L'Ange bleu

Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel was meant to enhance the star status of Emil Jannings, who had returned from Hollywood. This living great from films such as Madame DuBarry, Anna Boleyn, The Tragedy of Love, The Last Laugh, Waxworks, Tartuffe, Faust, and The Last Command was not entirely comfortable in English-language cinema and was, therefore, meant to burst onto German cinema screens with his thunderous voice as Professor Unrat. Marlene Dietrich charmed Von Sternberg in the play "Two Ties," among other things because she acted in both German and English, and Blue Angel was intended to be a double production from the beginning. She was supposed to be a decoy in Jannings' solo creation, and her salary was low compared to his, but nothing seemed to stop the energy-filled star next to whom Jannings became a regular actor in the course of one evening. How is it possible that in such a tight battle, there was still room for the other well-acted roles by Kurt Gerron, Hans Albers, and Rosa Valetti? Such was the environment of the Blue Angel Inn, which, at the crossroads of literary adaptation, Kammerspielfilm, expressionism, and part talkies, dominated the masses only to be rejected during the following years of rampant Nazism and rediscovered after its defeat. Marlene built her American myth on the legacy of her first collaboration with Joe, which only today is fully respected in the full breadth of the collaboration between the two geniuses. We should thus perceive this film in the context of Weimar and Hollywood, as it will richly reward us for doing so. (05/08/2010)

The film is good, I guess there's no doubt about that. Self-destruction appeals to me, which is what it's all about. However, unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that the movie didn't manage to captivate me. There are great metaphors here, and interesting connections, but all along I felt alienated from the film, unable to get under its skin. Or maybe it didn't even want me to. (16/07/2014)