“Touch of Evil” - Orson Welles (1958)

Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil holds a special place in the hearts of many film noir enthusiasts as one of the most flamboyant examples of the genre.  In many ways its visual and dramatic extravagance remains uneclipsed even today.  The film was not much of a hit at the box office when it was first released in 1958, due in part to Universal Studios’ cutting down and re-editing the film prior to its release, much against the director’s wishes.  There have been some “restored” versions more appealing to cineastes since then, but even that bastardized first release was widely appreciated in Europe.  It won the International Critics Prize (the top award) at the 1958 Brussels World Film Festival.  Since then, Touch of Evil’s reputation has steadily grown, and it is now ranked as an all-time classic [1,2].  In the British Film Institute’s most recent polls of film directors and critics concerning the all-time greatest films, it was ranked 57th on the BFI’s 2012 Critics’ Poll [3] and 26th on the BFI’s 2012 Directors’ Poll [4].

The story of Touch of Evil, which is loosely based on the novel Badge of Evil (1956) by Whit Masterson, concerns murder and corruption in two adjacent border towns straddling the U.S.-Mexican border.  And besides incorporating the usual noirish equivocations concerning honesty, loyalty, and justice, it also included provocative slants on ethnic and social stereotypes.  Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty told this dark story in a dramatic fashion, with their expressionistic, black-and-white rendering of mostly nocturnal scenes featuring many wide-angled moving-camera shots and quasi-threatening low-angled closeups.

And interestingly for cinema buffs, Welles included a number of famous actors in small roles.  Besides the casting several Welles favorites, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, and Ray Collins, in small character roles, he also had bit parts for the following well-known faces:

Joseph Cotten, Keenan Wyn, Dennis Weaver, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eva Gabor, Mercedes McCambridge, and Marlene Dietrich (!)

But what makes the telling of this complicated tale particularly effective is the way it continually crisscrosses between the narrative threads involving its four principal characters [5].  These four  characters are each almost social stereotypes that symbolize a dramatic theme of the story:

• Police Captain Hank Quinlan (played by Orson Welles).  He is a crafty but unprincipled cop who will use any means to ensure that the person who his intuition convinces him is guilty will be convicted of the crime.  Although Quinlan, as the main character in this piece, would be expected to embody the highest standards of American justice, he in fact is shady, prejudiced, unscrupulous, and repulsive – the kind of person that simple-minded and prejudiced Americans (you can guess whom I mean) think is common in Mexico.
   
• Ramon Miguel “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston).  He is a highly principled Mexican narcotics officer dedicated to seeing that justice is served in accordance with the full letter of the law.  Mike Vargas is also handsome, romantic, chivalrous and heroic – the kind of person that typical audiences might assume to embody the “American” ideal.
   
• “Uncle Joe” Grandi (Akim Tamiroff).  Although he is an American citizen, he is a Mexican gangster and current leader of the Grandi family criminal syndicate.  He is slimy and ruthless, the epitome of the stereotypical Mexican villain.
   
• Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh).  She is the newly married American wife of Mike Vargas.  A beautiful and elegant blonde, Susie is probably another, in this case dreamlike, stereotype for a Latin American population (Janet Leigh may have been the ultimate Caucasian beauty icon – she was to serve in a similar role soon in Psycho (1960).)  Like her husband, Susie is loyal, brave, and a believer in justice.  But she also may hold her own personal stereotypical views, as evidenced when she calls a young Mexican man she meets, “Pancho”, which is perhaps an allusion to a character in the popular U.S. television series The Cisco Kid (1950-56).

The film begins with one of greatest-ever opening shots – a more than three-minute crane-and-tracking shot that begins in one country and finishes in another.  It starts with a time-bomb being surreptitiously loaded into the trunk of a car in a Mexican border town and then tracking the car as it is slowly driven through the border control into the U.S.  Midway through the shot, it shifts its focus to a newly married couple, Mike and Susie Vargas, who are walking in the same direction across the border.  When the couple are embracing on the U.S. side of the border, the shot ends with the sound of an explosion.  The time-bomb has gone off, destroying the car and its two occupants, one of whom was a wealthy American, Rudy Linnekar.
                                   
So there is a murder case to solve, and Mike Vargas, knowing that the bomb was planted on the Mexican side of the border, feels he has to take part in the investigation.  He sends his wife Susie back across the border to wait in their hotel while he looks into the matter.  This separation of Mike and Susie introduces two parallel narrative threads that will intertwine throughout the rest of the film. 

At the scene of the crime, Police Captain Hank Quinlan shows up to take charge of the investigation.  Quinlan is an obese and disheveled slob with an overbearing personality who relies on his fabled intuition to solve crimes.  He is always attended to by his loyal assistant Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia), whose life he once saved by taking a bullet intended for Menzies.  In this case Quinlan immediately intuits that sticks of dynamite were used to commit the crime.  He also adopts a scornful, dismissive attitude towards Vargas, whom he considers to be wandering outside his proper jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, as Susie Vargas returns to her hotel, she is accosted by young thugs from the Grandi family who have been sent to her by “Uncle Joe” Grandi.  Joe Grandi’s brother was earlier arrested and is facing trial in Mexico City based on evidence supplied by Mike Vargas, and Joe wants to intimidate Susie into getting her husband to back off from the case. 

So early on we see that Mike Vargas faces two hostile adversaries, one challenging his sense of justice and the other threatening his personal life.  These two parallel struggles will gradually dominate the plot more than the original narrative quest, which was to solve the car-bombing crime.

With their honeymoon plans disrupted, Mike consoles Susie and concedes to her that “all border towns bring out the worst in their country”.  He reminds her of the positive side of things, that the U.S.-Mexico border is “one of the longest borders on earth. . . . an open border”, and he wants to work to keep things that way.  Susie then insists that she wants to stay near her husband while he pursues his investigation on the U.S. side of the border.  So he installs her and leaves her alone in a mostly vacant motel on the U.S. side that is tended by a tremulous night manager (Dennis Weaver). The night manager’s hyper-twitchy behavior only adds to Susie’s, and the viewer’s, nervousness.  Little do they know that this motel is owned by the Grandi gang.

