Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Scarlet Empress / USA / 1934

Whenever I watch a Sternberg film I have to keep reminding myself to pay closer attention (than I’m usually apt) to the style and presentation of images – particularly, icons of its historical period and how Sternberg implements them. Otherwise, I’m liable to drift off to sleep. Marlene Dietrich is awful. Oh, she’s beautiful, luminous, ravenous and bewitching for a chambermaid. But as Catherine The Great, she’s a wet noodle. As the idiot Grand Duke Peter, Sam Jaffe, though tiresome with his grinning gnome act, is far more compelling than the almost imbecilic Dietrich who seemingly stumbles her way into power as the first whore of Russia. The movie offers very little else to ponder unless one wants to consider the variations of horse stampedes up (or down) palace staircases. It’s a supremely over-the-top period piece that goes on for much too long. For a more cogent analysis see Beth’s review.

by Marlin Tyree | Source: The Criterion Collection DVD
05 Feb 2007 6:09 PM | Comments (3)

Comments / 3 total / Submit Comment

1. leo / 5 February 2007 / 4:26 PM / URL

   To me, calling acting in von Sternberg “awful” is like saying the same of acting in Kubrick or Dreyer. That’s to say that it’s true, the acting is awful, but it’s pointedly so. This was never better illustrated than in von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, in which von Sternberg directed his actors to deliver their lines in monotone, noting that, as the film’s action takes place on a train, everyone should speak like one.

   Suffice it to say that von Sternberg had some rather odd ideas about acting, but it’s perfectly in line with his idiosyncratic approach to cinema from the very beginning. It’s merely an extension of his emphasis on mise-en-scene and composition in order to create meaning, rather than drama or dialogue. And in The Scarlet Empress (as I think I noted in my comment on Beth’s review), this works perfectly to chart Dietrich’s passage from a bizarre, almost robotic naïf (the very antithesis of the Dietrich model) into an immensely powerful and thoroughly trapped figure (the very essence of the Dietrich model). All of this only really becomes clear in the context of the other films in von Sternberg’s Dietrich cycle, and while I’m not convinced it works nearly as well as Morocco or Blonde Venus, I would argue that The Scarlet Empress is truly one of Hollywood’s great political films (and from an avowedly apolitical director, too). Rather than take the usual biopic tack of looking at “the man behind the myth,” it unites the historical figure and the myth she perpetuated, utterly blurring the sexual and the political, the private and the public, in an allegorical fantasia, equating the nation-state with the female body in its own odd and thoroughly persuasive manner. In this way, it might make a nice double feature with The Queen.

2. tyree / 6 February 2007 / 2:21 PM

   Leo said:

   …it [The Scarlet Empress] unites the historical figure and the myth she perpetuated, utterly blurring the sexual and the political, the private and the public, in an allegorical fantasia, equating the nation-state with the female body in its own odd and thoroughly persuasive manner.

   You can’t argue for the film’s persuasive portrayal of the historical figure (fantasia or no) given that we really only see the rise of Catherine (and very little of that) . I agree with your assessment on a symbolic level (it’s really how the film operates best), which is why the fantastic element is so strong. But the “blur of the political and sexual” is a bit of an ambiguous phrase to my mind as I see the two far more closely aligned than separated in any given film. I’m not sure that drawing such lines provides an appreciation for either Dietrich’s performance or the film (though I realize this is not your main point).

   Her performance is largely “awful” (agin, to my mind) due to its lack of one. She’s not much more than a prop for Sternberg. You can feel his direction from her initial innocent bat of an eyelash to the maniacal grin at the film’s conclusion. It’s one of the most artificial performances from a major studio actress on film. She’s not a plausible character and Sternberg makes no attempt to make her into one. In fact, he takes the opposite route – he creates a sublime visual confection. Dietrich’s performance is the epitome of his overall design.

   There are, obviously, some unfortunate politics involved in this treatment of Catherine’s rise to power, however, any deliberate political statement by Sternberg (in spite of or due to his apolitical stance) is lost on me. You’ll have to elucidate further.

3. leo / 12 February 2007 / 11:26 AM / URL

   The paradoxical thing about the Sternberg-Dietrich cycle is the way in which it simultaneously dramatizes and repeats an allegory of female subjection, and this is where the film’s strangely progressive politics reside. The Scarlet Empress presents the most straightforward version of the story that all of these films present (with the probable exception of The Blue Angel, which isn’t quite an installment in the cycle as most critics understand it): namely, a kind of ritualized version of Sternberg and Dietrich’s own relationship, the much-touted (by Sternberg, no less) Svengali-Trilby relationship, in which the Sternberg character falls in love with the Dietrich character and eventually draws her into a situation in which she will be exploited for her body (as a “performer” and sexually). Though in every way exploited, the Dietrich character is nonetheless able to use her sexuality to attain a measure of power over her circumstances, specifically through masquerade, and so the principal question of the films is: To what extent is the Dietrich character able to attain her own agency, to act as her own author/director, or to what extent is she merely a puppet of larger forces (analogically, Sternberg, Hollywood, movie stardom) who flailingly uses her sexuality to avoid being crushed?

   This makes The Scarlet Empress particularly interesting as it is, in many ways, the most overt and complete allegorization of all this. Significantly, this film follows Blonde Venus, the first “flop” of the cycle, and, in my opinion, its best film. This film was partly inspired by Dietrich’s real-life passage to Hollywood and her relationship with her family, and properly should have given her a screenwriting credit (nb. authorship!), though that was not a common practice for starlets at the time. Following this rather personal and comparatively naturalistic film, Sternberg makes The Scarlet Empress as seemingly impersonal and anti-naturalistic as possible, converting Dietrich’s character from the (uncharacteristically) warm and maternal (and deeply conflicted) Helen to the almost robotic Sofia Frederica, perched on her swing and cocking her head like some perverse bird-puppet, dreaming about executions. What follows is a full account of the way in which the young princess is drawn into an exploitive situation in which she will again be used for her body (here, to produce an heir to the throne) and in which she will again have to learn to manipulate her own (sexual) identity in order to survive. (It should be noted that the identity she comes to inhabit is, as usual, a masochistic fantasy for Sternberg — here she is quite literally the Blonde Venus in Furs.)

   Anyway, I’m babbling, but part of what I think is the film’s political weight has nothing to do with historical verisimilitude (there is none, apart from the sly, knowing use of horses in the film), but rather lies in the way Sternberg riffs on the popular contemporary trend of casting big female stars as royalty in biopics of queens and princesses (cf. Garbo as Queen Christina and Bette Davis as Elizabeth I). This makes plain not only the rather obvious and persistent analogy between Hollywood and a kind of dummy autocracy, but also exposes the exploitation of women in both contexts. That’s all to say that I think that’s why her performance is so weird here — she had been quite versatile in earlier films (I think she’s particularly good in Blonde Venus and Dishonored), but in The Scarlet Empress everything she does is strangely ritualized, as if to say that, even as a tyrant, her identity is wholly circumscribed.

   So, obviously, I think there’s a lot to say about this movie!