11][15]
The narrative of Mann's story was largely abandoned by Sternberg (with the author's consent), retaining only scenes describing an affair between a college professor of high rectitude who becomes infatuated with a promiscuous cabaret singer. During the filming, Sternberg altered dialog, added scenes and modified cast characterizations that "gave the script an entirely new dimension."[16][17] The Professor's descent from sexual infatuation to jealous rage and insanity was entirely the director's invention.[9][18]
In order to maximize the film's profitability, The Blue Angel was filmed in both German and English, each shot in tandem for efficiency. The shooting spanned 11-weeks, from 4 November 1929 to 22 January 1930 at an estimated budget of $500,000—remarkably expensive for a UFA production of that period.[19][20][21]
During filming, although he was still the nominal star of the film (with top billing), Jannings could see the growing closeness between Sternberg and Dietrich and the care the director took in presenting her, and the actor became jealous, engaging in histrionics and threatening to quit the production. The Blue Angel was to be his last great cinematic moment; it was also one of UFA's last successful films.[22][23] Film historian Andrew Sarris comments on this double irony:
"The ultimately tragic irony of The Blue Angel is double-edged in a way Sternberg could not have anticipated when he undertook the project. The rise of Lola Lola and fall of Professor Immanuel Rath in reel [sic] life is paralleled in the real life by the rise of Marlene Dietrich and the fall of Emil Jannings..."[9][24]
Release
The Blue Angel was scheduled for its Berlin premiere on 1 April 1930, but UFA owner and industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, unhappy with socialist Heinrich Mann's association with the production, blocked release. Production manager Pommer defended the film, and Mann issued a statement distancing his anti-bourgeois critique from Sternberg's more sympathetic portrayal of Professor Immanuel Rath in his movie version.[25] Sternberg, who declared himself apolitical, had departed the country in February, shortly after the film was completed and the internecine conflict emerged. Hugenberg ultimately relented on the grounds of financial expediency, still convinced that Sternberg had concealed within The Blue Angel "a parody of the German bourgeoisie."[26][27]
The film proved to be "an instant international success."[28][29] Dietrich, at Sternberg's insistence, was brought to Hollywood under contract to Paramount, where they would film and release Morocco in 1930 before The Blue Angel would appear in American theatres in 1931.[30]
Themes and analysis
The Blue Angel, ostensibly a story of the downfall of a respectable middle-age academic at the hands of a pretty young cabaret singer, is Sternberg's "most brutal and least humorous" film of his œuvre.[31][32] The harshness of the narrative "transcends the trivial genre of bourgeois male corrupted by bohemian female" and the complexity of Sternberg's character development rejects "the old stereotype of the seductress" who ruthlessly cuckolds her men.[33]
Film historian Andrew Sarris outlines Sternberg's "complex interplay" between Lola and the Professor:
"The Blue Angel achieved its most electrifying effects through careful grading and construction. When Dietrich sings "Falling in Love Again" for the first time, the delivery is playful, flirtatious, and self-consciously seductive. The final rendition is harsher, colder, and remorseless. The difference in delivery is not related to the old sterotype of the seductress finally showing her true colors, but rather to a psychological development in Dietrich's Lola from mere sensual passivity to a more forceful fatalism about the nature of her desires. Lola's first instinct is to accept the Professor's paternal protection and her last is to affirm her natural instincts, not as coquettish expedients but as the very terms by which she expresses her existence. Thus, as the Professor has been defeated by Lola's beauty, Lola has been ennobled by the Professor's jealousy..."[33]
Biographer John Baxter echoes this the key thematic sequence that reveals "the tragic dignity" of Rath's downfall:
"[T]he tragedy of Immanuel Rath was not that he lost his head over a woman, but that he could not reconcile the loss of power with the acquisition of freedom." When Rath is forced to relinquish "his authority [over] his students, he sinks into alienated apathy…Rath's failure to grasp the chance opened to him…is portrayed in terms of his increasing silence, as he sinks more and more sullenly into the guise of the ridiculous, ironically named clown…In the end, the authoritarian master of language is bereft of articulate speech", finally erupting into a "paraoxysmic cockscrow" when he discovers that he has been cuckolded by Lola.[34]
When Rath, in a jealous rage, enters the room where his wife, Lola, is making love to the cabaret strongman, Mazeppa, Sternberg declines to show us Rath – now a madman – at the moment he is violently subdued by the authorities and placed in a straitjacket. Sternberg rewards the degraded Professor Rath for having "achieved a moment of masculine beauty [by] crowing like a maddened rooster" at Lola's deception: "Sternberg will not cheapen that moment by degrading a man who has been defeated." Sternberg presents "the spectacle of a prudent, prudish man blocked off from all means of displaying his manhood except the most animalistic." The loss of Lola leaves Rath with but one alternative: death.[9][35][36]
Pousse-Cafe, a 1966 Broadway musical version with music by Duke Ellington. It was unsuccessful and closed after three performances. Joyce, Mike (18 February 1993). "Ellington's Lesser Gem". Washington Post.