As the car-bombing investigation proceeds, Quinlan identifies a prime suspect: a young man named Sanchez who had just secretly married the victim Rudy Linnekar’s daughter.  But during the search of Sanchez’s apartment, Vargas discovers by accident that the incriminating dynamite sticks that were found there must have been just recently planted there by someone.  He suspects Quinlan of planting the false evidence in order to frame Sanchez.  In fact Vargas begins to wonder if Quinlan has been doing this for years – framing his Mexican suspects with false evidence in order to guarantee criminal convictions.

At this point Grandi privately approaches Quinlan seeking a clandestine alliance.  After all, he tells him, they both need to get rid of their common enemy: Vargas.  Then the scene shifts to Susie Vargas’s motel room, where she is attacked by Grandi family hoods, who then drug her and abduct her to a hotel room across the border.  We can presume that Quinlan has bought into Grandi’s plan to frame the Vargeses as drug pushers and addicts.  Although we know that Mike Vargas is a straight-arrow, the prevailing American prejudice against Mexicans makes Grandi’s plan feasible.

Later that evening we get an insight into what drives Quinlan.  At a bar, a half-drunk Quinlan melancholily talks to his long-time comrade Pete Menzies about his life’s great tragedy.  His wife was strangled thirty years ago, and despite Quinlan’s relentless efforts, he was never able to catch the perpetrator.  And he concedes that strangling is the most effective way to commit a murder, because the murder weapon is so hard to identify.  Since then, he tells Menzies, he has always made sure that no culprit (identified presumably by his intuition) could ever go free.

Unaware of the dire straits his wife is in, Vargas gets access to past court records in order to confirm his belief that Quinlan has been framing people for years by planting evidence that is discovered by his unsuspecting and loyal workmate, Menzies. 

While Vargas is trying to convince Menzies of his boss’s guilt, Quinlan goes to the Mexican hotel room where Grandi is waiting with the drugged Susie Vargas lying passed-out on the bed.  Things have presumably worked out in accordance with their joint plan.  But then Quinlan double-crosses Grandi by strangling him with Susie’s stocking.  The idea is apparently to pin the murder on the presumed drug addict Susie. 

Eventually Menzies becomes convinced of Quinlan’s duplicity.  The key piece of evidence was his finding in the just-seen hotel room Quinlan’s walking cane, which his somewhat inebriated boss had left there.  So Menzies agrees to cooperate with Vargas in order to collect convincing evidence of Quinlan’s guilt. Their plan is to wire Menzies with a hidden microphone that can be used to record self-incriminating comments by the unsuspecting Quinlan, while Vargas will be lurking nearby with a radio-connected tape recorder.  The scene is now set for the famous nighttime tracking sequence, in which Quinlan walks by a canal spouting his customary  contempt to Menzies, with Vargas surreptitiously trailing them at a close distance in the shadows. 

The final shots are dramatic. Quinlan’s cunning enables him to figure out that Menzies is bugged to record his voice; and after killing Menzies, he almost saves himself, but not quite.  Vargas winds up with the evidence needed to absolve himself and his wife of any wrongdoing.  At the close, Quinlan’s old flame, the brothel madam Tana (Marlene Dietrich, still looking seductive at the age of fifty-six), is asked if she has any comments on the man she knew, and she says sadly and wearily,

“He was some kind of a man! . . . . What does it matter what you say about people?”

So Touch of Evil was really concerned with the struggle between Quinlan and Vargas, which amounted to a contest between upholding the community-based laws (Vargas) or sidestepping those laws in order to follow one’s selfishly-construed version of what is right (Quinlan).  The original issue of solving the car-bombing crime had faded into the background.  Indeed in the end we learn that Quinlan’s hunch was correct – Sanchez ultimately confessed to the authorities offscreen that he was the one who had put the sticks of dynamite in Linnekar’s car.  But the point is that Quinlan was defying the way the way the legal system is supposed to work by planting false evidence in order to frame his suspect. 

The legal system is one of the four pillars, which I have labeled “RMDL” (the legal system is the ‘L’ in this acronym) [6], of rationalist-based modern societies that have arisen in the last couple of centuries.  And it is the U.S. that is supposed to be the flagship country of this form of government.  So in Touch of Evil the irony – one that jabs at some American ethnic prejudices –  is that it is a U.S. citizen who defies RMDL and a Mexican citizen who staunchly upholds it. 

 

Welles spins this utterly dark tale in mesmerizing film noir fashion by continually shifting back and forth among his four iconic characters – Quinlan, Mike Vargas, Susie Vargas, and Grandi.  One might criticize that these four characterizations are exaggerated and schematic.  But their emphatic representations are just the right dramatic elements Welles needed to sustain his dark, complex, and expressionistic narrative.

★★★★

Notes:

1. J. Hoberman, “Jokers Wild”, The Village Voice, (15 September 1998).   
2. Roger Ebert, “Touch of Evil (1958)”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com (13 September 1998).     
3. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).     
4. “Directors’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).    
5. Tim Dirks, “Touch of Evil (1958)”, AMC Filmsite, (n.d.).   
6. See my discussions of RMDL, which can be accessed by clicking on the tag  “RMDL” under the “LABELS” section of this site. 

"The Devil is a Woman" - Josef von Sternberg (1935)

The Devil is a Woman (1935) was the seventh and final film of the legendary screen collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and his alluring star Marlene Dietrich.  Like the greatest of those earlier films, The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), The Shanghai Express (1932), and Blonde Venus (1932), this film’s focus was entirely on how love can overpower a reasonable person’s mind and compel him or her to submit completely to its demands. And while all those earlier films pushed the limits of believability concerning what love can do, in some respects The Devil is a Woman went the furthest in this direction.

Romantic films typically have two narrative streams – a dramatic outer narrative that involves goals and threats in the external world and an inner, relationship-oriented narrative involving the main characters.  However, in the case of this film, the relationship narrative is pretty much everything.

The Devil is a Woman was scripted by John Dos Passos and was based on the French novel La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet, 1898) by Pierre Louys.  That novel also served as the basis of several other films, including La Femme et le Pantin (1959) directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Brigitte Bardot, and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) directed by Luis Buñuel; but those films are all different in style and substance.  Interestingly and uniquely in the case of The Devil is a Woman, the two main characters appear to have been specifically sculpted to correspond to the real personalities of von Sternberg and Dietrich, whose offscreen relationship was the subject of much speculation and which I will briefly discuss further below.

