Morocco Reviews

Out of all the possible films from which to choose as the one to give Marlene Dietrich her only Oscar nomination Morocco would not be that film. Witness for the Prosecution, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress -- these would be a few of the choices that immediately spring to mind. But I can see why in 1930 the Academy would bend over backwards to nominate her for this. Morocco has one hell of a movie star introduction, and for that one scene alone it is worth a look.

Clad in a man’s tuxedo and a top hat, Dietrich comes strolling out, cool and confident, sizing up the audience, singing a little here and there, and flirts with both men and women. When she finally stops to take a flower from a woman, she bends down and kisses her on the mouth before throwing the flower to Gary Cooper, her lust object in the film. Wowza! Now, THAT is an entrance. Although one must admit that her singing voice is slightly droning, but that is part of her post-modernist charm. While she is frequently compared to Greta Garbo, between them Dietrich is the lesser actress but an equal film presence, Dietrich’s ironic masculinity and Germanic singing voice have aged beautifully. And while The Blue Angel technically came before this, it was only released in Germany before Morocco. Around the world Morocco was the introductory film of Marlene Dietrich and The Blue Angel came a short while later.

The plot is a bit of an absurdity, like all of the Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations, in which Dietrich plays a singer coming to Morocco to escape something from her past. She needs no man and wants no love, but falls for the effeminate Gary Cooper. And who wouldn’t? His matinee idol good looks are just feminine enough to let you know that Dietrich is the alpha in charge here. And that’s a trait that carried over well into her later career. Dietrich always worked best opposite some feminine looking leading man that she could dominate and turn into putty with her remote-but-aggressive sexuality and confident bitchery. Anyway, he’s a Foreign Legionnaire, and she’s caught the eye of a worldly and sophisticated man in town. In the end she chooses to run off with her stunningly beautiful soldier boy. It’s the stuff that camp dreams are made of as she walks off into the desert in her high heels. It’s wonderful that it is shot in utter silence, save for the howling winds, because any music over those last images and it would have turned into the kind of purple filmmaking that so many ‘women’s pictures’ turned into.

Sternberg, always concerned with matters of the codes by which we live, obsession, sexual desire and our needs, lays bare the tug-and-pull of these characters as they constantly circle around each other but never inviting each other in. There’s something still very modern about the seven films that these two titans made together. It’s not just the visual poetry that Sternberg could so easily manipulate, or the way that Dietrich plays it all so coolly, but it’s the themes. The ways in which we repress our deepest impulses and secret desires to live in the normal world, and Sternberg knew what was and still is going on behind closed doors. Just look at the androgyny and masculine sexuality that he played up in Dietrich in every film they made together.