Written by Rachael Johnson.
Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was one of the most captivating, ground-breaking movie stars of the 20th century. There were more talented Hollywood contemporaries, but perhaps none of them had that heady combination of characteristics that made up her extraordinary screen persona: supernatural beauty fused with transgressive, gender-subversive sexual magnetism. Dietrich challenged traditional definitions of femininity, and bourgeois notions of respectability in her own life too. Biographical accounts reveal that the German-born star had numerous affairs with both men and women. But Dietrich was not solely an uninhibited sexual non-conformist. She was also a woman of considerable political courage. A committed anti-Fascist, the actress denounced Hitler’s Germany, and worked actively, and unstintingly, against the Nazi regime. (She became a US citizen in 1939.) Dietrich was a fearless, resilient woman who entertained throughout most of her life. She became a cabaret singer in her fifties, and toured the world into her seventies, soldiering on despite injury, illness and addiction. Was Dietrich a feminist movie star? Yes, and no. Although it seems that she was ultimately imprisoned by heterosexist Hollywood ideals of feminine beauty (she was a recluse in her later years), she should, nevertheless, be appreciated as an iconic figure of female sexual independence, individuality, and strength.
Hollywood marketed Dietrich, from the start, as an expressly seductive, “exotic” European star. Time and again, she portrayed scandalous lovers, and glamorous femme fatales. Dietrich did not embody the modern, professional American woman on screen. She never played a lawyer or reporter like Katherine Hepburn. Many of her films are about the pleasures, and dangers of romantic and physical love. They deal with obsession, sacrifice, and betrayal. Dietrich’s heroines are, also, of course, invariably ultra-glamorous. The star first caught Hollywood’s attention in The Blue Angel (1930), a German production directed by the Austrian-American filmmaker, Josef von Sternberg. In The Blue Angel, Dietrich plays cabaret singer, and femme fatale, Lola Lola. The Blue Angel secured her a contract with Paramount and she made six other films with von Sternberg: Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil is A Woman (1935).
The glamorous, dreamy Dietrich look is at its most iconic in von Sternberg’s atmospheric, stylish films. In The Blue Angel, Dietrich is plumper, and more voluptuous, but in Morocco, she becomes slender and more angular. She would remain so. Von Sternberg, with whom the actress was romantically involved, has been described as a Svengali-like character. A maestro of light and shadow, influenced by German expressionism, the director is credited with sculpting the face of Dietrich on the screen, and shaping her mystique. The nature of Dietrich’s role in their personal, professional partnership will always be subject to debate but it was, ultimately, a creative union. It is also important to note that Dietrich gained knowledge during this period that would be employed throughout her career. It is said that she greatly understood lighting and was an inventive make-up artist.
Dietrich was not a traditional Hollywood star although she looked like a perfect example of constructed feminine beauty. Her beauty, in fact, transcends conventional glamour in its unearthliness. It’s also remarkable, and considerably subversive, that she frequently played economically independent women living, and working, outside the domestic space, and prescribed bounds of sexual propriety. In von Sternberg’s films, Dietrich plays cabaret entertainers (The Blue Angel, Morocco, and Blonde Venus), a courtesan (Shanghai Express), a prostitute-spy (Dishonored), an adulterous queen (The Scarlett Empress), as well as a predatory “vamp” (The Devil is a Woman). She also plays a saloon singer in the George Marshall-directed Western Destry Rides Again (1939), and a Baroness brothel owner in her final film, Just A Gigolo (David Hemmings, 1978). But the most unique aspect of Dietrich’s screen persona is her sexual presence. The modern viewer is, perhaps, most intrigued by her androgynous aspect and sexually subversive behavior.
In Morocco, Dietrich provides one of the most radical sexually charged moments in Hollywood history when her cabaret singer character, Amy Jolly, sings “Give Me The Man Who Does Things” in French. She appears on stage elegantly dressed in a tux, and top hat, with a cigarette between her lips. Stopping at a table after the performance, she downs a glass of champagne, takes a flower from the hair of a female customer, and kisses her directly on the mouth. She then throws the flower to a male admirer (Gary Cooper as a French legionnaire). It’s a deeply seductive display of bisexuality, and Dietrich’s performance is fluidly, and perfectly, executed.
Dietrich was also the star of a scene that can be only be described as both sexually “out there,” and racist, in terms of its setting and images. I refer to the “Hot Voodoo” number in Blonde Venus where Dietrich’s character, once again a seductive cabaret entertainer, wanders around in a gorilla costume, slowly emerges from the suit, dons a blonde Afro wig, and starts to sing imperiously and suggestively, with hands on hips, in front of accompanying “native girls.” It’s a both bizarre and unsettling number.
Von Sternberg’s films are set, for the most part, in “exotic,” worlds such as 1920s China (Shanghai Express) and imperial Russia (The Scarlett Empress), and his depiction of non-American places is simultaneously ultra-stylized, and offensive. The audience is, also, at times encouraged to associate Dietrich’s heroines with “otherness.” The end of Morocco is quite interesting in that it shows a European woman rejecting domesticity, stasis, and marriage for love, and a nomadic existence. In pursuit of her great love, Amy Jolly eventually heads off into the desert and joins the North African women who shadow the legionnaires.
