Notes on my Favorite Films (Year By Year) Morocco (1930)

While The Blue Angel is far and away the better of the two films Josef Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made in 1930, my heart has always belonged to their first Hollywood production Morocco. After all, this is the film that introduced one of the most legendary teams in film history to many filmgoers. Morocco is also the work that announced that Von Sternberg and Dietrich viewed the art of film as much more than a medium to just tell a story. This was one of the truly great CINEMATIC teams in history and Morocco served as a forceful 'get on board or get out of our way' statement that intentionally abandoned so called 'substance' for a 'style' that has been copied many times over but never recaptured.




While The Blue Angel was extremely stylish and contained many of the elements that would come to define the team of Von Sternberg and Dietrich, Morocco took their visual and thematic obsessions to a whole new level. Abandoning anything resembling a realistic storyline and believable plot developments, Morocco is a seething hyper-real fantasy placing the stunning seductively strange Dietrich in the dominant sexual role while her co-star Gary Cooper is, for the first half of the film at least, placed in a more subversive spot. If the over the top ending of Dietrich following Cooper into the desert betrays this trailblazing gender bending attitude of the first half of the film it can be viewed as more of Hollywood's fault than Von Sternbergs. Indeed he and Dietrich would continue to push the envelope more and more with follow-up works like Shanghai Express and The Scarlett Empress.




Shot in an erotic black and white haze by cinematographer Lee Garmes, Morocco still packs quite a juicing wallop eighty years after its release. I still have a vivid memory of seeing the film once on the big screen and literally coming out of the theater in a total daze due to Von Sternberg's astonishingly original direction and Dietrich's stunning sexuality, a potent mixture of the demure and ferocious that seemed like it could make even the screen melt.
Marlene, who could barely speak English at the time, was nominated for Best Actress at that year's Academy Awards but lost to Marie Dressler in the mostly forgotten Min and Bill. Von Sternberg was also nominated, and lost, for Best Director. Never mind the Oscars though as Morocco still survives and still pulsates with a feverish creative heartbeat few films could even hope to approach. Morocco is ridiculous yes, but also masterful and totally sublime. Finally I suspect that even Von Sternberg would have admitted that the film is ultimately about his star and, WOW, what a star! Viewing, or even just thinking about the film to this day still leaves me breathlessly exclaiming, "Marlene, Marlene, Marlene"...

Death is Not the End: Karen Elson's The Ghost Who Walks

A dazzling musical collision between The Bad Seeds, Marlene Dietrich and Hank Williams, Karen Elson's wonderfully hypnotic The Ghost Who Walks is one of the first truly great albums of this very young decade. Far from being a vanity project from a beautiful model, Elson's album is a truly bewitching and absolutely compelling work that shows her as an artist of massive talent who should have a very long career in music ahead of her.
Born in the early part of 1979 in Oldham, England, the striking red-headed Elson began her career as a model, while she was a teenager, and immediately became a favorite of many top designers ranging from Marc Jacobs to Jean-Paul Gaultier. As far from the stereotypical air-headed super-model as possible, Elson has been dabbling in music, film and art since she first began to really make a name for herself in the early parts of the last decade.
A gifted vocalist and songwriter, Elson really began paving her way in the muisc industry with her acclaimed time in the ambitious New York Cabaret troupe The Citizens Band. Wowing audiences and critics with her delicious vocal renditions of songs from the catalogues of everyone from The Velvet Underground to Elvis Presley, Elson caught the attention of artists like Robert Plant and Cat Power (both of whom she lent her unforgettable vocal chops to).



While her skills as a great song interrupter weren't in question, few knew just how solid a songwriter Elson was becoming during this time. Not even husband Jack White, who Elson met when she appeared in The White Stripes stunning Floria Sigismondi "Blue Orchid" video, until he heard her one day singing one of her songs in private in their Nashville home. Urged on by his excitement at her material, Elson took the major step of preparing an album and, with White and several other top musicians on board, The Ghost Who Walks began to come together last year.
Taking a cue from nickname she had in her school days, Elson's The Ghost Who Walks is a really wonderful debut work that features beautifully inventive (and yet wisely understated) production from White, a dozen beautifully designed songs, a top of the line band and Elson firing on all cylinders as creative leader. The Ghost Who Walks is one of the first albums of this decade (along with The Sleigh Bells debut) that feels like it has a legitimate shot at becoming a classic. Its freewheeling spirit is absolutely refreshing among the deliberately plastic and robotic pop that is currently controlling the summer's releases.

While the album is remarkably consistent as a whole there are some definite highlights, including the stunning opening set of songs that recall the Murder Ballads of Cave and Cash, as well as the poetic collaborations between Exene Cervenka and Lydia Lunch. The album's title track and first single, "The Ghost Who Walks" opens with a bit that sounds like Donald Rubinstein's Martin score before coming out blazing with Dean Fertita's commanding guitar and organ work and Elson's beautiful vocal that is both seductive and menacing. Equally as powerful are the follow-up tracks, the bruising "The Truth is in the Ground" and the swampy "Pretty Babies". Elson is a commanding lead throughout but White never lets the band get lost in the mix, especially Carl Broemel whose gorgeous sounding pedal steel guitar is present on over half the album's tracks.

While the album has a definite country and rockabilly sound throughout, a couple of the most remarkable tracks show the influence of German composer Kurt Weill and obvious Elson influence Marlene Dietrich, such as "A Hundred Years From Now" which would have been right at home in a Von Sternberg film as re-imagined by David Lynch. The Velvet Underground and Nico's influence can also be felt, but what is more remarkable than the wide variety of influences on the album is Elson's ability to mix them up and make them her own. The Ghost Who Walks is the kind of truly great Americana record that only someone from outside the country could deliver.