Although I have identified the relationship narrative as the dominant theme in this film, the most memorable aspects are not so much the specifics of the story but rather the expressionistic dreamworld that von Sternberg conjures up to tell it. As usual for a von Sternberg film, everything was shot in the studio, where von Sternberg had complete control of every last detail and where he could carefully set his lights to fashion scenes with the chiaroscuro that made the entire environment  contribute to and reinforce the mood of the storytelling. For von Sternberg the visual context of his action was so important to the storytelling that it was occasionally intentionally staged to obscure the activities of the principal characters under view. Von Sternberg’s dreamscape was further enhanced by the contextually-supportive musical score, which was adapted from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Spanish Caprice and some classic Spanish melodies, including one of my favorites, Enrique Granados's Danza Espanola, No. 5.

Von Sternberg’s love stories invariably involve three principal and entangled characters:

• A beautiful, passionate, and bewitching woman whose mind and future directions are ultimately unknowable.  Marlene Dietrich played this role for von Sternberg during their time together, but there had been others, too, such as Evelyn Brent in Underworld (1927) and The Last Command (1928).
• A young, studly and prepossessing male who is used to having his way with women.  This person is often thoughtlessly narcissistic but not malevolent.  The beautiful woman usually finds him irresistible.
• An older more sensitive and reflective male who selflessly offers his love to the beautiful woman.  This person is more introverted and less confident, but his personality and character are richer, and his amorous commitment is deeper than that of the competing lover.

In The Devil is a Woman, whose story is set in Spain around the turn of the 20th century, these principal characters are present, and in fact there are really only four characters of any significance in the whole story:

• Concha Perez (played by Marlene Dietrich) is a beautiful and capricious young working woman. 
• Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero) is a young, handsome republican revolutionary who is on the run from the government police and is getting ready to flee to Paris.
• Captain Don Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill) is an aristocratic officer in the Spanish military.  He is the older and more refined figure of Sternbergian dramatics who has a mad infatuation with Concha.
• Governor Don Paquito (Edward Everett Horton) is the androgynous, yet ridiculously despotic, authoritarian commander of Sevilla who is trying to maintain order during a festival season. 

The film’s narrative is structured roughly into four sections, the second of which is a lengthy flashback period that takes up more than forty percent of the overall running time.

1.  A Meeting During the Spanish Carnival
At the film’s outset the viewer is plunged into the lavish spectacle of Sevilla’s Spanish Carnival festival, which is an extended celebratory fiesta just prior to the Roman Catholic Lent period.  There are masked parades, masquerade balls, and continuous scenes of merriment, all of which is brilliantly evoked by von Sternberg’s expressionistic staging.  Collectively, they remind me of the masked ball scene from von Sternberg’s Dishonored (1931), though these are perhaps even more flamboyant and colorful.

During a parade Antonio Galvan, who we will soon learn is ducking the police, is masked like all the others and enjoying the festivities.  He spots a beautiful woman, Concha, riding on a street float, and manages to catch her attention by making eyes at her.  Concha is a coquette and runs away, but before disappearing she has a note passed to him that he can meet in the evening when she normally goes for a carriage drive down a particular street.

2.  Don Pasqual’s Story

At a café, Galvan runs into an old friend, Don Pasqual, whom he hasn’t seen for years.  When Pasqual is asked if he knows anything about Concha, he launches into a lengthy account of his unhappy experiences with the woman, whom he first met five years earlier. This story-within-the-story of how this woman played with his affections and tortured him has five episodes.  In each of these episodes, Concha leads Pasqual on and then rejects him, leaving him in the lurch.

1. Captain Pasqual first saw Concha on a train trip, during which the cheeky girl precipitated an onboard fight that Pasqual intervened to stop.  He was attracted to the girl, but she indicated to him that she was not an easy pickup, and when the train stopped, she departed alone.
    
2. Sometime later, while investigating a cigarette factory, Pasqual sees Concha working there and is again attracted.  After giving her a valuable gold coin, she invites him to her home where she lives with her widowed mother.  After the two women ply him for more money, Concha kisses him, but she resists his natural response.  She tells him that she kissed him because she loved him – for a minute – but she will not let him kiss her without him loving her.  She claims (probably correctly at this point) that she merely pleases him and amuses him, but he doesn’t love her.  These remarks spotlight a key theme to the film – how deep is one’s love?.  Anyway, shortly thereafter Concha and her mother disappeared from town.
    
3. Three months later Concha appears again and seductively tells Pasqual that she can no longer live without seeing him.  Again he is infatuated and immediately offers to marry her.  But after accepting a considerable amount of his money, she disappears from his life again.
    
4. Months later Pasqual is sent down the coast on assignment and encounters Concha singing in a rowdy nightclub. Of course, we expect to see a song from Marlene Dietrich at some point in this film, and she delivers with her naughty “Three Lovers” song, which probably accurately reflects Concha’s amoral attitude about romantic fidelity. The two fo them repair to her dressing room, where Pasqual again professes his desperate love for her, and she seems to respond. But it is soon apparent that Concha is also having an affair with a handsome young bullfighter, Moreno.  When Pasqual breaks in on one of their trysts, he loses all control and gives her a beating (off-camera), thereby presumably ending their relationship.
   
   As we return momentarily to the “present”, Pasqual tells Galvan that this time he was really through with her.
    
5. But the next day Concha comes to Pasqual and surprisingly tells him that she loves him.  He pays out more of his money to buy her out of her nightclub contract, but immediately afterwards she abruptly departs on a week-long trip with the bullfighter Moreno.  Pasqual is again humiliated.

Pasqual tells Galvan that his affair with her became public, he was scandalized, and he had to resign from his commission.  After Pasqual summarily points out that she ruined many men – indeed, the bullfighter she ran off with later killed himself because of her – he gets Galvan to swear he will not go near the demonic temptress.

3.  Galvan and Concha

Pasqual and Galvan shake hands and depart, but Galvan still can’t resist going out that evening to meet Concha when she takes her carriage ride. He does so, and she soon brings him to a private room in a nightclub, where she listens to his accusations about ruining Pasqual. In the middle of this, however, she receives a hand-delivered letter from Pasqual declaring his undying love for her, which she reads aloud to Galvan.  He is angry, but he cannot resist the temptation of her beauty, and he kisses her.

Just then Pasqual shows up to their private room, angrily accuses Galvan of breaking his vow, and swears he is “not going to lose her’.  At this, Concha, now on the side of Galvan, continues to humiliate Pasqual and dismissively says, “how could you lose what you never possessed?”