In 1998, the Gems adaptation was translated to Japanese. With added songs composed by accordionist Yasuhiro Kobayashi, the Japanese version was staged as a musical, starring Kenji Sawada, at the Bunkamura in Tokyo.
A stage adaptation by Romanian playwright Răzvan Mazilu premiered in 2001 at the Odeon Theatre in Bucharest, starring Florin Zamfirescu as the professor and Maia Morgenstern as Lola Lola.
Morocco is a 1930 American pre-Code romantic drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Adolphe Menjou. Based on the 1927 novel Amy Jolly by Benno Vigny and adapted by Jules Furthman, the film is about a cabaret singer and a Legionnaire who fall in love during the Rif War, and whose relationship is complicated by his womanizing and the appearance of a rich man who is also in love with her. The film is famous for a scene in which Dietrich performs a song dressed in a man's tailcoat and kisses another woman, both of which were considered scandalous for the period.
Emil Jannings was a Swiss born German actor, popular in the 1920s in Hollywood. He was the first recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actor for his roles in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. As of 2023, Jannings is the only German ever to have won the category.
Thunderbolt is a 1929 American Pre-Code proto-noir film directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring George Bancroft, Fay Wray, Richard Arlen, Tully Marshall and Eugenie Besserer. It tells the story of a criminal, facing execution, who wants to kill the man in the next cell for being in love with his former girlfriend.
Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich was a German and American actress and singer whose career spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s.
Josef von Sternberg was an Austrian-American filmmaker whose career successfully spanned the transition from the silent to the sound era, during which he worked with most of the major Hollywood studios. He is best known for his film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s, including the highly regarded Paramount/UFA production, The Blue Angel (1930).
The Last Command is a 1928 silent film directed by Josef von Sternberg, and written by John F. Goodrich and Herman J. Mankiewicz from a story by Lajos Bíró. Star Emil Jannings won the first Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the 1929 ceremony for his performances in this film and The Way of All Flesh, the only year that multiple roles were considered. In 2006, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for the National Film Registry. The supporting cast includes Evelyn Brent and William Powell.
Underworld is a 1927 American silent crime film directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Clive Brook, Evelyn Brent and George Bancroft. The film launched Sternberg's eight-year collaboration with Paramount Pictures, with whom he would produce his seven films with actress Marlene Dietrich. Journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht won an Academy Award for Best Original Story.
Macao is a 1952 black-and-white film noir adventure directed by Josef von Sternberg and Nicholas Ray and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, William Bendix, and Gloria Grahame.
Friedrich Hollaender was a German film composer and author.
The Salvation Hunters is a 1925 American silent drama film which marked the directorial debut of the 31-year old Josef von Sternberg. The feature stars Georgia Hale and George K. Arthur, and would bring Sternberg, "a new talent", to the attention of the major movie studios, including Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Paramount Pictures. Film Mercury included The Salvation Hunters in its ten-best list for the films of 1925.
The Devil Is a Woman is a 1935 American romance film directed and photographed by Josef von Sternberg, adapted from the 1898 novel La Femme et le pantin by Pierre Louÿs. The film was based on a screenplay by John Dos Passos, and stars Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, and Alison Skipworth. The movie is the last of the six Sternberg-Dietrich collaborations for Paramount Pictures.
Dishonored is a 1931 pre-Code romantic spy film about a female spy for Austria-Hungary during World War I. It was co-written, directed, and edited by Josef von Sternberg for Paramount Pictures. The costume design was by Travis Banton. The film stars Marlene Dietrich, Victor McLaglen, Gustav von Seyffertitz, and Warner Oland.
