The Devil Is a Woman

The Devil Is a Woman is the last in a series of seven films which Marlene Dietrich and her svengali Josef von Sternberg made together. Each contained some kind of prophetic or weirdly autobiographical element within the storyline, and Devil comes across as the summation of their relationship being acted on film. It also happens to be the least of their series of films with an exaggerated performance from Dietrich and a plot which feels like Sternberg acting out his frustration and wounded pride with his muse/former lover.

The Devil Is a Woman has a title which reeks of misogyny, but tells a tale of male masochism being acted out. Dietrich is Concha, a Spanish factory girl who seduces and repeatedly rejects Don Pasquale (Lionel Atwill), before she performs her act on his younger friend and revolutionary (Cesar Romero). The film is told in flashbacks as Pasquale warns his young friend about Concha, a beautiful rose with poisonous thorns. If you subscribe to the storyline that Sternberg loved Dietrich while she felt raging indifference after a period of time, then the film’s two main players are effectively the director and star. It makes for a fun bit of behind-the-scenes tabloid gossip informing and creating the work. As each man continually goes back for more of Dietrich’s pleasure torture, they lose a piece of themselves and their dignity. They revel in every moment of it until it’s all over and the guilt sets in. It’s all a dark comedy about the war between the sexes, with Dietrich always coming on top.

And while the film is overflowing with the typical visual excesses and startlingly beautiful cinematography of his other films with Dietrich, it’s the star who makes their last film together so off. Normally so finely restrained and a glacier who oozed sexuality and a dominatrix-like intent is here seen stomping her foot and bugging out her eyes in a manner that suggests Bette Davis slumming it in her earliest films. If the intent was to portray the damaged little girl inside of Concha then they could have gone about it in a different way. The sets and costumes retain their visual poetry, but Dietrich’s image and pathological indifference to all around her were an equal part of that poetry. Her acting here helps proclaim that their relationship is really and truly over if she can’t continue on with the image and acting style that Sternberg crafted for and with her.

Despite some problems with the faintly ridiculous storyline and Dietrich’s performance, The Devil Is a Woman is well worth a look. It’s visual sumptuous and contains a great final scene in which Dietrich leaves the young stud to go about destroying her next victim. Or possibly to return to the sad sack Pasquale one more time, just because she can. The moral of the story which Dietrich proved time and again in her later Hollywood years and Sternberg had to learn the hard way? No man can tame Marlene Dietrich, though many have tried.