The posturing between Pasqual and Galvan escalates, until Pasqual slaps Galvan in the face,  symbolically inviting a duel.  After agreeing to a formal duel to be held the next morning, Pasqual menacingly fires his pistol at distant target and demonstrates that he is a crack shot. 

With the sound of gunfire, everyone disperses in panic before the police arrive.  Concha finds Galvan in his room and declares her love for him – she promises to run away with him to Paris.

The next morning at a secret location in the woods, the duel is held.  This is a brilliantly staged dark scene set during a pouring rain storm and evoking the utmost in expressionistic gloom. Concha, worried now about hew new love, Galvan, accuses Pasqual of trying to “kill the only man I’ve ever cared for.” The duel is then held, and Pasqual, surprisingly refusing to fire his pistol, is gunned down by Galvan.  The police then show up and jail Galvan.

4.  Escape
Concha still has some cards to play, though.  She goes to Governor Paquito and with her flirtatious charm seduces him into authorising Galvan’s release from jail and providing them with two fake passports so they can escape to Paris.  She also goes to the hospital to see that Pasqual is still alive, barely.  Pasqual, though at every turn he has been defeated, he is always honest: he tells her he didn’t shoot Galvan because of his total love for her.

Concha and Galvan pack their bags, get through passport control, and get ready to board the train for Paris.  At the last moment, though, Concha baulks and says she has changed her mind.   She is going back to Pasqual.


Your overall understanding and appreciation of The Devil is a Woman will probably depend on how you interpret that last action of Concha’s.  Most people, it seems, view with a cynical eye Concha’s final refusal to get on the train with Galvan and return to Pasqual.  From this perspective, Concha is seen as realizing her passion for Galvan is ephemeral and will soon run its course.  She prefers not to give up her role as the puppet master, knowing that she has a helpless slave in “Pasqualito” that she can perpetually use and torment to her heart’s desires.  People who hold this point of view see the film as a black comedy that scoffs at the hopeless naivete of the unrestrained human heart that often actively seeks its own ruin [1].

But one could alternatively interpret Concha’s last action as a commitment to true love.  According to this interpretation, she finally realizes that she has found a man who truly loves her (since he is willing to die and let her run away into another man’s arms).  When she earlier accused Pasqual of only being dazzled by her charm, she was probably thinking of all the otoher men who were blinded by her glamour but didn’t truly love her as a person.  Another point in support of this interpretation is that Pasqual at this point is a man whose career has been ruined.  She is not returning to a privileged man, but to a man whose position is now considerably diminished.  The prospects of treating such a man as a puppet would then not seem to be a major attraction for even a selfish flirt.  So according to this second interpretation, Concha and Pasqual are united in true love in the end.

Of course, some people might want to overlay their interpretation of the film with their understanding of the relationship between Dietrich and von Sternberg. Certainly von Sternberg crafted Dietrich’s screen image and made her a star – their relationship has been variously compared to that of Svengali and Trilby and of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.  However they got started, though, it is generally understood that had a love affair during their period together.

In addition the suggestion that Concha’s character matches well with Marlene Dietrich’s real-life persona is given support by Dietrich’s own comments that her role in this film was her all-time favourite [2].  She was known to have been an amorous butterfly with an unending stream of brief love affairs with both sexes.  So in real life, Dietrich was perhaps just as capricious as Concha in this film.

Although such speculation may be spicy, I think it is best to focus on the work as it stands by itself.  Looking at just the film as it is, it is still a work of amazing splendour.  Nevertheless, I perceive some weaknesses when comparing it to von Sternberg’s greatest films. 

• Lionel Atwill’s performance as Pasqual is so reserved and militarily tight-lipped that we never get to see the two of them (Pasqual and Concha) interacting in a spontaneous and vital way. There is never any real electricity between the characters, and there relationship does not appear to evolve or progress.
• Marlene Dietrich’s behaviour is, virtually throughout, artificial.  The passionate, emotive glances that she sometimes gave in other von Sternberg films are missing in this one.  Her phoney unnaturalness here extends even to her heavy makeup, which featured extravagantly artificial eyebrows that were drawn inches above her physical brow ridge.  As a consequence of this artificiality, she, never evinces even hints of any convincing, true ardour for anyone in this film.

Perhaps, however, we should not really be looking for realism at all in this particular arena.  This film, after all, is really von Sternberg’s grand harlequinade, in which the outlandish characterizations are another aspect of the moody, atmospheric spectacle.  It is all part of an expressionistic masque under the control of the master marionettist, von Sternberg.

So all my previous reservations notwithstanding, I go back to my appreciation for von Sternberg’s aesthetics. What he presents are all-consuming love stories. I don’t know about you, but I hold to the second of the two above interpretations of this film.
★★★½  

Notes:

1. Andre Sennwald, “The Devil Is a Woman (1935)”, The New York Times, (4 May 1935).
2. Charles Silver, “Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman”, Inside/Out, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, (16 November 2010).

"Shanghai Express" - Josef von Sternberg (1932)

Shanghai Express was the fourth, and one of the best, of the seven outstanding films that Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s. Unlike their preceding film, Dishonored (1931), which had more of a historical/adventure spin to it, Shanghai Express was a return to the moody and deeply romantic style that characterized Morocco (1930). The story follows the fate of a group of mostly European travellers who take the train from Peking (which had recently been renamed, “Beiping”) to Shanghai. This was the “Warlord Period” of 20th century Chinese history, and the Nationalist Government at that time only had tenuous control over various warlords and rebel groups that were operating about the country.

Von Sternberg was always a master of cinematography, but this film was perhaps his masterpiece in chiaroscuro and atmospheric lighting. Working in the studio, he again managed to evoke an exotic realm that fires our imagination, even if it may not have perfectly matched the physical reality. Like Wong Kar Wai who came much later, von Sternberg effectively used physical confinement and cramped quarters, often setting his characters behind partially obscuring architectural artifacts in the foreground, to create the crowded, but often lonely, atmosphere of modern urban society. This cinematic style, combined with his stories which featured characters more obsessed about their pasts than their futures, set the parameters that came to make up film noir. Adding to these effects is the fact that this film takes place almost entirely at night and in the middle of a confusing Chinese civil war in which it is difficult to determine who can be trusted.

