Blonde Venus

Moviecut—Blonde Venus

source: Blonde Venus

While hiking in the Black Forest with a group of students, the American chemist Ned Faraday (Herbert Marshall) meets the German artist Helen (Marlene Dietrich) and sooner they get married. Years later, living in New York and having a boy, Johnny (Dickie Moore), Ned gets sick, poisoned by twelve years of exposition to radium in his experiments. However, his doctor tells him that In Dresden he would have a chance of healing, but the treatment would cost the fortune of US$ 1,500.00. Helen decides to work in a night-club under the pseudonym of Blonde Venus to raise some money for his travel. When she meets the playboy millionaire Nick Townsend (Cary Grant), she decides to ask for money to have an affair with him. Ned goes to Germany and Helen becomes Nick's mistress. When her cured husband returns fifteen days ahead the schedule, he finds that she had been unfaithful to him. Ned decides to take Johnny from Helen, forcing her to runaway with their son with the police in their tail. The melodramatic "Blonde Venus" is not a bad movie, with a great performance of Marlene Dietrich. The story of a mother that prostitutes with a millionaire in a post-Depression period to raise money to save the life of her husband is not explicit, based on the moral values of those years, but very clear when she gets US$ 300,00 from Nick after their first encounter. Unfortunately, the moralist and corny conclusion is ridiculous, spoiling the story. My vote is six. Title (Brazil): "A Vênus Loira" ("The Blonde Venus")

Josef von Sternberg would, no doubt, dismiss this film as one of his lesser works. Yet, to me,"Blonde Venus" sort of defines his relationship with Marlene Dietrich. The combined attraction of the harlot-mother gives Marlene's acting both sexual radiance and that intimate, moody quality that is so unique to her. Just watch her in the scenes with her baby boy. She is lovely, glamorous, yet totally attentive to the child's needs, protective and unselfconscious in a way that only Carole Lombard (see "Made for each other" for evidence) managed back in those days. Her presence is so strong that she makes the male stars seem awkward and rigid. Herbert Marshall looks ill at ease, (probably from lack of directorial attention) while Cary Grant sails through the movie, unblessed by inspiration. This is Marlene's film, through and through. The plot is silly beyond words (suffering in mink, writ large!) but Marlene makes it memorable. Her close-ups in the scene at the railway-station when she realizes she has lost her family tells it all. A lost soul with nowhere to go but down. Von Sternberg (or some intrusive producer) tacked on a happy ending, but the movie really ended there, on a bench. The rest is just wish-fulfilment.

This is the 5th of the 7 legendary collaborations between Dietrich and von Sternberg, and the only one set in the U.S. (the other 6 are set in Germany, Morocco, Europe, China, Russia, and Spain). All of the principals, including the director, were born in Europe. For some reason it is my personal favorite, and the only one I enjoy watching repeatedly. Probably this is for the outrageous musical numbers, which display Dietrich's incredibly self-assured command of her environment (what can top "Hot Voodoo", but I really really love the glittering white top-hat and tails number particularly). This would have been the only time during filming that von Sternberg could not totally exercise his robotic direction of her; she gets to be more "herself" as a real performer, and her energy-level comes way up. Also I'd venture that since the story is set in the U.S. it makes it more challenging to present her as "exotic" (as opposed to, say, China). I love how von Sternberg plays her character's flight South, into increasingly lurid, run-down, and crude environments. The technical side of movie-making had made huge strides; film-stock was becoming much more uniform and high-contrast, and sound-recording had improved greatly in just a few years; von Sternberg was able to make full use of this. The film feels snappy and tightly-paced, and has mostly abandoned silent-film mannerisms. In comparison to their next 2 films, this one feels quite grounded. The subsequent "Scarlett Empress" and "Devil is a Woman" would be increasingly baroque and outrageous excursions into fantastic style, excess, and European decadence, which kind of left their American audiences in the dust - and helped Dietrich land on the infamous "box-office poison" list. This is a pre-Code film, and it routinely tweaks conventional morals. The nightclub in which Dietrich goes to work is clearly a high-class "speakeasy"; Prohibition was still in effect at the time. Also, its always a bit confusing for modern audiences when dollar-amounts are mentioned in old films. The personal check which Dietrich receives from Cary Grant is for $200 as I recall; in current dollars that would be something more like $2,500 and was an amount which would have set Depression-era audiences reeling with its clear implication of what Grant had received in return! This is the first chance Cary Grant had to do a major co-starring role, and its the earliest of his films available on video. Another IMDb "comment" mentions Dietrich and Mae West supposedly "falling in love" with him, which is a laugh! Dietrich (in her daughter's bio) referred to him as the "shirt-seller" (Grant was selling men's shirts at the studio, as a sideline to make extra money); West preferred, to put it delicately, men who were a little more red meat (I think that Grant was already living with Randolph Scott at the time of filming; they used to attend Hollywood A-list parties as a couple, which Scott could get away with partially because of his very blue-blood East Coast family connections). Originally available on LaserDisc (as a 2-disc set with "Shanghai Express").