Sergeant Madden is a 1939 film noir forerunner directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Wallace Beery. The supporting cast in this dark police crime drama, noted for its imaginative and evocative cinematography, includes Tom Brown, Laraine Day, Alan Curtis, and Marc Lawrence.
Mischa Spoliansky was a Russian-born composer who made his name writing cabaret and revue songs in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s, before he was forced to emigrate to London in 1933 when Hitler rose to power. He stayed in Britain for the rest of his life, re-inventing himself as a composer of film scores.
Crime and Punishment is a 1935 American drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg for Columbia Pictures. The screenplay was adapted by Joseph Anthony and S.K. Lauren from Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 novel of the same title. The film stars Peter Lorre in the lead role of Raskolnikov.
Professor Unrat, oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen, which translates as "Professor Unclean", is one of the most important works of Heinrich Mann, and has achieved notoriety through film adaptations, most notably Der blaue Engel with Marlene Dietrich. The book caricatures the middle and upper class educational system of Wilhelmine Germany and the double standards of the title character. In the United States, an abridgment of the English translation was published in 1932 under the title The Blue Angel.
Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress.
Marlene is a 2000 German biopic film directed by Joseph Vilsmaier and starring Katja Flint, Hans Werner Meyer and Herbert Knaup. It follows the life of the German actress Marlene Dietrich and her success in Hollywood.
The Blue Angel is a 1959 American drama film in CinemaScope directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Curd Jürgens, May Britt, and Theodore Bikel. The film is a remake of Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel about cabaret singer Lola-Lola and the troubled, aged Professor Rath, who falls for her much to his own detriment. Both films were based on Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat.
An American Tragedy (1931) is a pre-Code drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg. It was produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film is based on Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy and the 1926 play adaptation. These were based on the historic 1906 murder of Grace Brown by Chester Gillette at Big Moose Lake in upstate New York.
↑ Bordwell, David; Thompson, Kristin (2003) [1994]. "The Introduction of Sound". Film History: An Introduction (2nded.). New York City: McGraw-Hill. p.204. ISBN978-0-07-115141-2.
↑ Sarris, 1966. p. 25:"The film was produced simultaneously in German and English language versions for the maximum benefit of the Paramount-Ufa combine in world [movie distribution] markets."
↑ Baxter, 1971. p. 74: The production "was complicated [by the Sternberg/Dietrich] romance...Jannings, as expected, had reacted with special bitterness to the affair, working actively to break down their rapport, throwing tantrums and threatening to walk out."
↑ Baxter, 1971. p. 63, pp. 74–75: The Blue Angel "had no successors at UFA"
↑ Weinberg, 1967. p. 54: "Hugenberg [a political reactionary] had sensed that, within the framework of an entertainment film, Sternberg had subtly mirrored the paranoiac tendencies of the Prussian bourgeoisie."
↑ Sarris, 1998. p. 121: "The Blue Angel (1930) [depicts] the downfall of a middle-aged bourgeois male through the machinations of a disreputable demi-mondaine..."
↑ Sarris, 1998. p. 221: "Sternberg's profundity...is measured less by the breadth of this vision than by the perfection of his form and by the emotional force of his characters within that form."
↑ Sarris, 1998. p. 221:"...it is Lola's strength that she has lived with shabbiness long enough to know how to bend without breaking and the Professor's tragic misfortune to bend to first and still break after all."
Black, Gregory D. (1994). Hollywood censored: morality codes, Catholics, and the movies (Transferred to digital print.ed.). Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN978-0-521-45299-1.
Baxter, John, 1971. The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. London: A. Zwemmer / New York: A. S. Barnes & Co.
Reimer, Robert C. and Reinhard Zachau, 2005. "German Culture Through Film." Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing.
Sarris, Andrew, 1966. The Films of Josef von Sternberg. New York: Doubleday
Sarris, Andrew. 1998. "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet." The American Talking Film History & Memory, 1927–1949. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-513426-1
Tibbetts, John C., and James M. Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film (2nd ed. 2005) pp 34–35.
Weinberg, Herman G., 1967. Josef von Sternberg. A Critical Study. New York: Dutton.
Wakeman, John. World Film Directors Vol. 1 (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1987)
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