Getting to Know: Marlene Dietrich

Nine decades have elapsed since Marlene Dietrich headlined the first German talkie and became an international star. Many have credited director Josef von Sternberg with plucking a middling contract player from relative obscurity and transforming her into a revered icon. But, as the latest entry in Cinema Paradiso's Getting to Know series reveals, Dietrich's career extended far beyond these seven collaborations in the early 1930s and owed much more to the force of her own personality than the vision of any Svengali.

At a time when Hollywood stars were among the most famous people on the planet, Marlene Dietrich shone brighter than most. She instinctively understood the importance of lighting and how to work with the camera. Daughter Maria Riva dismissed the Dietrich look as 'manufactured flamboyance', while a Guardian critic carped in a 1960 article that she had a 'sculptured image' in which 'only the voice moves'.

But Dietrich recognised that 'glamour is assurance' and strove to make the most of it. She enjoyed the trappings of fame, but wasn't particularly bothered about being a star and only maintained the image she had created out of her Teutonic sense of duty. Ironically, the role she most relished was the one she had played in reclaiming her homeland from Nazism and, having spent the Second World War close to the frontline entertaining the troops, she continued performing for 'her boys' until she was 73, singing such favourites as 'Lili Marleen', as well anti-war songs that kept her relevant in a changing world like Pete Seeger's 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' In return, Dietrich would be immortalised in the first line of Peter Sarstedt's No.1 single, 'Where Do You Go to (My Lovely) ?'

The Prussian Officer's Daughter

Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born in Schöneberg near Berlin on 27 December 1901. Both her police lieutenant father, Louis, and her Grenadier stepfather, Eduard von Losch, instilled in her a sense of duty that was reinforced by her mother, Josephine, after she was widowed for a second time during the Great War. Having adopted the name 'Marlene' at the age of 11, Dietrich dreamt of becoming a violinist. But a wrist injury and a growing tendency to rebel prompted her to join Guido Thielscher's Girl Kabarett as a chorine.

Despite failing to secure a place at the prestigious Max Reinhardt Acting Academy, Dietrich made her screen debut in Napoleon's Little Brother (1922), the first of 17 features she would make during the silent era. She was mostly confined to minor roles, notably appearing alongside Greta Garbo in GW Pabst's Joyless Street (1925). But, while she continued to alternate between stage and screen, Dietrich also became a mother in 1924 after marrying assistant director Rudolf Sieber. They would remain together until his death in 1976, although they were rarely faithful to each other, with Dietrich (who once proclaimed, 'I am, at heart, a gentleman.') taking a string of male and female lovers.

Shaping an Icon

By far the most besotted of Dietrich's admirers was director Josef von Sternberg. Having divided his youth between his native Vienna and his adopted New York, Von Sternberg had made his reputation in Hollywood with sharp-witted satires like The Last Command (1928), which had contributed to Emil Jannings winning the first Academy Award for Best Actor. The pair were slated to reunite in Berlin on what would be Germany's first talkie, but Von Sternberg was struggling to find the right actress to play cabaret tease Lola Lola opposite Jannings's respectable schoolmaster, Immanuel Rath. He spotted the 28 year-old Dietrich performing on stage and cast her in The Blue Angel (1930), which he made in both German and English.

Such was the response to Dietrich's seductive rendition of the Friedrich Hollaender song, 'Falling in Love Again', that Paramount offered her a one-picture deal and she arrived in Hollywood ready to let Von Sternberg mould her. She lost weight and became a blonde in order to cause a stir by donning top hat and tails and kissing another woman in a nightclub sequence in Morocco (1930). Indeed, Dietrich so upstaged co-star Gary Cooper en route to her sole Oscar nomination that the front office offered her an improved deal, which Von Sternberg readily approved. As the most Europeanised of the major studios, Paramount could offer him the talents of production designer Hans Dreier, cinematographers Lee Garmes and Bert Glennon, costumier Travis Banton, make-up artist Dorothy Ponedel, and stills photographer Eugene Robert Richee to help him realise his vision of and ambition for his muse.

