Marlene Against the Wall
Dishonored was Marlene Dietrich’s second Hollywood film with her diminutive Svengali Josef Von Sternberg, but unlike Morocco, her first, it tanked at the box office. It’s difficult to see why, since it’s a more involving and dramatic work than the earlier film: maybe audiences turned out for the North African adventure out of curiosity, to see this vaunted new star in the Paramount firmament, didn’t enjoy the experience, and stayed away from her second venture into languor, exotic romance and tragedy?
The movie is essentially a re-telling of the Mata Hari yarn, with Sternberg providing the original (?) story. True, the leading man this time is a considerable step down from “long drink of water” Gary Cooper. Victor McLaglen does actually look surprisingly like a leading man here, for those who know him mainly as loutish comic relief in John Ford westerns. Until he grins. And he grins all the time. I mean all the time. It’s a manic, vulpine grin expressing explosive, demented self-satisfaction and projecting a barely-suppressed urge to tear apart his co-stars and the set walls with those pearly and seemingly filed-to-a-point teeth. I’ve shown his performance to students. “Who is THAT?” they all ask, terrified. “Why is he DOING THAT with his FACE?”
Sternberg undoubtedly had a tendency to pair his Teutonic Trilby with unlikely leading man. For every Cary Grant or Gary Cooper there are two Clive Brooks or Cesar Romeros. Something weird going on there, or more likely, several somethings. Speculation would become lurid, lascivious. By the end of this series, we may be indulging in it, but not yet.
Despite her repulsive opposite number, Marlene creates a kind of seething screen chemistry all by herself, or with her director and the Klieg lights and the nitrate stock. Discovered working the Viennese streets by spymaster Gustaf Von Seyffertitz, she becomes X-27, agent for the Austrian government. Politically, this is an interwar, pre-Hitler pacifist movie, one of Sternberg’s more progressive works. But politics never seems to matter much in his world, indeed ideology exists primarily to be overwhelmed by matters of the heart.
The innovation here, or maybe it’s following the Garbo pattern, is that we never really know what’s going on in our heroine’s head. Marlene really does represent the Eternal Enigma of Woman, it seems, though here it’s not so much that she’s a Rashomon-like bafflement of conflicting but unknowable desires, as a series of plot reversals in human form. Seeming about to betray her country, she instead has her tempter arrested. When he turns out to be a spymaster, she goes to work for him, faithfully using infidelity to seduce secrets from such unappealing men as Warner Oland (before he was Chinese). And then she turns traitor after all, but for love.
Singer Suzanne Vega discovered this movie on late-night TV, back when that was a thing, and was struck by a dialogue exchange between Marlene and McLaglen, who knows she’s an agent. “You bring something into war that doesn’t belong. You trick men into death with your body!” Vega was taken aback by these strong words, and wondered how she would respond to such an accusation. “Probably I’d say ‘Sorry!’ or something.” Marlene gazes at McLaglen, imagines he’s somebody else I presume, and says, “Give me a kiss.”
After Morocco’s one-and-a-half-note performance of sultry exhaustion and sardonic ennui, Dishonored actually gives its star acting to do, with a transition from world-weary sex worker to daring undercovers agent, by way of a hilarious disguise as a cleaning woman, with much padding and goofy, bovine mannerisms. Previously, you could only get a sense of the star’s versatility by running more than one film. But X-27 is a quicksilver nitrate masquerade artist, a protean Venus.
Finally too tired even to pretend, X-27 saves the captured McLaglen and faces the firing squad for treason. The priest trying to save her soul becomes the latest man to fail to understand her as she waits unconcernedly for the final kiss-off. At least he gets her a piano in her cell, so she can hammer the keys in demented cabaret ecstasy, somehow suggesting hopeless exhaustion while pounding the ivories like a demon, arms moving as if on strings.
The film ends with the most chi-chi execution on record, with La Dietrich redoing her lipstick at the last moment, to look her best for the bullets. She asked her director whether she should fall forwards or backwards when struck dead, but he refused to answer. She made the right decision. There follows an endlessly echoing set of gunshots which Sternberg forced his sound team to record in a zeppelin hangar. They did it under protest and won an Academy Award, as he reports with satisfaction in his autobiography. He seems quite pleased with the film, but is still cross that Paramount changed the title from X27, despite his pointing out that “my heroine was not dishonored, she was executed by firing squad.”
by David Cairns