In fact the question of trust and faith turns out to be the principal theme of the film. The story begins with passengers boarding the first-class compartments of the Shanghai Express in Beiping. We are quickly introduced to a diverse set of these passengers, as they begin to make each others’ acquaintances. Many of them turn out to be misrepresenting themselves to varying degrees. They are

• “Shanghai Lilly” (played by Marlene Dietrich), whose name is really Magdalen. She is a “coaster” – a courtesan who travels up and down the east coast of China “living by her wits”, as they say.
• Captain Donald Harvey (Clive Brook), a medical doctor serving in the British military.
• Henry Chang, an enigmatic half-Chinese traveller.
• Hui Fei, another young “coaster”, but of Chinese ethnicity.
• Sam Salt, a loud, no-nonsense American.
• Reverend Carmichael, a highly moralistic Christian pastor from England.
• Mrs. Haggerty, an elderly American lady who runs a boarding house in Shanghai
• Eric Baum, an elderly German businessman.
• Major Lenard (played by Emile Chautard, a long-time French writer, director, and actor) an elderly French military officer.

As the train sets out, Harvey recognizes fellow passenger Shanghai Lilly as his former lover, Magdalen, whom he has not seen since he jealously broke off their relationship five years earlier. It is clear that they still have strong, though suppressed, feelings for each other. The issue is Magdalen’s status. Five years earlier she had played the game of trying to make the clearly not-very-demonstrative Harvey jealous, but this ploy had backfired when he had angrily walked out. Disconsolate afterwards and without any purpose to her life, she had taken on many other lovers and had become a “fallen woman”. Now, though she admits her foolish mistake, Harvey doesn’t believe her. Reflecting on what she may have been doing during their time apart, he says, “I wish you could tell me there had been no other men.”, and she responds by saying, “I wish I could, Doc, but five years is a long time.” This is the abiding character of Marlene Dietrich in all her films: utter unashamed authenticity about who she is. You must take her on her terms.

Reverend Carmichael certainly doesn’t take her on any terms. He sternly warns the other passengers in the carriage about the “rotten souls” of the two prostitutes on the train. Harvey, the surgeon and man of science, scoffs at Carmichael’s absurd claims, scornfully questioning how Carmichael could ever have acquired the medical knowledge first to identify the location the soul in the human body and then to ascertain its state of rottenness.

The train is soon stopped by government soldiers, and all passengers are forced to leave their carriages and show their documents. One of the Chinese passengers is singled out and arrested. In the commotion Henry Chang goes to a nearby telegraph office and sends a coded message to someone indicating that (a) a top rebel agent has been arrested, (b) that the train must be stopped by rebel forces at an upcoming station, and, by his signed codeword, that (c) he, himself, is the “Number 1" in the rebel warlord organization.

In due course, the Shanghai Express is stopped by attacking rebel soldiers, as Chang had ordered, and after many Chinese government soldiers are killed, all the passengers are again ordered to disembark from the train. Chang now reveals himself as the rebel commander that he is, and he begins examining the passengers in order to identify a suitable hostage that he can use to swap with the government in exchange for his own highly valued assistant now in government custody. When he discovers that Harvey is travelling to Shanghai in order to perform critical brain surgery on the governor general there, Chang knows that he has found his man. Another telegram is sent, and the English persuade the Chinese government to agree to make the trade.

Meanwhile Magdalen, agitated with worry about what might happen to Harvey, urges Reverend Carmichael to do something. He tells her that the only thing she can do is to pray to God, and when she doubts that God would listen to such a sinner as herself, he assures her that God remains on speaking terms with everybody. So she sneaks off to a darkened train compartment and kneels down in fervent prayer.

Later during the waiting for the returned rebel agent, Chang, who has had his eye on both Shanghai Lilly (Magdalen) and Hui Fei, threateningly propositions Lilly, and Harvey intercedes forcefully by punching him. Furious about this loss of face, the ruthless Chang has Harvey bound to a chair and swears to Lilly that he will have Harvey’s eyes gouged out prior to returning him to the government. Distraught upon hearing this, Lilly resolutely decides to sacrifice herself for her love and offers to become Chang’s mistress if he will spare Harvey. Chang accepts the deal and releases Harvey, but Hui Fei, who had earlier been forced to submit to Chang’s sexual demands, stabs and kills the monster when he is not looking. Before the rebels can react, everybody scrambles to get back on to the train, and it pulls out of the station on the way to Shanghai.

Now Magdalen and Harvey are safe, but Harvey knows nothing of Magdalen’s willingness to sacrifice herself for his safety. In his eyes, Magdalen was simply willing to sell herself to another man. And Magdalen never tells him – she never tries to apologise for her past deeds. She offers her love unconditionally and demands the same in return. This is always von Sternberg’s characterisation of true love. Finally, at the Shanghai train station when they appear to be about to separate for the last time, Harvey breaks down and comes over to Magdalen. Confessing his total and unconditional love for her, they finally embrace.

The theme of love and faith overcoming all obstacles has rarely been so exquisitely evoked as in Shanghai Express. Von Sternberg has created in the film a dark, Expressionistic journey down into the depths of Hell and back, with love the only saving grace. Everyone you meet may have some secrets, and sometimes you must simply have blind faith in them. In fact several of the passengers on the train turn out to be not what they seem. Chang, of course, turns out not to be a businessman, but a rebel warlord. Major Lenard turns out not really to be a major; he was discharged from the military, but wishes to conceal that fact from his family. Eric Baum turns out not to be a respectable businessman, but a dealer in illegal opium. Hui Fei appears to be submissive, but she is capable of murdering her assailant. Even kindly Mrs. Haggerty tries to sneak her pet dog past the authorities and into her compartment on the train. And Reverend Carmichael finally recognizes and confesses that the women with the supposedly “rotten soul” is actually worth much more than all the others.

The acting in the film is generally good, but Eugene Palette’s performance as the American Sam Salt is a bit overbearing. Warner Oland, who convincingly played the loathsome Henry Chang, was actually of Swedish descent, but he made a career out of playing Chinese – he was famous for his role as Charlie Chan during the 1930s. The role of Hui Fei was played by Anna May Wong, who was the first Chinese star in American movies. Gustav von Seyffertitz, who had a major role in Dishonored, here played the role of Eric Baum in his usual emphatic fashion. Clive Brooks, though, is excessively wooden and stiff as Captain Harvey. The British stiff upper-lip tradition is taken to such lengths in his case that one wonders if there is any capacity at all for romantic passion beneath that uniform. Von Sternberg had a much more effective British actor in his next film, Blonde Venus, with Herbert Marshall, who had the right combination of reserve and emotion.