Shrouding her in shadows and wisps of smoke, Von Sternberg made the elegant androgyny of the Dietrich silhouette the focus of the mise-en-scène that so mesmerised viewers that they failed to notice the formulaic nature of screenplays like the one for Dishonored, a variation on George Fitzmaurice's Garbo vehicle, Mata Hari (both 1931), that was memorable primarily for the sight of X-27 (Dietrich) applying lipstick before facing a firing squad. As Shanghai Lily, she proved herself equally willing to sacrifice herself in Shanghai Express (1932). But, while this is one of Jules Furthman's better screenplays, the film has not worn well, as the peerless Chinese American star Anna May Wong was made to play opposite actors in 'yellowface', including Warner Oland, seven of whose outings as Earl Derr Biggers's sleuth, Charlie Chan, are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso.

Disc is always preferable to streaming when it comes to the quality of the image and DVD and Blu-ray are the best way to watch features like Blonde Venus (1932), in which Dietrich dons a white tuxedo and a gorilla suit to beguile scientist Herbert Marshall and politician Cary Grant. Indeed, they're the only way to watch The Scarlet Empress (1934) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), in which Von Sternberg fills the space between the camera and the characters with ornate props and motifs that make the respective stories of Catherine the Great and Conchita Perez feel so exotic and sensual that they sweep audiences seeking an escape from their everyday troubles into Russian court and Spanish carnival settings that showcase the Dietrich mystique to monochromatic perfection.

Box-Office Poison

Despite The Devil Is a Woman being Dietrich's favourite film, it proved to be her final collaboration with Von Sternberg. For five years, they had been living together, but she was ready to explore new people and, with Paramount noting the dip in receipts, the partnership on and off the screen was dissolved. As Cinema Paradiso users will notice, Von Sternberg continued producing such fascinating films as The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Macao (1952), The Siege of Anatahan (1953) and Jet Pilot (1957). But he never found anyone to take Marlene's place.

She also struggled to find a niche without him. During their liaison, Dietrich had made the unjustifiably overlooked drama, The Song of Songs (1932), for Rouben Mamoulian, who shared Von Sternberg's eye for a striking image. But, while she made her Technicolor debut in Richard Boleslawski's The Garden of Allah (1936), not even dual assignments with the wondrously witty Ernst Lubitsch - as the producer of Frank Borzage's Desire (1936) and the director of Angel (1937) - could prevent Dietrich from being branded 'box-office poison' by Harry Brandt, the president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America, in an article in the Independent Film Journal in May 1938. Among the others to attract his ire were Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, and Fred Astaire. Just type any of these names into the Cinema Paradiso searchline to see how misguided Brandt's verdict was.

The slur certainly caught Dietrich at a low ebb, as she was struggling to cope with the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the fact that both Josephine and her sister Liesel were showing no inclination to leave Berlin. Among the many documentaries about this period available on high-quality disc from Cinema Paradiso, the most intriguing is Rüdiger Suchsland's Hitler's Hollywood (2017), as propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was keen for the Aryan Dietrich to quit California and become the jewel in the German cinematic crown. However, around the time that she cast off her ice queen image alongside James Stewart in George Marshall's comic Western, Destry Rides Again (1939), Dietrich became an American citizen and spent the next two years lobbying for the United States to join the global war against Fascism.

Captain Dietrich of the USO

Initially, Dietrich toured the country selling war bonds, but she also did her bit at the fabled Hollywood Canteen that Bette Davis had founded to give service personnel a touch of Tinseltown glitz before shipping overseas. Among her companions was the Viennese actress who had tantalised Der Führer as Hedy Kiesler in Gustav Machaty's Ecstasy (1932) and whose remarkable achievements under her Hollywood pseudonym are related by Alexandra Dean in Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017).

When not recording propaganda broadcasts and albums to demoralise German troops, Dietrich continued to make movies, teaming with lover John Wayne to play Bijou Blanche in Tay Garnett's Seven Sinners (1940), Cherry Mallotte in Ray Enright's The Spoilers, and Josie Winters in Lewis Seiler's Pittsburgh (both 1942). Dietrich also found herself as Fay Duval alongside Edward G. Robinson and George Raft in Raoul Walsh's Manpower (1941) before she guested as herself in A. Edward Sutherland's star-spangled flagwaver, Follow the Boys (1944), in which she is sawn in half by none other than amateur magician, Orson Welles.

