Two things make it impossible to consign Josef von Sternberg's seedily atmospheric 1930 masterpiece The Blue Angel to the archives of museum land: it was the first film to put Marlene Dietrich in front of an international audience; and it features a towering performance from Emil Jannings as the professor whose fall from grace is precipitated by his obsession with Dietrich's archly vampish showgirl Lola-Lola. On both counts The Blue Angel remains a potent, vibrant work which still has moments of real relevance. Dietrich's performance is indeed hypnotic: von Sternberg lights her face and exposed flesh--shoulders and thighs--in a way that clearly indicates the erotic charge she generates among the men in the Blue Angel night club, and in Jennings in particular. Before our eyes his repressed, puritanical self-will disintegrates and his fate is sealed. The pivotal moment is, of course, when Dietrich teases her audience with "Falling in Love Again", her stockinged and suspendered legs astride a beer barrel, a top hat rakishly on her head. It would become the signature tune of her cabaret act in later years but here she delivers it with a far less studied, throwaway cheeriness; how, indeed, can it be her fault if men cluster around her like moths around a flame? This is the raw material on which an icon was built, but there is much else to fascinate in the film itself: you can still smell the pungent grim reality of a trouper's life on the road; and the professor's pathetic efforts to control his class of unruly boys still resonates today... this is an essential piece of film history. On the DVD: The Blue Angel is presented in its German and English-language versions, both restored and digitally remastered. As far as the sound quality is concerned this is of limited benefit since there is a great deal of distortion on both versions. But thanks to the picture restoration we can see how von Sternberg treats Dietrich: her face becomes a radiant, mocking pool of light always in contrast with the dark, grainy characters around her. The English version (in truth, only the Dietrich/Jannings scenes were shot in each language) is slightly pruned, missing a key scene in which the professor's repressed sensitivity is established at the very beginning. So despite some erratic sub-titling, the German version remains definitive. And it also reveals the worldliness of the original lyrics to Friedrich Hollander's classic songs: "I Was Made for Love from Head to Toe" suggests a rather more robust attitude than the vague whimsy of "Falling in Love Again." A final thought: releasing films of this importance on DVD surely creates an opportunity to put them in context by including documentary and factual resources, but this release has no extras of any kind. At the very least it cries out for an authoritative commentary. --Piers Ford
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