Marlene Dietrich, though, makes up for any shortcomings on the parts of the other performances. Dietrich characteristically had the magical persona, as projected by Josef von Sternberg, of always being both direct and demure. She suggests delicacy, but is nevertheless capable of forcefulness. She is authentic, yet she is invariably ironic: she is always composed and resigned to her fate – and there is always a suggestion that there is more to the story than she cares to tell. There are affinities between Dietrich and Chinese actress Gong Li (as directed by Zhang Yimou). Both are physically robust, yet graceful and sensitive. And with both of them, there is the suggestion of strong passion that lurks just below the surface.

What makes the film an outstanding experience, though, is not so much the ironies of the characterizations, but the masterful visual expression of the story. It is a characteristic of von Sternberg’s films to portray the action events in elaborately shot, but brief and fast-paced impressionistic sequences, while the “relationship” scenes are lingering, more fully rounded explorations of human interaction. Von Sternberg switches back and forth in this fashion between (a) the exotic and ominous details of the journey, (b) the colorful and distracting prattle of the expatriate wayfarers, and (c) the anguish felt by the former lovers. This is all punctuated by the visual and aural motif of the steam-driven train relentlessly chugging towards the dark destiny that awaits them all (an effect that Von Sternberg similarly achieved in Morocco, with the legionnaires’ drumbeat incessantly signalling the dark forces pulling Legionnaire Brown away from Amy Jolly). In Shanghai Express it all comes together – a dark, romantic, expressionistic dream.
★★★★

"The Scarlet Empress" - Josef von Sternberg (1934)

Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) recounts the rise to power of Empress Catherine II of Russia (Catherine the Great). This was the sixth von Sternberg film that starred Marlene Dietrich and was the second time, after Dishonored (1931) in which she played a character modeled after Mata Hari, that he cast her as a a willful woman in a historically-based drama. Unlike the other Sternberg-Dietrich films, in which the focus is essentially on romantic love, The Scarlet Empress and Dishonored place a greater emphasis on historical melodrama (although, to be sure, Dietrich’s romantic persona is always given attention). This was perhaps von Sternberg’s most extravagant venture into the historical costume drama genre (in his own words, “a relentless excursion into style”), and the film’s most memorable aspects are certainly its lavish production values employing elaborate custom-designed sets and moodily sculpted cinematography. The overall effect of the intense mise-en-scene is the evocation of 18th century Russia, shrouded in the mysteries of semi-barbarism and unpredictable passions. Some reviewers criticized the film (it was not a financial success) for its overindulgence in visual expressionism, but, in my view, von Sternberg should have followed his instincts and gone even further in this direction. It was the failure to realize fully its expressionist potential by tolerating or encouraging some histrionics on the part of some of his cast that ultimately compromised the film.

The story is set during the years 1744-1762, when Catherine rose to power and became Empress of Russia and, though exaggerated in its tone, largely follows the historical record. The narrative has roughly four main sections, which do not fit smoothly together to form a perfectly coherent tale.

1. In the opening section, Catherine, born as Sophia Frederica, is shown as a young princess born into the minor family of the German aristocracy. In 1744, at the age of 15, she learns that she is to be betrothed to the crown prince of Russia (later Peter III), whom she has never met. She is to travel immediately to Moscow for the marriage. She is escorted on this trip by handsome Count Alexei, a character who may have been modeled after the real Count Alexei Grigorevich Razumovsky, who was an important figure in the Russian court and was a paramour of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, mother of the crown prince. This section primarily presents colorful backdrops associated with the seven-week journey to Moscow and the sudden change in circumstances of the young wide-eyed teenager.
2. In Moscow Sophia is forced to convert to the Russian Orthodox church and change her name to “Catherine”. When she meets the crown prince, her husband-to-be (who was actually about 16 years old at this time but is played by the 43-year-old Sam Jaffe), she discovers that he is far from handsome and behaves in a childish, foolish manner. This section covers the lavish trappings of the Russian court and the extensive ceremonial proceedings of their marriage. Not unexpectedly, the disappointed Catherine does not hit it off well with her new husband, and consequently the Empress, upon learning of this rebellious incompatibility, compels Catherine to become her personal servant in order to “learn how to be a proper Russian wife”. At this time Catherine has another disappointment when she learns that Count Alexei, towards whose private romantic entreaties she had felt a strong attraction, is actually the Empress’s secret lover. So far we are more than an hour into the film, and Catherine has been treated like a pretty slave, deprived of any autonomy and chances for future happiness.
3. In the third section, Catherine is shown taking on her own secret lovers, which ultimately leads to her giving birth to the desired son (in 1754), who will be the heir to the Russian throne. Having achieved some standing for this achievement in the royal court, Catherine cynically sets out on a course to pursue power of her own. This is actually a matter of survival, because Peter, who is portrayed as a savage half-wit, reveals his intentions of getting rid of her the moment that he ascends to the throne.
4. In 1762, the Empress dies, and as soon as Peter III becomes the czar, he issues a wave of cruel edicts that plunge the nation into violent chaos. Meanwhile Catherine is courting favor with the military and the Church in order to bolster her own political power. One of the lovers shown, Captain Orlov, was a real historical figure, and Catherine displays her new acquired toughness before her old crush, Count Alexei, by flaunting her romantic preference for Olov in front of him. The film ends with a dramatic coup d’etat by the military that overthrows and kills Peter and installs Catherine as the new empress of Russia.

It is certainly the principal virtue of The Scarlet Empress that it has some extraordinarily powerful and dramatic cinematography that almost overwhelms the viewer. The sets are utterly dark and gothic, decorated with candelabras, mysterious gargoyles, and strange gigantic architectural formations. There are numerous atmospheric processional scenes of court members moving through the cavernous palace in solemn observance to what seem to be semi-barbaric cultural rituals. The candle-lit gothic interiors, in fact, are some of von Sternberg’s most expressionistic realizations. Kenji Mizoguchi once remarked that von Sternberg was a major influence on his own style, and when viewing the interior tracking shots of The Scarlet Empress, one can see on display a foreshadowing of some of Mizoguchi’s ingenious camera style.