This latter glimpse of the entertainments laid on by the USO gives modern audiences an idea of what was expected of Hollywood stars during the war. But Dietrich went above and beyond. As Gallic beau Jean Gabin had been so embarrassed by pictures like Archie Mayo's Moontide (1942) and had returned to Europe to join the French Resistance, Dietrich felt compelled to follow him across the Atlantic. Knowing she was a prime target for capture by Axis forces, she took an unofficial captain's rank and gave shows close to the frontline in North Africa, Italy, France, the Low Countries and Germany. Consequently, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the US government, as well as the Legion of Honour by the French.

Dietrich was also one of the first Allied civilians to learn about the concentration camps, as her sister had been running a cinema for German troops near Bergen-Belsen. Dietrich had vouched for Liesel to prevent her from being punished, but she broke off all ties. Imagine the trauma she must have felt when playing a general's widow in Stanley Kramer's Judgment At Nuremberg (1961), who swears that the German people knew nothing of the crimes being perpetrated in their name.

This side of Dietrich's career is capably covered in such documentaries as The Yellow Star: The Persecution of the Jews in Europe 1933-1945 (1981) and Entertaining the Troops (1988), while her significance to the LGBTQ+ community is celebrated in The Celluloid Closet (1995) and Vito (2011). Cinema Paradiso also offers two of the most intimate documentaries ever made about this most elusive of stars, Maximilien Schell's Marlene (1983), in which she discusses her life frankly despite refusing to appear on camera, and Dominique Leeb's Marlene Dietrich: The Twilight of an Angel (2012), which reflects upon her final years in a small apartment on Avenue Montaigne in Paris.

The Indelible Icon

Hoping to rebuild her career alongside Jean Gabin, Dietrich travelled to France to make Georges Lacombe's Martin Roumagnac (1946), an undeservedly little-seen drama that only convinced the pair that their romance was over, especially as Marlene refused to divorce Rudy in order to start a second family. Ironically, she had played a woman who finds a baby in the street in The Lady Is Willing (1942) and she reunited with director Mitchell Leisen to play a very different character, as her Black Forest gypsy helps British agent Ray Milland steal a top secret poison gas from the Nazis in Golden Earrings (1947).

Re-enacting the war was clearly not to Dietrich's taste and she took some persuading to play Erika von Schlütow, a chanteuse with a shady past who scandalises visiting US politician Jean Arthur in Billy Wilder's biting postwar satire, A Foreign Affair (1948). In the 1930s, the pair had set up a hardship fund to help fleeing Jews and dissidents and Wilder had also witnessed the atrocities at Bergen-Belsen, having made the documentary short, Death Mills (1945), from the footage that had been commissioned by Sidney Bernstein for Alfred Hitchcock and which was eventually released as German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (2014).

Dietrich herself would hook up with the Master of Suspense on Stage Fright (1950). Following this adaptation of Selwyn Jepson's novel, Man Running , Dietrich would return to whodunit territory as Christine Vole seeking to provide an alibi for her husband in Wilder's take on the Agatha Christie stage hit, Witness For the Prosecution (1957), in which everyone is upstaged by Charles Laughton, whom Dietrich had once claimed was the only man on Hollywood worth seducing.

In between times, Dietrich had reunited with James Stewart as Hollywood diva Monica Teasdale in Henry Koster's adaptation of Nevil Shute's aero-thriller, No Highway in the Sky (1951), and headed back West to run the Chuck-a-Luck hideout in Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952). She also put in a cameo appearance as another saloon hostess in Michael Anderson's Oscar-winning interpretation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days (1956). However, she was much more integral to the plot as Tana the brothel keeper who is reacquainted with corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan in Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958).

Having narrated Louis Clyde Stoumen's Oscar-winning documentary, Black Fox: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler (1962), and made a wordless freeze-frame cameo in Richard Quine's Paris When It Sizzles (1964), Dietrich devoted herself to the busy cabaret schedule that took her around the world. Indeed, she was only seen again on the big screen singing the theme song to David Hemmings's Just a Gigolo (1978), although she does crop up in the Touch of Evil scene recycled in Barry Sonnenfeld's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty (1993). And if you're wondering why Dietrich was never presented with an honorary Oscar before she passed away in Paris on 6 May 1992, it's because she vocally expressed her contempt for what she called 'the Deathbed Award'!