Germany, 1930
Directed by Joseph von Sternberg
With Marlene Dietrich (Lola Lola), Emil Jannings (Professor Immanuel Rath), Kurt Gerron (the magician)
This is the scathing relation of a fall, relying on ironic and cruel repetitions and the heartbreaking contrast between miens and attitudes that could not have ever matched – love as a senseless thrill, turning awry.
A detail proved to be not just a bad surprise but the harbinger of the disaster to come. The first thing Professor Immanuel Rath realizes on the first morning of the story is that his pet bird has died. His maid is neither surprised nor troubled: after all the bird has stopped singing for some time and it is now a little dead animal to be thrown in the stove, even as the high school professor looks on stunned. Death is already knocking at the door; the enchantment brought by music cannot last.
What would annoy more that morning Immanuel Rath is to find how unruly his students are and how obsessed with a cabaret singer striking provocative poses on teasing postcards they are. The stern, old-fashioned, unpopular professor decides to see what Lola Lola is doing at The Blue Angel cabaret look like and to make sure that does no longer distract his students from studying in the evenings. But the episode just echoes the mayhem of the classroom: the priggish bully rather looks like ridiculous and is readily mocked. The smirk on Lola Lola’s beautiful face resembles the one that the jokiest students of the professor have when doing their dirty tricks.
But this is a prank by one of the boys in the mayhem caused by the professor in the cabaret which changes the situation: founding the artist’s panties in his coat, Immanuel Rath feels obliged to come back to The Blue Angel for a second evening in a row, to hand it back, out of his strict sense of politeness and propriety. Or maybe something else: whatever the reasons, Immanuel Rath spends much time with Lola Lola and in a quixotic and old-fashioned move takes aggressively on a customer who wants to drink with her even if she clearly does not relish the prospect. Funny circumstances do not make the professor run away in a shame, but actually let him stay over, getting celebrated by a magician who is the manager of the troupe Lola Lola belongs to and courted by the singer herself. From an embarrassed intellectual he morphs into a simpering suitor who eventually spends the night in Lola Lola’s small apartment above the cabaret.
Still spurred by this strict sense of politeness and propriety, and more clearly by something else, Immanuel Rath decides to marry Lola Lola. Stunned, she accepts, while her boss views it as an extraordinary and great event – his earlier remarks about the meeting of art and science when he bumped into the professor during the hectic first evening at The Blue Angel seem now fitting. The celebratory lunch following the wedding is carefully highlighted in the montage, the obvious turning point in the life of Immanuel Rath. It involves a grotesque episode, when the magician performs a trick and makes eggs coming out of the professor’s nose. Lola Lola starts imitating a hen, and her hubby a rooster.
That feels like the foolish, oddball behavior guests who have drunk too much have in such an occasion. But it soon takes another meaning in the drab sequences that follow: Immanuel Rath has become a disheveled, imbecilic, and sad assistant of the troupe struggling to sell the raunchy postcards featuring Lola Lola. She may still love him, but he is no longer the distinguished man of their first encounter, just a skivvy. Worst is to come: to stay in the troupe and make a buck he is forced to become the partner of the magician’s number, disguised as a clown conducting himself as a clumsy, dense assistant, both the needed help and unwilling victim of the magician’s tricks – a performance that includes singing like a hen: this marriage was a mistake.
Years fly by and amazingly Immanuel Rath has become a star – but also a far more bitter and sadder guy. When the troupe comes back at The Blue Angel, it could have been business as usual. But the way an artist woos Lola Lola, who enjoys the attention, drives Immanuel Rath mad. He spoils the number, tries to kill his wife, and runs away. He rushes through the dark streets of the town, but in the opposite direction from what the narrative’s first part showed: he gets into the high school where he taught, sits at his former chair, lies his head on the desk, and just dies, his hand gripping the edges of the desk, the camera repeating the same swift tracking out motion that illustrated the moment when he was threatened by his director to be fired for his improper relation with a scandalous cabaret artist. Death bookends the film, with the physical death of Immanuel Rath belatedly completing the social death he has caused by his foolish courting.
A bachelor, a bully, a blunderer: Immanuel Rath is not a pleasant character eliciting sympathy. His fall is the unforgiving relation of a man who is not loved and does not know how to love but who out of the blue has feelings that bowl him over and push him to make the biggest mistake – getting out of the world he was made for to enter a starkly different one. It may be easy to point that the cabaret is the stage of illusions and a locus for immorality; but it could also be argued that the academic, elitist, bourgeois milieu Immanuel Rath symbolizes is stuffy and stilted – the film is loosely based on the novel “Professor Unrat” by Heinrich Mann, who was no great admirer of the German society of his time. The two worlds could not have met.
The signature song of Lola Lola explains that, from head to toe, she is made for love: mawkish assertion that Immanuel Rath, sitting mesmerized in a gallery as Lola Lola sings on a stool, may have too readily take as accurate and inviting, misreading the body language of the singer which plainly suggests a more frivolous and hotter meaning. Love is then the freedom to desire and to have pleasure, the artist offering herself to satisfy a lust held by a leash by a conservative, dated society. But it could well be a sincere feeling from a singer who is first a lonely heart: maybe the unexpected marriage fulfilled a secret desire, of romance and respectability. Of course, it could never have been on the longer term fully rewarding to a person so proud of her liberty and independence.
Who did make the biggest mistake, the careless and carefree singer getting married out of a whim, or the professor discovering belatedly what love can be and independence can taste? But whose film is it, anyway?
The titles make clear the big star is Emil Jannings, one of the greatest stars of the German cinema, fresh from a failed trip to Hollywood. The first and last character to feature, the film is a showcase of his skills. Yet the real engine driving his character’s narrative arc, the focus of a riveted camera, is the novice working with him: Marlene Dietrich, whose cheeky and bold ways stun, plainly aware of her charm and of what her part implies. She steals the show, and this was forthcoming. If Jannings is the first lead to be shot acting, it is Dietrich who is first glimpsed by the audience through a telling, suggestive image.
The establishing shot captures the hustle and bustle of a street, then the camera moves closer to a showcase. Behind the glass is hanged a poster of The Blue Angel with Lola Lola. From the door on the left of the showcase a charwoman comes out to clean the glass. She does it fast and good, but then takes a step back, stares at the image of the singer, and turns around to strike the same merry, provocative pose as the woman on the poster: the first sign in the narrative of the huge, decisive impact of the cabaret artist, which would draw ultimately Immanuel Rath into disaster, the symbol of the influence celebrity, and even more scandal-tainted celebrity, wields, and the revelation of what a new star can embody. Jannings reportedly found it hard to get along with Dietrich who had an affair with director Joseph von Sternberg – a terrible background for the production. And the fact is the film does not play out as some might have thought when the shooting started: von Sternberg made a film that went beyond the remit of an adaption and highlighted the birth of a new kind of female star.