The seven collaborations between director Joseph "von" Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich were so distinct in look and tone, and so different from anything else going on at the time, they almost seem to constitute a sub-genre of their own. Like any genre, they have their outright masterpieces, as well as their absolute turkeys. Time to send Blonde Venus back to the farm. After the seedily seductive hits The Blue Angel, Morocco and Shanghai Express, in which Miss Dietrich established her screen image as cabaret-singer-*-prostitute, someone at Paramount decided it was time for Marlene to play a mother. There is nothing wrong with that in itself; as an actress she was up to the part. It's just that nothing else about the format has changed. It's like The Blue Angel plus a kid. Fair enough, the story of a woman who drags her child along on her sleazy escapades is a sound premise for a tragic drama, but that's not the way this is played. Dietrich's journey is played as some kind of adventure, using her wits and accomplices to stay ahead of the law. This is not some cheeky example of pre-code libertarianism – it is just bizarrely distasteful. Although we may be able to accept Marlene is a doting mommy, there is absolutely no way we can buy Sternberg as a director of warmth and poignancy. In spite of this being one of the handful of pictures for which he also took a writing credit, Sternberg simply fails to get the story-arc. The film's emotional payoff is supposed to be the eventual reunion of the family, but even at the beginning this is not established as something worth getting back to. As usual Sternberg's interiors are dressed and shot to look like either brothels or insane asylums. The Faradays' home is actually quite a creepy, dingy environment, and it's a wonder little Johnny wasn't wetting the bed and asking to sleep with the light on. But as anyone familiar with them will know, the point of a Dietrich/Sternberg picture is to make Dietrich look fabulous, and in this respect at least Blonde Venus is a success. Marlene is introduced emerging from a forest pool in a bright, shimmering close-up, and even when she is reduced to rags the camera still loves her. The same cannot be said for the rest of the cast, whom Sternberg tended to view as mobile pieces of scenery. The normally likable Herbert Marshall is here reduced to a moody grouch lurking in the shadows. Even the suave and lively Cary Grant becomes just a boring, background blob, and does not seem nearly interesting enough for Dietrich to run off with. The only standout moments in Blonde Venus are Marlene's song and dance routines, especially the renowned Hot Voodoo number where she parodies her own surreal stage persona by emerging from a gorilla outfit. But even these feel like they have been cut-and-pasted from a different film. Sternberg's fans may hail it as another masterpiece, as they are wont to do, but for the average punter it is a massive disappointment. Audiences of the time did not lap it up as they had her earlier hits, and this heralded the beginning of the end for Marlene's heyday. A year later there would be a new queen at Paramount – Mae West.

