Domestic Dietrich
Author: Ron Oliver (revilorest@juno.com) from Forest Ranch, CA
20 May 2005
Billed as The BLONDE VENUS, a sultry German cabaret singer will do anything to save her sick husband and care for their child.
Acting under the flamboyant direction of her mentor, Josef von Sternberg, legendary Marlene Dietrich fascinates as a tender mother fiercely protecting her small child, who spends her evenings as a seductive stage siren, captivating audiences in America & France. She is equally good in both postures, her perfect face registering deep maternal love and sphinx-like allure. Dietrich is incredibly gentle crooning an old German lullaby at her son's bedside, while the contrasting image of her emerging from an ape suit to sing 'Hot Voodoo' in a nightclub is one of the Pre-Code Era's most bizarre images.
Two British actors compete for Marlene's attention. Distinguished Herbert Marshall, with a voice like liquid honey, is ideally cast as Dietrich's conflicted husband. Playing a chemist poisoned by radium, his face reveals his humiliation at having to be supported by his wife; later, he manifests pent-up rage when he discovers her 'betrayal.' Cary Grant, just on the cusp of becoming a major film star, plays a powerful political boss whose arrogance mellows as he pursues Dietrich's affections.
Little Dickie Moore, one of the OUR GANG members, is terrific as the infant son who is the bridge between Dietrich & Marshall. Here was a kid who could really act and tug at the viewer's heartstrings. Sidney Toler is amusing as a low-key detective. Gene Morgan, as a talent agent, and Robert Emmett O'Connor, as a theater owner, very realistically portray denizens from the sleazy underbelly of the entertainment world.
Movie mavens will spot some fine performers in unbilled cameos: silly Sterling Holloway as one of the student hikers in the first sequence who discovers Marlene skinny-dipping in the forest; Clarence Muse as a stuttering bartender; dear Mary Gordon as Marshall's informative landlady; big Dewey Robinson as a gruff greasy spoon owner; wonderful Hattie McDaniel as Dietrich's New Orleans maid; and prim Marcelle Corday as Marlene's maid in Paris.
Paramount gave the film lavish, and slightly decadent, production values. The live chickens flapping about in Dietrich's apartment during the French Quarter sequence are a nice touch.
Marlene Dietrich is spellbinding as a woman who takes her son and flees her jealous husband who threatens to take him away. The husband (Herbert Marshall) goes to Europe for his health, but on the money Dietrich makes as the Blonde Venus. When he finds out she's also had an affair with Cary Grant, he goes ballistic. Thin plot has Marshall sending detectives around the world to follow Dietrich as she sinks lower and lower. She finally gives up the boy and returns to nightclub stardom. All ends well. Dietrich sings a few songs along the way and looks gorgeous, but it's her "Hot Voodoo" number, emerging from a gorilla suit via a slow strip, that is sexy and mesmerizing. The storyline is not terribly logical, but hell ... it's Marlene Dietrich doing what she did best: hypnotizing her audience with glamorous, allure, and wit.
3 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Dietrich 101
Author: allaboutlana from United States
15 February 2010
This Dietrich film throws in everything but the kitchen sink (and I'm not too sure that's not in there, too) for the sake of entertainment. If you've never seen Marlene Dietrich before and start your Dietrich 101 with this, then most others will pale in comparison.
The story revolves her and husband Herbert Marshall and how they met, which plays a pivotal part of the film throughout. Soon after their marriage and having a sweet little boy, played by actor Dickie Moore, scientist Herbert gets sick due to exposure to a chemical in his experiments. In order to be cured, they need money for his surgery. So she goes back to being a performer, which she quit to be a wife and mother, and Herbert reluctantly acquiesces.
This film manages credibility by all of the stars' sincere and heartfelt acting, including a young Cary Grant, and a fast-moving script. Scandal, deception and lies, jealousy, twists and turns, a mother's love, and a gorilla make this Dietrich film a true essential to cinema history. If you haven't seen "Blonde Venus," then you've not truly appreciated Marlene Dietrich.
27 out of 31 people found the following review useful:
Solid Film Deserves Being On DVD
Author: ccthemovieman-1 from United States
22 September 2005
This was a very interesting story.....one of the best in the early era of sound. The only negative was that even though time passed, nobody - including the 6-year- old boy (Dickie Moore) - aged!
