RasoirJ's Movie Notes: The Blue Angel

The Blue Angel (1930) director: Josef von Sternberg (Rating = 4 = I liked it a lot)

A wonderfully entertaining film that stands up better than anything else I’ve seen from the early talkie era. Germans with their hierarchical educational institutions, rigid social class distinctions, and capacity for angst can really nail a humiliation story. In the decline and fall of Professer Rath under the spell of the cabaret singer Lola Lola, director Josef von Sternberg has created on one level a brilliant farce, maybe the first screwball comedy on screen. We see Herr Professor first as the lord of all he surveys in his classroom and the keeper of social order – the supreme superego. When he enters the Blue Angel, he encounters a cluttered, confusing, yet deeply seductive backstage world where all that the classroom represses is loosed. I found myself chuckling again and again at how Von Sternberg crams the dressing rooms with silent clowns, props, cops, floozies, students, and assorted low-lifes in constant bustle.

Emil Jannings as the professor dazzled by Lola Lola puts on an acting workshop in his disintegration from august deity of the gymnasium to cuckolded clown who crows for a living onstage. And it’s a grand pleasure to be there at the birth of the Marlene Dietrich legend. As the good-hearted realist Lola Lola, Dietrich seems to spend most of her camera time changing her extraordinary skirts backstage, but there are also plenty of those iconic shots of Marlene onstage in lingerie and top hat stretching out those legs as she sings “Falling in Love Again.” Pure movie bliss.