The Scarlet Empress

Truly one of the greatest films ever made (see the International Film Critics' Top 100 Films list as well). Dietrich was never more luminous, nor cinematography more gorgeous, than in THE SCARLET EMPRESS. It's in black and white, but you'll feel like it's in full and glorious color. History it's not, but who cares? This is the way things should have been.

An innocent & obscure German princess is sent to Russia to become the wife of Grand Duke Peter, heir to the throne. Her romantic dreams are shattered when she finds her new husband to be a childish imbecile. Quickly growing wise, she soon begins taking lovers from among the military guard. So begins the legendary life of Catherine, Tsarina of Holy Russia, The Messalina of the North, THE SCARLET EMPRESS.

A riotous feast for the eyes, this is one of the great, unheralded films of the 1930's - enthralling for its visual impact alone. Seldom has an American film been filled with such lush imagery - tactile, grotesque, fascinating. The Russian royal palace is a charnel house full of ghouls & gargoyles - human & artistic. The actors share the scenes with fantastic statuary, twisting & writhing in silent, unspeakable pain. (Notice the tiny skeletons on the dining table.) Everywhere is death, moral decay & barbarism, even in the most powerful court in Europe.

At the center of this ossuary is the gorgeous Marlene Dietrich. Her beauty radiates, but never dominates, throughout the film. She is splendid as a young woman in a very dangerous place, who gains courage & great determination in her ordeal. Equally good is Sam Jaffe as Peter; with his leering grin & demented eyes he is the very picture of a murderous madman.

Louise Dresser, as the Empress Elizabeth, is very effective as a comic bully. John Lodge & Gavin Gordon, as Catherine's military lovers, are both stalwart. Wonderful old Sir C. Aubrey Smith has a small role as Catherine's princely father. Film mavens will spot an uncredited Jane Darwell as Catherine's nurse.

The highly emotional soundtrack, an amalgam of themes by Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn & Wagner, explodes in the film's final moments into musical pyrotechnics.

This biopic about the rise of the German Princess Sofia to Empress Catherine of Russia, from naive and deferential innocent to rapacious predator, is accurate only in the broadest outlines. Even the opening credits indicate a loose approach to fact: "Based on a diary of Catherine," "arranged by Manuel Komroff."

In the first half Marlene Dietrich in the title role overplays breathless awe so emphatically that one can only wonder if she was strictly directed to do so; after her sexual awakening after months of resisting the stirring of her passions by a rakish courtier (John Lodge) and crazed with frustration by her unconsummated marriage to the repellent Tsar-to-be Peter (Sam Jaffe), she melts into the arms of a palace guard during a sudden moonlit encounter.

It's hard to believe this film passed the 1934 censors, given its open suggestions of out-of-wedlock sex (and subsequent pregnancy); Dietrich's posturings call to mind pre-Code Mae West (who was a friendly acquaintance of Dietrich's on the Paramount lot where they were working at the same time). Perhaps the keepers of the Code were too distracted by the shimmering vision of the blonde icon as lit by Josef von Sternberg. And make no mistake about it, this movie is a paean to Dietrich as a work of art. The "Catherine the Great" plot, scenic design and supporting players are the scaffolding and trappings supporting and surrounding the living goddess.

These trappings are highly stylized and elaborate as, for example, the Lubitsch-like ritual of Princess Sophia (the future Empress Catherine) kissing the hands of all adults present whenever she enters or exits a room; when she isn't engaged in strictly supervised activities she is kept locked in her bedroom several flights above the main floor of her house; her mother is such a disciplinarian that she scolds the child even when the child obeys. Empress Elizabeth of Russia (Louise Dresser) is introduced on a grand throne in forbidding surroundings decorated with huge grimacing gargoyles festooned with dripping candles and attended by over-dressed lackeys, only to open her mouth and jabber like a bilious small-minded housewife. And the future Tsar Peter whom Sophia is sent to Russia to marry is an imbecile and described as such repeatedly in intertitles in case we miss the point.

In fact the flow of exaggerations and extremes is more or less constant so that the viewer is alternately hypnotized and amused. If Dietrich is not your cup of tea, the movie will repel you, because it's all about her.