Dietrich made her most celebrated, and extraordinary films with von Sternberg but there were at least a couple of other good, and remarkable films. A riotous energy and charisma are evident in Destry Rides Again where she plays a sassy saloon singer called Frenchy. She also puts in a fascinating, idiosyncratic performance in Orson Welles’s astonishing, and greatly stylized Touch of Evil (1958) as an outlandish cigar-smoking madam, and fortune-teller. She radiates personality, and insolence in the role. Dietrich moved away from the movies, and remade herself as a cabaret singer in the 50s. She worked with Burt Bacharach, and toured extensively for decades, before retiring in her 70s. The entertainer was the ultimate show business survivor.
Dietrich also had an interesting, unconventional private life. She did the conventional thing early on in her career by marrying a fellow German, director Rudolf Sieber, and bearing a child (a daughter named Maria) but soon took a radically different track. Although she remained married to her husband until his death in 1976 (as well as good friends), she separated from him, and reportedly had many affairs with both men and women. Which brings us briefly to the intimate Dietrich.
Characterizations of public personalities by the people who know them are often contradictory, and human beings are, of course, different people to different people. Biographical accounts attest that Dietrich was both deeply flawed as a mother, and hugely sympathetic as a friend. No doubt Dietrich’s bed-hopping must have caused pain to some of her lovers too. The function of film criticism, particularly star studies, is, however, not to marvel at, or judge a star’s number of partners. Leave that to biographers and the Daily Mail. What modern cinema audiences should be interested in is his or her place in Hollywood history, and socio-cultural significance. Dietrich is a radical, and progressive cultural figure in terms of her sexual and gender identity. On and off screen. Her off-screen identity was also subversively androgynous and was often signified by her masculine attire. There is, in fact, no overstating Dietrich’s modernity as fashion and erotic icon. Both the star’s bisexuality and sexually independent lifestyle, challenged patriarchy and she helped change the way 20th century women looked and behaved. In light of this, it is all the more baffling and maddening that the star slammed feminism in her later years. Her views are expressed in Maximilian Schell’s 1984 documentary, Marlene, which features interviews with an unseen Dietrich eager to preserve her glamorous persona. Nevertheless, the star’s spirit of sexual autonomy and freedom remains extraordinary, a spirit which, no doubt, had its roots in the sexually liberated Germany of the 1920s. During this creative, volatile period, Dietrich had been a chorus-girl and theatre actress who also took boxing lessons. A product of the Weimar Republic, Dietrich was, indeed, the living antithesis of the puritanical, patriarchal Nazi regime.
Dietrich exhibited backbone and a principled, political consciousness during World War II. She not only condemned her own homeland’s nefarious government but also vigorously campaigned against it. The star raised war bonds, recorded music for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), and toured with the USO (United Service Organizations). She even entertained troops near the front. Both Hitler and propaganda minister, Goebbels, tried to get woo her back to Germany but she refused to be a Third Reich star. The Nazis responded by defaming her, and banning her movies. Dietrich was recognized by both the US and France for her war work. She was awarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1945 and the French Legion of Honor. The star regarded this work as “the only important work I’ve ever done.” It is perhaps worth noting that both her father and step-father had been military men. There were German citizens who considered Dietrich a traitor– she received hate mail, and was once even spat at when she returned to her native land during post-war visits–but her anti-Nazi stance was also appreciated at home, and in 2002, the city of Berlin made her an honorary citizen.
The global screen star was a modern cosmopolitan woman who had friends, and lovers of many nationalities and backgrounds. She was a buddy of Asian-American actress Anna May Wong, and reportedly had affairs with legendary French singer, Edith Piaf, Cuban-American writer, Mercedes de Acosta, French actor, Jean Gabin, German writer Erich Maria Remarque, as well as American stars John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and James Stewart. It is also said that she had a romantic relationship with Greta Garbo. Dietrich moved to Paris in her later years, after touring the world as a cabaret artist. She died in the French capital in 1992 at the age of 90.
Dietrich has endured as a cultural icon because she was, simply, way ahead of her time. Her chic, sexually ambiguous screen, and star personae have remained hugely influential in popular culture. Madonna, who somewhat resembles the actress, has, famously, paid homage to her style in her performances, most memorably perhaps in her 1993 Girlie Tour. But Dietrich’s name is not only immortalized in “Vogue”; she haunts Suzanne Vega’s very different track “Marlene on the Wall” too. Interestingly, Indiewire reported earlier this year that Megan Ellison is planning a TV show about Dietrich and Greta Garbo. It sounds like an exciting project but we can only hope the filmmakers will fully appreciate Dietrich’s sexual, and gender non-conformity, cosmopolitan lifestyle and anti-Fascist spirit. The star deserves no less. She was, after all, the coolest of them all.