Elson's debut only slightly slips on a couple of tracks that are more straightforward country than anything else, such as "Lunasa" and "The Last Laugh". They are far from bad songs though, they just feel slightly limp when placed beside such powerfully strange and adventurous songs like "The Birds They Circle" and the powerhouse closer, "Mouths to Feed." Elson offers a quote by Anais Nin in The Ghost Who Walks' liner notes and, like Nin's best works, Karen's debut is a wildly seductive and original vision from a clearly talented artist. I really can't wait to hear and see what she comes up with next.

Overlooked Classics: Dishonored

Jean-Luc Godard adored it, Pauline Kael despised it and MGM was so threatened by its success that they offered not one but two Greta Garbo films to answer it. Yet, for all of its power, Dishonored, the third collaboration from the legendary team of Josef Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich has hardly been seen by an entire generation due to Universal’s shameful mishandling of the old Paramount titles in its collection.
Dishonored was the follow up film to the wildly successful Morocco, a film that had introduced most American audiences to the stunning screen presence of Marlene Dietrich and the unmistakable cinematic styling of Von Sternberg. If the German produced The Blue Angel had announced them at the door a few years earlier, then Morocco had completely kicked it down and in 1931 Marlene Dietrich was threatening to overtake Garbo as the premiere European screen Goddess that American film fans were clamoring to see.
The third Dietrich and Von Sternberg film is a spy drama based loosely on the life of Mata-Hari. Dietrich portrays Marie, an Austrian prostitute renamed X-27 after she is inducted as a spy in the Austrian army to infiltrate the life of a certain Russian Colonel named Kranau, played by Victor Mclaglen.

The film is taken from a script by Von Sternberg and a playwright named Daniel Nathan Rubin but this is after all a Von Sternberg film so who really cares about the script? I was a bit surprised to see the script’s weaknesses being complained about in Kael’s original review as frankly when I am watching a Von Sternberg-Dietrich film the last thing I am thinking of is logic or plot progression. Von Sternberg’s films are some of the most thrilling visually one can experience and Marlene Dietrich is one of the great figures to ever appear on a screen so let the rather flimsy plot of Dishonored be dammed, this is a thrilling visual feast for the eyes that feels as inventive and fresh today as it did almost eighty years ago.
With the moody black and white photography of Oscar winning Lee Garmes, the near fetishistic and obsessive art direction by un-credited Oscar winner Hans Dreier and the jaw dropping costume designs for Dietrich by Travis Banton, Dishonored is a real top of the line production that is controlled at every turn by the fixated director and his overwhelmingly powerful muse.

Von Sternberg made a dozen or so films before he met Dietrich and a few after but today is it hard to imagine his lens without her. The two were one of the most thrilling and perfectly suited teams in Hollywood history and Dishonored is one of their major, if often overlooked, works. With its dreamlike super-impositions that connect nearly every scene and its strong feminist attitude, Dishonored must have felt absolutely shocking in its look and attitude to audience goers back in 1931.
Dietrich is particularly fascinating in this role and it is indeed one of the first that really gives notice on how great of an actress she really was. Attempting to build a character for Von Sternberg couldn’t have been easy but Marlene delivers a stirring one here, a woman totally convicted to her country, her countrymen and most importantly herself. While at times she is absolutely playing to Von Sternberg’s camera, one can almost hear him screaming at her behind the scenes, the film is at its most remarkable when she is allowed to be at her most subtle, as in the moments where she is sitting at her piano playing or pausing to lightly pet her cat who goes everywhere with her. Dishonored was the first film that allowed Marlene Dietrich the actress the truly come into her own, and that alone makes its current missing in action status all the more regretful.

The rest of the cast manages to get devoured by Dietrich at nearly every turn so they hardly register. Kranau was originally supposed to be played by Gary Cooper, who wanted no more of Von Sternberg after Morocco, and it is a shame the role went to Mclaglen as Cooper was one of the few who could hold his own with Dietrich. Recognizable face Lew Cody does some good work in the film and is worth noting but the picture finally belongs completely to Dietrich, whether she is silently sitting in her apartment or posing as a dimwitted maid in the late part of the picture. Dishonored is a near one-woman show from the opening credits to its much discussed and rather shocking closing scene.

The film, which rather forcefully questions accepted political and sexual boundaries in nearly every scene, opened up to a surprisingly strong audience and critical reaction in the spring of 1931. The success of the film prompted Paramount to let Von Sternberg and Dietrich go even further into the strangeness with their follow up productions, Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934) and The Devil Is A Woman (1935). MGM panicked when they saw Dishonored’s box office returns and sent Garbo quickly into production on the exceptional Susan Lennox: Her Rise and Fall in an attempt to show that the Swedish sphinx was as versatile as Dietrich. A year later Garbo would make her own X-27 film with Mata-Hari, a production that has nowhere near the power, style or innovation of Dishonored.
Dishonored appeared briefly on home video in the mid nineties as a part of the Marlene Dietrich collection on VHS and I believe Laserdisc. It has never had a DVD release in America although imports are available. The Blue Angel and The Scarlet Empress are both available as rather disappointing special editions from Kino and Criterion respectively and the other films, outside of Dishonored, are available in an affordable but bare bones Marlene Dietrich Signature Collection from Universal.

Notes on my Favorite Films (Year By Year) Morocco (1930)

While The Blue Angel is far and away the better of the two films Josef Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made in 1930, my heart has always belonged to their first Hollywood production Morocco.