This picture is absolutely one of the oddest damn things ever to come out of the old Hollywood studio system. Von Sternberg himself called it "a relentless exercise in pure style" and he wasn't kidding. Where to begin? For starters, it marks the apex of Sternberg's worship of Marlene Dietrich (worship is hardly too strong a word; it might not be strong enough). His justly famous expressionistic lighting, brilliantly shot by Bert Glennon, dazzles the eye throughout. During the wedding ceremony, for instance, the whole scene is lit by what must be 10,000 candles and is shot through a variety of diffusion materials; in one shot Dietrich's face can hardly be more than a foot from the camera lens but there is a candle between them, and fabric as well, making her face waver and melt into the sensuous texture. This scene is largely silent, and the movie as a whole, though made in 1934, is often silent with music only. Rubinstein's "Kammenoi-Ostrow" arranged for chorus and orchestra plays through the whole wedding scene while Sam Jaffe, a wonderful and versatile actor, plays the insane Grand Duke Peter like Harpo Marx on bad acid. The dialogue throughout is just plain weird, and the mise-en-scene far weirder. Sternberg has created an entire fictitious style for this movie that might be called Russian Gothic. The buildings in no way resemble the airy rococo palaces where the real Empress Elisavieta Petrovna spent her time; rather we are given a nightmarish phantasmagoria of wooden architecture with railings and balustrades carved into the shape of peasants in attitudes of great suffering, and vast doors which armies of ladies-in-waiting struggle to open and close. The aftermath of a brutal feast is portrayed with a skeletal tureen stand presiding over the indescribable flotsam and jetsam. Louise Dresser is a hoot as Empress Elizabeth, never mind the accent; and I also like John Lodge, although I didn't at first; the aplomb with which he delivers his outrageous dialogue finally won me over. Please ignore all the stupid stories about Catherine the Great and horses that you may have heard; there isn't an ounce of evidence for any of them. Instead relish the opening of this gloriously crazy movie: Edward van Sloan, in his best "Dracula/Frankenstein" mode, reading to the little girl Catherine about Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, as we dissolve to fantastic scenes of barbaric torture, culminating in a shot of some peasant being used as the clapper of a bell, which dissolves to the sweet young adult Catherine of some years later on a swing. In the 18th century, swings were considered highly erotic, and Sternberg misses none of this. She is called away by a servant, and runs breathlessly into the parlor where her parents are receiving the Russian envoys. Her actions are literally choreographed to the music as she bobs and weaves around the room, kissing hands and saluting her elders. This is pure cinema, and absolutely nuts, but glorious. Take a good strong snort of whatever your favorite mind-expander may be (a dry red wine with a shot of Stolichnaya under it is my recommendation in this case) and blast your brain with a truly strange movie made by real artists.

Historically speaking, the film must count as one of the grossest abominations in a Hollywood which for the longest time envisioned anything laying east and south of the Danube as uncharted, barbarous darkness. Young Catherine arrives in Russia practically a child, only to be greeted by the scoldings of another overbearing mother, an Orthodox patriarch perched beneath an ungodly gargoyle, and a half-mad imbecile for a husband.

The whole of the Russian court turns out to be not much different from the vile stories of atrocity she was narrated to as a child, one after another a series of machinations at the hands of the half-mad.

But of course history was never the purpose for Sternberg, these stories at the beginning of the film he visualizes in the manner of pages from a book. So a fiction malformed from history, a book of images, ostensibly based on the diaries of the real person, in turn a history malformed from the real thing, with Dietrich stage center, shining, radiant.

It was always Dietrich that validated film for Sternberg, the image of seductive beauty that could seduce beauty from the camera. But in several ways, I feel that Sternberg deteriorated upon joining up with her much like the hapless professor in Blue Angel. His art was tortured before, anguished with emotion, but since Dietrich it seemed to be solely consumed by her at the expense of all else.

Nowhere is this more evident than here, no pretense about it anymore. Dietrich is quite literally queen, destined to be, and the whole thing around her merely provides the tortured circumstances for the scene of triumph.

There is so much cacophony when she does finally triumph that it makes you think Sternberg has finally gone unhinged from so much pained adoration, that he doesn't quite know when to separate one feverish fantasy from his own. A cavalcade storms inside the palace and up the expansive staircase, a bell rings, ringing bells across the country, crowds rejoice, that were earlier silently praying, and Dietrich is finally ushered on shoulders into the church swarmed with banners on all sides to be crowned empress. Ride of the Valkyries clangs away in bombast for the duration.

But this is the thing that strikes the most vividly, the crowning luxurious decadence of the whole enterprise. Even in the grip of what seems like lovestruck paroxysm, Sternberg could envision farther than most at the time. And when he failed, he failed more spectacularly than anyone could, in the most interesting ways to see.

It baffles. It exhilarates with the sheer monstrosity of the caricature. It overwhelms any sensibility that is fine, any sense of good taste. You will never see more a outrageous depiction of an Orthodox church ever, the frescoes of saints bordering on a surreal that is blasphemous. Or more styrofoam gargoyles in one studio lot palace.

So the frame is overflowing with anguished, fiendish luxury; but everything that is grossly portrayed here, was actually taking place on that studio lot. Whatever was going on in 18th century Russia, at least this thing was actually happening in Hollywood, that would go to such lengths to envision and stage such a dazzling darkness. A cavalcade was made to storm up a staircase. And there was this woman at the center, flickering before the camera like the flame of the candle she holds at one scene, finally lighting up the place.

So it is apt to recast the whole thing as Dietrich's journey, mirrored from the other, from her faraway home into the court of a foreign country, with every spotlight on her, every male pair of eyes.

The first part is sourced out as a kind of Alice in Wonderland; the girl enters a strange world, apprehensive, fearful, a world that would reduce her to size, where she must fit through doors too big, wait for the queen or lose her head, finally descend into a rabbit hole and come out the other end the mother of a heir.

But in the second part she becomes the Dietrich we know and have come to see conquer with fierce beauty, the Lola that first broke hearts in Blue Angel; the whole film around her transforms into the restless dream that men were dreaming about her. The idea is that she becomes that dream, operating the image from inside.

It is not a good film all else considered, the overcooked bombast, the intertitles that never shy away from revealing the full implications of the most obvious detail, but it's a mess you should see, just for how madly passionate.