There were a few other things that didn't make sense, either, but the film is so captivating that one can ignore the gaffs and still really enjoy this. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, is mesmerizing at times. She could - except for those stupid 1930s pencil-thin eyebrows - look absolutely stunning. Make no mistake: she's alluring.
All the lead characters in here did their parts well and Moore, who gained fame as one of the "Little Rascals," is particularly endearing.
The adults, however, all have character flaws: a married Dietrich runs off with a wealthy young Cary Grant while her husband (Herbert Marshall) is off in Europe being treated for radium poisoning. Marshall is understandably bitter when he returns to find out what his wife was up to, but is too hard-hearted about letting his wife see the kid. Grant, of course, is an adulterer.
Despite this soap opera premise, the movie almost plays like a film noir, with sharp dialog, great cinematography and tough characters.
This is another great classic film that, for some reason, is still not available on DVD and deserves to be.
2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Pure and simply, Art!
Author: Gary170459 from Derby, UK
20 December 2013
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
This is the Marlene Dietrich film which opens with six supposedly naked women swimming and later her stripping out of the bulky gorilla suit on stage to sing a gauche incomprehensible number. Having got those admittedly interesting bits out of the way what we have here is an incredibly well made work of Art from Paramount's wonder year of 1932, complete with problems but so simple that it defies any meaningful criticism.
Herbert Marshall contracts some radioactive disease, his devoted wife Dietrich as ex nightclub singer knows how to raise the enormous sum of USD 300 to send him to Europe to be cured – and Cary Grant as a rich politician is implied to be the lucky guy! This eventually leads to a falling out and Dietrich and son are on the run from Marshall. It's a simple pre-Code soap opera directed by Josef von Sternberg, who managed to impart an atmosphere, majesty and his usual Code of Ethics to the proceedings that set it apart from most of the others from the time. Every actor is at the top of their game from Dietrich down to the uncredited Hattie McDaniel, the production values fantastic, with photography, posing and lighting thoughtful and gleaming at all times. Marshalls' beetling blackening brows were never used to greater dramatic effect than in here; Sternberg already knew how best to portray Dietrich. Favourite bits: the almost unbelievable elegance and style of Dietrich and Grant and the interior of his house when Marshall was away – a masterclass of film making in ninety seconds, but unfortunately immediately followed by a rather clumsy back projection; You Little So And So by Whiting & Robin droned by Dietrich at the elegant Star Club; the frank scenes in New Orleans with the skinny and hopeful Sidney Toler; the charming inevitable climax but enigmatic ending.
It's a straightforward love and honour tale handled so expertly the ninety minutes fly by. I do wonder sometimes how Sternberg would film this and his other classics if he could return today; I probably know my answer to this but could the complex technology and looser morals of today lead him to make a better film, or should we be grateful for the simpler technology and greater knowledge of and adherence to a moral code that could help produce such wondrous films like this?
2 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
A glimpse into what film could have been
Author: timmy_501 from United States
16 September 2011
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
Josef Von Sternberg's films of the 1930s are some of the most unique ever made. Sternberg was one of the most promising directors of the 1920s, but of course there was a paradigm shift with the advent of sound near the end of the decade, causing most filmmakers to abandon the experimental cinematic techniques so instrumental to the most successful silent films. Dialogue heavy films in which visuals took a backseat to plot and characterization became the norm. Sternberg seems to have been the only director to integrate sound successfully into his normal filmmaking routine without completely changing his style. Thus, in a film like Blonde Venus Sternberg still employed his slick editing techniques and Impressionistic camera tricks such as superimpositions. As simple as this sounds, it's quite off-putting to see a film like this when expecting the relatively primitive filmmaking techniques of the popular films of the 1930s.
While Sternberg naturally evolved his style and progressed through the '30s in his own way, nearly every other filmmaker regressed to a more stagy film style. It's for this reason that Sternberg's films of the 1930s look so different: this is an offshoot of film evolution that unfortunately didn't have much influence on contemporary films; what you see when you watch Sternberg's films from this era is the style that films could have moved toward if the retreat to the old dramatic forms hadn't occurred.
