Der blaue Engel

Josef von Sternberg (1930)

It takes a little while to get going but, once it does, The Blue Angel is gripping and terrible – the story of how a pompous high-school teacher in a provincial town in Weimar Germany descends to vagrancy, through his infatuation with a cabaret artiste, Lola Lola.  Professor Immanuel Rath first visits the ‘The Blue Angel’, the local club where Lola is headlining, in the hope of catching out some of his pupils – whom he’s already taken to task for circulating photographs of Lola in class.   Some of these gymnasium boys look to be in their late twenties and their high jinks are consequently strained:  the film finds its feet once it’s moved beyond almost farcical comic business into the uninterruptedly serious stuff.  (The schoolboys’ pranks include making a two-letter adjustment to the professor’s name to ‘Unrath’, which the subtitles translate as ‘turd’.  The Heinrich Mann novel on which the film is based is called Professor Unrat:  according to the online ‘NameLab’, ‘unrat’ is the ‘nickname for an unfortunate person, from Middle High German unrat  ‘need’, ‘disaster’ [sic].’)  Josef von Sternberg’s attitude towards Rath is coolly disapproving.   The staid professor is ridiculous and somewhat gross from the start.  He’s a clumsy pedant, both physically and socially awkward, blowing his nose with ludicrous formality and repellently loudly.  He’s sadly childish too.  Rath is dismayed to discover that his caged bird has stopped singing because it’s stopped living and speechless when his landlady disposes of the bird, dropping it into the stove without a trace of emotion or regret.    Because Rath is a far from admirable figure before his loss of authority, his humilation is grotesque rather than tragic but it’s still very upsetting.

Emil Jannings was a leading stage and silent film actor, and in 1929 the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor.  When the talkies arrived, according to Wikipedia, his thick German accent got in the way of a Hollywood career.  Back in Germany in the 1930s, he starred in a number of pictures designed to promote Nazism.   (Jannings accompanies the Nazi high command to the mortiferous film premiere in Inglourious Basterds.  In reality, he died in 1950.)   Even if he’d never won an Oscar or made another film after The Blue Angel, Jannings’ performance as Professor Rath would have assured him a place in cinema history.  His style is decidedly theatrical but his characterisation has real depth.  When Lola is joshingly flattering him, Rath’s self-satisfied bashfulness is surprising and rather shocking.   When the action moves forward from 1924 to 1929 and we see what the professor has become, after five years of marriage (and, one assumes, cuckoldry), as part of the travelling show in which Lola remains a tawdry leading light, Jannings’ portrait becomes exceptionally powerful.  The presence of a clown in the company in the 1924 scenes seems to foreshadow the professor’s eventual fate (the clown has disappeared from the scene in 1929 – usurped by Rath).  When Emil Jannings sits at the dressing-room mirror putting on his clown’s wig and make-up, it feels like the prototype of countless what-have-I-become scenes in the same setting in subsequent movies.  At Lola and Rath’s wedding breakfast, Kiepert, the magician who leads the troupe, performs a trick of producing eggs from Rath’s nose.   Lola clucks seductively and Rath crows in proud reply.   When Rath is required to go through this routine again – on the troupe’s climactic return for a show at ‘The Blue Angel’ and in front of a local audience which have packed the place to see his ‘special guest appearance’ – Jannings’ desperately abject, almost demented reprise of the crowing is a sound that’s hard to get out of your head.

Marlene Dietrich was approaching thirty when she made The Blue Angel, her first sound film.  Because Dietrich’s Lola, especially her singing of ‘Falling in Love Again’, is (truly) iconic, just quite how great a performance this is comes as a startling revelation.  And because we think of Dietrich’s speaking voice – in English – as an exaggerated, heavily accented drawl, one of the most striking aspects of her portrait is Lola’s matter-of-factness.  In her native language, Dietrich speaks naturally, untheatrically.  This quality – the fact that Lola isn’t self-consciously a femme fatale – has the effect of making her all the more sensually powerful.  Her physical freedom – shamelessness – is there not just in overpowering contrast to Rath’s own inhibition.  Josef von Sternberg manages to capture it in smaller but no less telling ways – as Lola makes a little movement that reveals an extra inch or two of flesh unknowingly or, at least, insouciantly.  Yet what’s also so good about Dietrich’s acting is that she doesn’t make Lola simply heartless.  There are moments when she’s intrigued, almost concerned by Rath’s blandishments:  when he proposes marriage, it’s all too much for her and she bursts into unstoppable (and unforgettable) laughter.  Then she comes to her self-interested senses and accepts him.

The magician Kiepert is expertly played by Kurt Gerron, his scolding, shabby wife by Rosa Valetti, the clown by Reinhold Bernt and the strongman Mazeppa (whose seduction of Lola triggers Rath’s final breakdown) by Hans Albers.  (By an unspeakable irony, the Jewish Gerron died in the Nazi death camps, and in Theresienstadt ran a cabaret to entertain the inmates.)  It’s hardly surprising that Bob Fosse drew on The Blue Angel but I hadn’t realised how specifically some of the onstage compositions and details in Cabaret echo the earlier film – more than one of the dancers at the Kit Kat Klub has the exact physical form of a Blue Angel progenitor.  Although von Sternberg had returned from Hollywood to make The Blue Angel (his second sound feature), the chiaroscuro of Günther Rittau’s photography, with its deep, alarming shadows, seems fully characteristic of German expressionist cinema of the 1920s.   The details of the design make for some memorable images – like the figures that emerge from the school clock when it strikes the hour, sinister in their inviolable order.  At the end, you feel you’ve seen a film which is not just about physical longing but also about loneliness, and about how the horror of loneliness can be realised when it’s combined with longing.  You’re also left wondering whether what he felt for Lola fired Rath’s existence in a way that was life-enhancing as well as destructive.  It brings to mind the lines in Larkin’s ‘Deceptions’:

‘… What can be said,

Except that suffering is exact, but where

Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?’

10 December 2009