Josef Von Sternberg's films of the 1930s are some of the most unique ever made. Sternberg was one of the most promising directors of the 1920s, but of course there was a paradigm shift with the advent of sound near the end of the decade, causing most filmmakers to abandon the experimental cinematic techniques so instrumental to the most successful silent films. Dialogue heavy films in which visuals took a backseat to plot and characterization became the norm. Sternberg seems to have been the only director to integrate sound successfully into his normal filmmaking routine without completely changing his style. Thus, in a film like Blonde Venus Sternberg still employed his slick editing techniques and Impressionistic camera tricks such as superimpositions. As simple as this sounds, it's quite off-putting to see a film like this when expecting the relatively primitive filmmaking techniques of the popular films of the 1930s. While Sternberg naturally evolved his style and progressed through the '30s in his own way, nearly every other filmmaker regressed to a more stagy film style. It's for this reason that Sternberg's films of the 1930s look so different: this is an offshoot of film evolution that unfortunately didn't have much influence on contemporary films; what you see when you watch Sternberg's films from this era is the style that films could have moved toward if the retreat to the old dramatic forms hadn't occurred. So, what makes Blonde Venus off-putting? Well, in spite of its relative lack of length (it's only ninety-minutes long) a lot of ground is covered in this film. There's a love triangle established early on which is resolved almost before it's fully formed and the plot doesn't slow down as a character goes from riches to rags and becomes a fugitive from justice in just a few moments; in fact, things just speed up from there and in twenty minutes or so there's a manhunt that stretches across several states, several close brushes with the law, and a dramatic showdown about child custody before the character hits bottom, heads to Europe, and quickly vaults back to riches again. This is the sort of plot that would never be told in less than twice this amount of time today, in fact I've seen entire seasons of television shows with less plot packed into them. Throughout all this, Sternberg's visual panache guarantees the viewer's interest and, at the same time, narrative coherence is easily maintained. There's even some good thematic material here about self-sacrifice and women's roles in the period. Like most of Sternberg's films from this decade, Blonde Venus offers an embarrassment of riches when compared to its contemporaries in spite of a pacing style that will be difficult for viewers used to (non- Sternberg) films for this era to adjust to. For a viewer with a bit of context, this is a wonderful glimpse at what film could have been.

As a modern viewer, I found much of this movie extremely silly. It's a quasi-tragedy, but I couldn't help laughing out loud in some places. Marlene Dietrich is fun to look at in a drag-queen sort of way, but I am completely missing her appeal. She can't sing, she can't act, she's not beautiful, she has no chemistry with anyone else, and she has very little charisma. The music does very well to drown her out during her numbers - completely bizarre numbers, by the way. But I have to admit that I couldn't take my eyes off of her for some reason that I can't explain. She's got some kind of presence that demands your attention and for this I credit (blame) von Sternberg, the director. The plot is sketchy at best and the presence of a very young Cary Grant adds absolutely nothing. But for 1932, there are some arresting images and some great sequences - such as Dietrich on the bench watching the train go by. von Sternberg does a better job than this movie deserves.

Well...there were some great, creamy-smooth facial shots of Marlene, along with her "shocking", gender-bender outfit (plus her not-to-be-missed "transmogrification" from ape into human being); but, overall, the generally unconvincing plot and dated acting -- not to mention the less than engaging tunes coming from Miss Dietrich's "baritone" voice --did little to ensure Blonde Venus a permanent place in my mind's Pantheon of Memorable Films. Cary Grant -- still in the throes of cinematic infancy -- seemed as though he was forever looking to "find himself", while Herbert Marshall was probably never anything BUT Herbert Marshall from the day he was born, until the day he died. Naturally, from an historical point of view, Blonde Venus was fun to watch, so long as one was able to put aside..."great expectations".

There are better von Sternberg Deitrich projects. The only charm of this one is the America situation. I never got the charm of Deitrich, and if you didn't, you'll find this empty. It has three stage performances by our blond Venus. The first of these is pretty obnoxiously strange. The chorus line is thin white girls with blackened skin and African face paint. Afro wigs. They gyrate in a weak emulation of Josephine Baker. They thump around a gorilla. After a bit our blond seductress emerges from the gorilla suit and dons a blond Afro wig. Its both passionless and revolting. The whole picture is a bit of both, passionless in a direct way reflecting that continental nonchalant tone which later became beat. Revolting that such a story would be assumed to matter to us. Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.