So, what makes Blonde Venus off-putting? Well, in spite of its relative lack of length (it's only ninety-minutes long) a lot of ground is covered in this film. There's a love triangle established early on which is resolved almost before it's fully formed and the plot doesn't slow down as a character goes from riches to rags and becomes a fugitive from justice in just a few moments; in fact, things just speed up from there and in twenty minutes or so there's a manhunt that stretches across several states, several close brushes with the law, and a dramatic showdown about child custody before the character hits bottom, heads to Europe, and quickly vaults back to riches again. This is the sort of plot that would never be told in less than twice this amount of time today, in fact I've seen entire seasons of television shows with less plot packed into them. Throughout all this, Sternberg's visual panache guarantees the viewer's interest and, at the same time, narrative coherence is easily maintained. There's even some good thematic material here about self-sacrifice and women's roles in the period.
Like most of Sternberg's films from this decade, Blonde Venus offers an embarrassment of riches when compared to its contemporaries in spite of a pacing style that will be difficult for viewers used to (non- Sternberg) films for this era to adjust to. For a viewer with a bit of context, this is a wonderful glimpse at what film could have been.
In his fourth film with Marlene Dietrich, Josef von Sternberg recovered part of the frenetic passion of "The Blue Angel", and although he did not reach the drama of that cruel tale of obsession, he took his muse away from the parodies of an African adventure in "Morocco", or the Chinese affair in "Shanghai Express", if Marlene still insisted on placing her hands on her hips as a bodybuilder. In "Blonde Venus", she is again a German singer who has been domesticated by her marriage to an American chemist (Herbert Marshall, in one of the victim roles he specialized in, usually with Bette Davis as his nemesis). However she is soon back on stage when her husband gets sick for being continuously exposed to radium, and has to receive an expensive treatment in Germany. After a great and funky musical number in which she first struts around the cabaret wearing a gorilla suit, and later seduces the audience with her singing, Marlene obtains in the night of her debut the moneys for the trip and treatment, from the hands of a young and handsome politician (Cary Grant), with whom she has an intense romance, while the husband is abroad. The main course this time is poor Marlene's decadence and her eventual rebirth: there is a bit of sadism in covering her with glitter from head to toe, and then make her wear torn, cheap clothes; and we are certainly a masochist audience watching such an outrage. Although there are even a few aquatic shots of naked girls in this tale of moral decay, the influence of the nefarious censor Will H. Hays was already felt, so Marlene goes back to Marshall's bland arms and to their little son (the unbearable Dickie Moore), and leaves Grant, with whom she surely had a very good time, but… she and Sternberg could not beat the "good customs" of the day. In any case there is a lot here to enjoy, so have a good time, but prepare your handkerchief or buy yourself a pack of Kleenex.
14 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
One of Dietrich's best
Author: Yngvar Myrvold from Tonsberg, Norway
6 December 1998
Josef von Sternberg would, no doubt, dismiss this film as one of his lesser works. Yet, to me,"Blonde Venus" sort of defines his relationship with Marlene Dietrich. The combined attraction of the harlot-mother gives Marlene's acting both sexual radiance and that intimate, moody quality that is so unique to her.
Just watch her in the scenes with her baby boy. She is lovely, glamorous, yet totally attentive to the child's needs, protective and unselfconscious in a way that only Carole Lombard (see "Made for each other" for evidence) managed back in those days. Her presence is so strong that she makes the male stars seem awkward and rigid. Herbert Marshall looks ill at ease, (probably from lack of directorial attention) while Cary Grant sails through the movie, unblessed by inspiration.
This is Marlene's film, through and through. The plot is silly beyond words (suffering in mink, writ large!) but Marlene makes it memorable. Her close-ups in the scene at the railway-station when she realizes she has lost her family tells it all. A lost soul with nowhere to go but down. Von Sternberg (or some intrusive producer) tacked on a happy ending, but the movie really ended there, on a bench. The rest is just wish-fulfilment.
11 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
One of Dietrich's best and a great love story
Author: chinaskee from United States
29 September 2002
This is Marlene Dietrich at her best. From reading the reviews here all I can say is there's a whole lot of people in this world who are way too cynical. Marlene Dietrich and Herbert Marshall loved each other in this film, for crying out loud. There is no other way this movie could have or should have ended, without seeming contrived and false. And maybe Marlene Dietrich couldn't sing. So what ? The only actress in cinema movie history who ever rivaled her in sex appeal was Greta Garbo. This is a great movie.
