Notes on Films Viewed on TCM

Marlene Dietrich in the infamous
Hot Voodoo number in Blonde Venus

I happened on the middle of Blonde Venus (1932, Josef Von Sternberg) on TCM and rewound it to the beginning. What Marlene Dietrich was selling and what Madeline Kahn satirized so brilliantly in Blazing Saddles was boredom and beauty. In her most iconic role after The Blue Angel, Dietrich plays a German-born wife and mother forced to sing in NYC cabarets to pay for her ailing husband's expensive medical treatments (Herbert Marshall is the husband in a role he would later repeat opposite Bette Davis in The Little Foxes.) 

In the infamous Hot Voodoo number, later parodied by Joel Schumacher for Uma Thurman in the ultra-campy Batman and Robin, Dietrich transcends the plot, her character and sexuality itself. The number is supposed to take place in a low-class dive but there are high production values and filthy rich customers like Cary Grant as a playboy-politician frequenting the dump. The weirdness starts as a chorus of African-American dancers--not white girls in blackface--got up as stereotypical tribeswomen with spears, shields and Afros, sensuously move as one like a giant millipede, leading a gorilla on a chain. Things get weirder when the beast removes its paw to reveal an alabaster feminine hand, nails painted and adorned with diamonds. The gorilla is revealed to be Dietrich who once shod of the costume, croons of the intoxicating rhythm of Hot Voodoo. 

The beast is the primitive symbol of pre-Code lust and Dietrich the unattainable ice princess beneath. Dietrich is indifferent throughout the film, registering the same blank lack of emotion whether bathing her supposedly beloved toddler son, teasing equally stone-faced Grant, or performing two other numbers including the stunning "I Couldn't Be Annoyed" in sparkling white tie, top hat and tails. There is no chemistry between Dietrich and Grant, while there was plenty between Grant and Mae West in She Done Him Wrong, filmed a year later. We believe West's appraisal of Grant's Salvation Army lieutenant, "You can be had." There is also no chemistry between Dietrich and Marshall as her sap of a spouse even when she drops Grant to return to home and hearth. 

The connection is between Dietrich and her audience. Her singer Helen Jones exudes indifference to her fate, despite what the script says. Every man in the audience imagines he is the one to melt the star's Teutonic iceberg-exterior and every woman longs to project her dominance over men. 

The only scene where she expresses an emotion is when Helen has hit rock bottom in a flop house populated with the female dregs of society. The emotion is anger as Helen rages at her fate and stamps out. The next thing you know, she headlining in Paris, bored as ever.

Hattie McDaniel pops up in a few scenes towards the end of the film. 

When I took my first trip to Paris, my roommate, an inveterate movie buff, suggested I visit Dietrich who was living there at the time and get her autograph. This was in 1989 and I scoffed at the idea. How would I even get in to see her? Maybe I should have, who knows?

The Battle of Britain (1969, Guy Hamilton)

Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer in
The Battle of Britian.

Somehow I missed this WWII epic. My Dad used to love watching films like this--The Longest Day, Battle of the Bulge, A Bridge Too Far, Bridge on the River Kwai, etc. I like watching these old films because it makes me think of him. Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Michael Redgrave, Kenneth More, and Trevor Howard exhibit stiff upper lips as top brass in the RAF and diplomatic corps while handsome young Robert Shaw, Christopher Plummer, Michel Caine, Edward Fox, and Ian McShane keep the skies over Britain safe from Nazi invaders. Sir Laurence is so subdued he seems to be ready for a nap, but Sir Ralph is devilishly dynamic in his one scene as the English Ambassador to Switzerland standing up to his German counterpart. Suzannah York is the sole female as Plummer's combative wife, torn between her husband's demands she stay near him and her sense of duty as a Section Officer of female recruits.