Marlene

Marlene is a documentary about Marlene Dietrich consisting largely of a lengthy interview for which the actress refused to be photographed. This decision is the central reality of the film, and a frustration that drives interviewer/director Maximilian Schell to explosions of pique.

In its own way, Dietrich’s refusal to be photographed is an entirely appropriate gesture. “I’ve been photographed to death,” she says, and she’s right; Dietrich may well have been the most stylishly photographed actress in cinema. Her masklike beauty lent itself to rapturous close-ups that captured and reflected the silvery light of the movies; without, curiously, ever quite seeming to generate that light.

Interestingly enough, it has been suggested that her exotic image – particularly as exuded in the seven films she made with her Svengali director Josef von Sternberg – had little to do with the woman herself. In von Sternberg’s films, she was the cool temptress who drew men to her, only to leave them cut and bleeding from her sharp eyebrows and cheekbones.

Yet in life, she seems to have been a game gal who cheerfully pitched in to the American war effort, viewed her acting as a job, and regarded sex – if she regarded it at all – as an indifferent marital obligation. As we see film clips, performance footage, and newsreel shots, she dismisses the body of her work as rubbish and kitsch.

The von Sternberg films, in particular, she seems to find absurd, almost as though she were afraid of their implications. (She claims never to watch her old movies.) Fascinatingly, she chooses the insane climax of von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress, one of the American cinema’s delirious high points, as her favorite movie scene.

Schell, who starred with her in Judgment in Nuremberg, shows her video clips to jog her memory. But she expresses boredom with this, and insists she is without nostalgia – until the moment she recites a poem she has loved for years. Then, briefly, the façade breaks down.

But not for long, which drives Schell into some irritating hand-wringing (the movie is also about the process of making the film). Dietrich questions his professionalism a couple of times, and it’s hard to disagree with her.

Despite Schell’s self-indulgence, the film is arresting. Dietrich bristles with down-to-earth opinions. On the afterlife: “Horrible. You can’t believe that they all fly around up there?”

All this, without her face. But it may be said that Dietrich’s face takes shape throughout this exploration, as a composite of the film images and gravelly mature voice. Perhaps that voice can give us a truer face, without the distraction of Marlene’s mask.

First published in The Herald, November 1986

I have to guess at the publishing date, but that’s close enough; it opened in Seattle at the Egyptian theater. I don’t know where I come off pontificating in this way about the great Dietrich, but some of it comes from the documentary; I remember that Schell comes across as pretty insufferable. Now go watch The Scarlet Empress.