All of these beautifully shot scenes have their evocative effectiveness, to be sure, but they are essentially set pieces that can amplify, but not fully constitute, an effective narrative. In the case of The Scarlet Empress, there are shortcomings in the other areas of (a) acting and (b) the narrative, itself, that ultimately prove fatal to the movie achieving the status of a masterpiece.

Acting.
There are two insuperable thespian catastrophes in the film that cannot be overcome by any degree of cinematography. The first problem was the disastrous miscasting of Louise Dresser as Empress Elizabeth. Although Dresser was an established character actress, her homespun American Midwestern accent (from Indiana) is utterly wrong for a member of the Russian court. Her verbal style and cornfed mannerisms are more appropriate to Ma Kettle than they are to a queen, and they are deadly to the sustenance of audience immersion in a dark expressionistic fantasy.

Equally alarming is the performance of Sam Jaffe, in his first film appearance, as the crown prince, Peter. Jaffe later got an Oscar nomination for his performance in The Asphalt Jungle (1950), but his performance here is disturbingly off-key. It might be possible to portray Peter as a man of limited intelligence, but Jaffe’s portrayal is so full of leering and wild, manic grimaces that one can only conclude that it was played for laughs. In fact the image of Harpo Marx is almost impossible to drive from one’s mind while watching the film. This ludicrous performance has led some critics to commend it as an early form of high camp, but it is ruinous to any audience involvement in the story. When Dietrich provides innuendo and irony, she usually manages to stay within the scope of the drama. But Jaffe is so over-the-top that all suspension of disbelief is destroyed.

For her part, Marlene Dietrich’s performance is overly constrained, because there is little dramatic range available to her. In Sections 1 and 2, she has to play an innocent 15-year-old, so she can do little more than offer pretty, wide-eyed glances of astonishment. Later on, she has a few better moments, but there are no opportunities for the display of nuance or romantic passion.

Narrative.
The success of any film is crucially dependent on the degree to which the narrative is compelling. In this film, the choppy set pieces fail to maintain a narrative rhythm. In all of the other von Sternberg films with Marlene Dietrich, there is a highly romantic theme that carries the story. In these cases, there are usually two men interested in the Dietrich character, one of whom is a handsome, arrogant, and selfish lothario, while the other is a sensitive gentleman with less obviously prepossessing charms. Dietrich often falls at first for the lothario-type alpha male, but the audience knows that the sensitive gentleman offers her a better long-term chance at happiness. (Critics usually assume that the sensitive gentleman character is an embodiment of von Sternberg’s own civilized sensibilities.) In all these movies, the interest is to watch the dialectic involving this triangle. In The Scarlet Empress, there is again the handsome stud, in this case Count Alexei. But the competing, less impressive, suitor is not a sensitive gentleman in this film, but is, instead, a cruel lunatic. Some people have sensed some metaphorical overtones concerning the evolution of the Dietrich-von-Sternberg relationship in this, but we will not speculate about that here. All we can say is that an interesting romantic dialectic never takes shape in this film.

In fact, there is only a tease. After 87 minutes of film, with the tiresome Empress Elizabeth finally permanently out of earshot, it appears that Count Alexei and Catherine will finally get together for a tryst. But when Alexei, by now thoroughly smitten, finally gets his chance to go to her bedchamber, Catherine sadistically taunts him by employing him as a messenger to summon her new lover, Captain Orlov.

Incidentally, the sturdy he-man, Count Alexei, was played by John Lodge, a scion of the prominent Bostonian family who later served as the governor of the State of Connecticut. His forceful presence supplies some useful dramaturgical weight early in the piece, but it disappointingly fades away to insignificance in the last half of the film. As a consequence, there is never any real, romantic passion shown in this film – only the numerous sardonic references to people using each other as sexual playthings. This may amuse, but it does not captivate.

The political and characterological dialectic doesn’t take much shape, either. In Section 3 of the narrative, Catherine’s transition from naive ingenue to cynical political string-puller, which is the key turning of the story, happens rather quickly and without clear motivation.

Conclusion.
While The Scarlet Empress was a stunning spectacle, it was the least successful of the seven films that von Sternberg made with Dietrich. One can watch the cinematographic dazzle with a certain degree of wonder, but that is all. The delirious dream of romantic passion, of which von Sternberg is capable, is not summoned before the viewer on this occasion. But the von Sternberg and Dietrich magic was to return in their next and last outing, The Devil is a Woman.
★★★

"Blonde Venus" - Josef von Sternberg (1932)

Josef von Sternberg’s fifth film starring Marlene Dietrich, Blonde Venus (1932), is another one of his great expressionist fantasies. Like most of von Sternberg’s work, the film is highly romantic and features a melodramatic plot that stretches all credibility. Yet von Sternberg’s unique mise-en-scene pulls the viewer into a delirious world of romantic passions and their entangled worldly involvements that ultimately overcomes the ordinary demands for strict realism. As with others of his films, such as Morocco and Shanghai Express, you must approach Blonde Venus as you might an opera or a poem and allow yourself to succumb to its charms.

The never-more-alluring Dietrich gives one of her best performances, and her two male co-stars, Herbert Marshall and Cary Grant (in one of his first major appearances) also perform admirably, despite being cast in somewhat stereotyped roles. Other memorable performances include child star Dickie Moore, and the character actor Robert Emmett O'Connor. Despite von Sternberg’s penchant for moody, lingering scenes that define and shift key interpersonal relationships, the plot covers a lot of ground, along with dramatic ups and downs, in reasonably short order. Here is an outline of the films sections:

