Angelo

Lady Barker (Marlene Dietrich) benignly ignored by her British diplomat (Herbert Marshall) sneaks off to Paris to visit an old friend running a fashionable salon where discretion is highly valued. There she meets a brash American Anthony Halton (Melvyn Douglas) and has a whirlwind affair with him before disappearing. Circumstance brings the two men together however and once revealed as rivals Barker is left with no option other than to decide who she will walk with.

One of Lubitsch's minor efforts from his Paramount period Angel is a well mannered romantic comedy that never raises its voice as adults behave like adults. Marshall and Douglas display charming civility with each other while the usually ice like beauty Dietrich supplies the right amount of hopeless romantic, strong woman to balance the trio. The usual stalwart Paramount supporting cast is in evidence with Edward Everett Horton, Edward Cossart, Herbert Mundin and Laura Hope Crews adding wit and humor to the proceedings while Lubitsch applies his famous touch of deft incidentals and open doors. The arrested passions and lack of high comedy however allows Angel to fly no higher than a mildly pleasant entertainment ably assisted by the grace and charm of its stars.

The Lubitsch touch is omnipresent in this relatively unknown but extraordinary romantic comedy. The theme of a potential marital infidelity of a disaffected upper class wife (a gleaming Marlene Dietrich) is dealt with unusual sophistication and insight, building up slowly to a brilliant denouement, while the core dilemmas and the predicament of the main character are continuously and subtly underscored. The confrontations between the characters are a delight of restrained pathos, whereas Lubitsch, unsurprisingly, perfectly recreates a confined world of rigid social norms that suppresses any emotional profusion. All the performances are top notch, the secondary characters are equally memorable and the whole film is pervaded by the genius of one of cinemas most charismatic directors, Ernst Lubitsch. One wishes that modern romantic comedies had only maintained even a fraction of the wit and incisiveness that Lubitsch established as a norm in the 30s.

Fans of Lubitsch have always been disappointed in this 1937 film, the last one Marlene made under her Paramount contract and a failure at the box office. Perhaps because it is not one of the director's champagne comedies, although it has its occasional comic moments. It is, unlike most of the director's later works, a serious drama about a neglected woman, dutiful wife of a workaholic English diplomat, who has a brief fling in Paris with an attractive American playboy and chooses to forget about it until... Marlene is absolutely superb in this demanding psychological role, radiantly beautiful and flirtatious at times, glacially cold at others. The men, Herbert Marshall as the stiff upper class Brit, and Melvyn Douglas as the frivolous Yank out for pleasure, are exactly right as men of the world without the slightest notion of what a woman might be. Films like this about adultery were rarely made after the Pre-Code era and, as to be expected, Lubitsch displays his genius for erotic suggestion. He never shows us what he knows we can imagine. Filmed entirely on the Paramount Hollywood lot in the golden age, it is filled with gorgeous sets and furniture, Dietrich in Travis Banton gowns, underscoring by Fredrick Hollander, and glamorous back-lighting by Charles Lang-all dedicated to creating a world of sophistication that never existed other than in Hollywood. This is a major Lubitsch film, among his most complex efforts.

This is a Dietrich film, her last starring role at her home studio, Paramount. She is supported by 2 of the top Hollywood leading men - Douglas and Marshall - and dressed sumptuously by Travis Banton. The film should have been a money-maker for its studio, but apparently it was too sophisticated for the small-town public and she became 'Box Office Poison' after its release. Variety, in its disparaging but humorous review, said that you could hang coats from Dietrich's eyelashes. I attentively kept an eye on those eyelashes and have to admit that they ARE long, but not long enough to hang a coat on.

I liked this film. I especially liked Dietrich's aristocrat diplomat husband - Marshall - devoted to duty to fend off WW2. And I liked Dietrich. She has servants who attend to all personal and household tasks and therefore she has nothing to do. She is bored. She flies to Paris and has a romantic evening with a stranger - Douglas - a piano playing playboy who is infatuated with her. In the end she chooses the man who is the only one who can give her the happiness she craves. Females can learn a trick or 2 or more re how to attract and keep a man from closely observing Dietrich in this film. In what was once common terminology, she is a "man's woman." How times and the culture have changed.

BTW, 'Angel', although it has bits of comedy supplied by the servants, is not a comedy, but is instead a light-hearted, sophisticated marital drama.

This is one of Ernst Lubitsch's less conspicuous films, while the performance of Marlene Dietrich in it is the more outstanding. Herbert Marshall is all right, he played against her before in "Blonde Venus" four years earlier, he was a jealous husband even there, but that was Josef con Sternberg, while Ernst Lubitsch is a completely different thing, although both are Viennese, and Marlene Dietrich is German. Melvyn Douglas is the tricky thing here. He makes a perfectly abominable offensive character insisting on constantly importuning on her, and you can't understand how she can tolerate it, but Marlene is Marlene, always superior to any critical situation, and also here she finally provides a solution, but not without the clever psychological empathy with her on the part of Herbert Marshall. Both Melvyn and Herbert appear, however, as perfect dummies at her side, while she makes the entire film worth while and watching. It's very European, while poor Melvyn keeps blundering on without noticing anything of the subtleties going on. She enters as a mystery of an intrigue, but when she has solved the knot she is already gone.