Movie: The Blue Angel - Der blaue Engel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
I didn't expect to see so soon someone get humiliated even worse than Baby Doll's Archie Lee. But Josef von Sternberg ruthlessly transforms Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) into an emasculated clown whose obsession with Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) ruins his life. She barely has do to anything for it; Dietrich, in her breakthrough role, plays Lola Lola as rather indifferent to her talent, appeal and admirers. The film itself only further encourages this nonchalance. Considering that this was the start of a notorious affair between von Sternberg and Dietrich, it's quite striking how dispassionately she is presented. Beyond one performance of Lola's signature song, during which she is presented fully lit in full frame and in close up, the film doesn't do anything to adorn her or to present her in a way that signals that she is more special than the other characters.
This approach does fit the film's story. Lola is part of a semi-legal travelling theater troupe specialising in cheap cabaret and even cheaper magic tricks. Lola is its biggest star, which the film quite explicitly presents as her ceiling as a performer. She is presented (and presents herself) as a decent singer and a decent dancer with just enough charm and talent to take some money out of the pockets of naive high-schoolers. Professor Rath, at wits' end that his students are so enthralled by such lowlife pleasures, one day goes into the club ('The Blue Angel') where she performs to confront everybody. Of course he ends up in love with Lola (who doesn't really actively seduce him, nor does she seem to love him very much. For her their relationship appears to be mostly transactional) and decides to marry her, losing his job as a professor. Travelling with the theater troupe, he is forced to sell pictures of Lola to disinterested audiences in shady bars, while Lola is happily flirting with customers. As he is miserably assisting Lola, in a wonderful transition depicting the abrupt passage of time, the film cuts to five years later when an equally miserable Roth is putting on clown's make up. What he doesn't yet know is that the biggest humiliation still awaits him: performing as a mediocre magician's assistant in The Blue Angel in his old home town.
The downfall of the professor represents such an abrupt shift in tone for the film (which was up until then a rather lighthearted comedy) and is so mercilessly executed by von Sternberg that it almost makes you forget the somewhat disappointing first half of the film. While I was not a fan of Dietrich's blasé performance I can see the appeal. Not so with Emil Jannings, who spends much of the film's early scenes mugging and making annoyed faces signaling his uptightness, with the film not very interested in exploring any other aspect of his character. In many of those scenes it is also noticeable that this is a film made in the midst of the transition from the silent to the sound era. Several scenes are staged in such a way that you are either waiting for someone to say something or to do something dramatic (or for an intertitle to appear telling us what is happenning). But because no clear choice is made and the timing is off, there are several instances in which characters are standing around awkwardly without much happenning. While this is a bit annoying, it's also quite interesting to see filmmakers struggle with the possibilities of film in real time. Also interesting is von Sternberg's lovely use of 'callbacks', such as the train whistle, the sound of a chirping bird, and the empty schooldesks. All of these sounds/images appear twice or more in the film, and are used cleverly to depict the emotional state of Professor Roth.
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