1. Forest Flirtation in Europe. American students hiking in a German forest encounter some women theatrical performers swimming in the nude. One of them, Ned, engages in a jaunty, flirtatious conversation with a pretty bather, Helen.
2. Married in New York. The story cuts quickly to a scene about six years later showing Ned, a nuclear chemist, and his housewife, Helen, now married and with a five-year-old son, Johnny. Ned has recently suffered radiation poisoning and has only months to live, unless he can find $1500 (roughly $25,000 today) for some new experimental treatment available in Germany. To raise the money, Helen goes back onto the stage as a cabaret singer, performing as the “Blonde Venus”. She is an immediate hit when she performs the jungle-rhythm jazz song “Hot Voodoo” (one of the three songs she sings in the film). In fact she is such a hit that she attracts the amorous attentions of suave millionaire, Nick Townsend (Grant), who immediately gives Helen the money to send Ned overseas for the treatment.
3. Helen and Nick in NYC. With Ned away for six months, Helen is unable to resist Nick Townsend's dazzling charms and becomes his mistress. Meanwhile Ned has been cured in Europe and returns a couple of weeks earlier than expected, upon which he discovers Helen’s infidelity. Enraged, he orders her out. She grabs Johnny and takes flight on the train.
4. Helen and Johnny on the Road. For the next thirteen minutes Helen and Johnny are only a step ahead of the Bureau of Missing Persons (Ned wants Johnny back) as they move from one town to another. Sometimes Helen gets some performing gigs, but she slips more and more into destitution and desperation. Eventually, the police catch up with her, and she has to surrender Johnny. Helen, now penniless, homeless, and with a scandalous reputation, has reached rock bottom and has turned to prostitution and alcohol.
5. Helen and Nick in Europe. But somehow Helen pulls herself together, and in a dramatic turn she manages to get to Paris and to revive her singing career. Soon she is a big cabaret star again – the “Blonde Venus” is back. Nick, having earlier fled to Europe to forget about Helen, shows up to one her shows, and in no time they are lovers again. He knows that she misses her son, though, and offers to bring her back to New York so she can be close to him.
6. Finale in New York. Back in New York, Nick escorts Helen back to her old apartment, where the still bitter Ned doesn’t want her to see his son. But after a nasty exchange, he relents, and watches as the boy responds to his mother's tenderness. In a touching final scene, Johnny triggers the suppressed affections that Ned has for his wife, and the two become reconciled.

Consider the dramatic changes in Helen’s fortunes over the course of the narrative. In section 1, she is an entertainer in Germany and probably a star. In section 2, she has been just a housewife in a lower middle-class family for six years, but then returns to the stage and becomes a big star again. In sections 3 and 4, Helen is gradually reduced to penury and shame. In section 5 she is a big star again, and in section 6, she goes back to being a housewife. These events are presented over a cinematic narrative that has amazingly dramatic speedups and slowdowns over the course of its 93 minutes. For example, the tender scenes with Ned, Helen, and Johnny are evocatively slow moving (the final scene lasts nine minutes). And there are three rousing Dietrich cabaret numbers also presented in the film (in sections 2, 4, and 5) that take up about a dozen minutes. But the dramatic circumstantial rises to glory can be covered quickly, because the main focus of the story is not so much on Helen’s position in society, but on the way she engages in personal relationships.

It is worth remarking, for those unfamiliar, that Marlene Dietrich’s sultry singing style, with its husky voice and allusions to untamed desire, was unique. It musically expresses the mysterious nature of her magnetism. In von Sternberg’s films Dietrich is always the quintessential embodiment of feminine irony, with an intuitive compass that questions all rules and conventions. There are always those sly, watchful eyes, which mask deep unknowable and unquenchable passions. Most of her songs in these films reflect a carefree acceptance of her never-ending susceptibility to love and to falling in love. Of all her songs, my all-time favorite Dietrich song is in this film, “You Little So-and-So”, which is performed while she is on the road in Section 4, and it is so enchanting that I reprise the lyrics here:

"You Little So-and-So"

It isn’t often that I want a man
But when I do, it’s just too bad
I know you’re acting hard to get, and yet
I’ve got the feeling you can be had.

You, so-and-so, you little so-and-so
Look what you’ve done to me
You’re almost twice as bad as... Who’s this again?
I ought to take you out and .... How have you been?

You, this-and-that, you got me you-know-what
Is that the way to be?
The Greeks have words for almost every thing I know,
But you little so-and-so.

You, so-and-so, you little so-and-so
How did you get this way?
Although you know that I have lost my control
You sit and talk about my beautiful soul.

You, this-and-that, you’ve got me you-know-what
Is that the way to be?
The Greeks have words for almost every thing I know,
But you little so-and-so.

Apart from Dietrich’s specific seductive charms, however, what makes Blonde Venus particularly interesting is the perspective it takes on her character, Helen Faraday. It is a focus on life from the woman’s point of view, but as with Mizoguchi and Bergman, it is a presentation as seen and interpreted by a sympathetic male, which encompasses not only elements of compassion, but also of admiration and wonder. In the eyes of conventional society (and also those of her husband Ned), Helen an immoral hedonist. As soon as she was out of the sight of her husband, she succumbed to the charms and money of a notorious seducer. Then she kidnapped her son and exposed him to the dangers and improprieties of her notorious life on the road, while she descended into prostitution and drunkenness. She managed to return to stardom by “using” one man after another (presumably in return for sexual favours). When Nick Townsend visits her backstage dressing room in Paris (Section 5), he sees handwritten on her mirror Kipling’s famous line and apparently Helen’s new credo: “Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels fastest who travels alone.” Yes, it's a grim picture of a fallen woman, but thanks to von Sternberg’s coloring, we see things quite differently. From the romantic slant as presented, we get a more sympathetic feeling how all these terrible things came about.

What we see is that Helen was a loving and selfless mother who returned to the stage in Section 2 in order to help save her husband’s life. True, she was overwhelmed by the charms of Nick Townsend, but he was basically a gentleman and irresistibly attractive, as well. She vowed to break off the relationship and return to her husband, but her husband angrily threw her out. Her powerful attachment to her son drove her to take him with her, and she thereafter strove at all times to offer him what only a mother can give to a child. In all her circumstances she tried her best, given the limited resources that were available to her. But when she is finally hauled before a judge for vagrancy, she confesses society’s stern judgement: that she is “just no good.” But we don’t think so. As with the women in Mizoguchi’s films, we see the world from their angle.

Helen’s husband, Ned, has the typical attitudes dominated by the conventional mores of society. The man must be in control. Ned doesn’t want his wife to work, at all. When made aware of her affair with Nick, he sees her as a bad mother. When Nick finally offers him $10,000 to let her see Johnny, Ned stubbornly retains his autonomy: he will cast aside the money and let Helen see Johnny for nothing. This is his final act of defiance. Throughout the film, Ned wants to retain some degree of control. But in von Sternberg’s romantic universe, one must accept love absolutely and unconditionally, and this is what Ned ultimately does. This is what true love demands. In the final scene, Ned responds to his true, passionate love for Helen and embraces her. He never gets an apology or an explanation. What he does get is that final look in her eyes.
★★★★