Original subtitles

♪ Falling in love again

♪ Never wanted to

♪ What's a girl to do?

♪ Can't help it ♪

The Blue Angel is a remarkable film

and a remarkable piece of film history.

This is the moment Marlene Dietrich stepped onto a global stage,

guided by director Josef von Sternberg,

electing himself as her Svengali.

Though as he said,

"I gave her nothing that she did not already have."

A new form of stardom emerged,

where actor and parts became versions of one another.

Audiences would seek out Dietrich films for Dietrich alone.

♪ I often stop and wonder

♪ Why I appeal to men

♪ How many times I've blundered

♪ In love and out again

♪ They offer me devotion

♪ I like it, I confess

♪ When I reflect emotion

♪ There's no need to get... ♪

Provocative and thrilling,

the film tells the story of the schoolteacher

Professor Rath, played by Emil Jannings,

who loses his mind

over Dietrich's risque club singer Lola Lola.

She will entice him, seduce him and then abandon him.

Where would you say The Blue Angel stands,

not just in terms of film history, but world history?

Well, I mean, it's at a pivotal point

in so many things this film is made, and the making of the film

reflects all of the changes that are going on around it.

First of all, in pure film terms, it's three years

since The Jazz Singer, and all of the conventions of filmmaking

have been thrown up in the air by the arrival of sound. You know,

suddenly acting has to change, the way that you make films

has to change, everything is being torn apart and remade.

At the same time, that's having a huge impact on the power base in cinema.

So Germany, which was a huge centre for making film in Europe

under the Silent era, is beginning to lose ground because of language,

so it's beginning to be, you know, the rise of Hollywood, the making of the new American Cinema.

But also it's shot in Berlin in '29, '30,

at a time when Berlin is just going, the Weimar Republic is going from

a period of hyperinflation into a period of austerity,

and these huge collapses in the fortunes of the middle class

are starting to produce the move towards the Nazis.

There'll be a huge vote for the Nazis in the year the film is released,

and then three years later the Nazis come to power,

And in a way, unconsciously or consciously,

the film captures this. It captures the fear of loss,

the fear of being dragged into something that you would have no control over,

the abandoning of old ways, and so the film, in a way,

is about its time, it's a film about the making of its time,

but it's also a film about the making of film.

Al Jolson,

whose picture The Jazz Singer had started the talkie revolution,

brings bride Ruby Keeler to Hollywood.

The world-famous Winnie Mae glides into the Los Angeles airport

after her epic-making flight around the world. Maurice Chevalier,

whose accent and outthrust lower lip had taken America by storm

the previous year, returns from Paris to star in The Love Parade.

Marlene Dietrich has just finished Morocco,

her first Hollywood film.

Marlene Dietrich is the key to this film.

She changed cinema acting.

Before that you had your Lilian Gishes, great actors all of these people.

But Marlene Dietrich comes on and there are moments in that film

where it looks like she's doing nothing,

you can't take your eyes off of her, and you're reading the movie

through her. Even if she's in the back and she's on,

she's in a frame with a great actor, but she is doing nothing.

And that is a great and interesting departure

for film acting. And partly, I'm thinking about it now,

her songs and the things she did later in her life,

it's about a Germany that was exhausted, that had no more to prove.

There was nothing left in the locker.

It was a young country in terms of it being united,

1870 under Bismarck, then it goes into the Franco/Prussian War

of 1871, then it goes into various little tiny wars,

and then there is World War I, in which it was defeated.

There is reparation. Germany was told

- that they started the war, you pay for it. - And this iswhat we think of

as the Weimar Republic, isn't it? The Weimar comes in

as a way to sort of hold the entity together.

Well, people were going to the shops with wheelbarrows full of currency.

Nothing was worth anything, nothing.

And so all of the old alliances, all of the old links, break down.

There is a theory that carried all the way through

to the Nazis, the theory of the stab in the back.

There was somebody within society who did this to us,

because we couldn't have allowed... this couldn't have happened to us

unless it had been done from within. So all of that is there,

and you go into Berlin, the capital of the country,

the sort of beating heart of the nation,

even though it's a bunch of little nations,

there's still Berlin, you go in

and the cabaret scene is inhabited by people from other countries.

And they're doing different things. There are guys dressed as women,

women dressed as men, and we mustn't forget

that a lot of Germany was rural. There were people who looked at this

and saw this as almost one of the supreme examples

of why the country was defeated, and it had to stop.

So if you can imagine, and I think about it,

the exhaustion, the exhaustion in the population as a whole,

they were fighting amongst themselves,

there was a Freikorps, there was all of this fighting in the streets,

there were paramilitary groups, there was the Left,

there was the Right, and there were people being thrown in the rivers,

there were people being, you know... beer hall putsches. But there was some great cinema.

There was, but within it comes The Blue Angel,

which is a kind of masterpiece and a masterclass

of what is happening underneath, within.

It is exemplified by this really straight

'I'm the king, I'm the one who knows how to do it' professor,

and this woman, who tells him, beware of blonde women,

and he doesn't hear her. I mean, the irony is

that this period in the Weimar Republic, you know,

while there is a great deal of sort of poverty and you know, austerity,

it was a time when the arts flourished.

It's extraordinary, I mean, you know, it's not the first time

this has happened. And cinema especially.

And one of the reasons that did is because it didn't matter

how much it took to actually make films,

they could sell them very cheaply because of the recession

and because of the Reichsmark as it was then, was so low in value.

So they could sell those films abroad.

♪ Spring has come, the birdies sing, all is bright and cheerful

♪ Hear the cuckoo in the trees, giving us an earful ♪

These were the early days of sound,

and we too are bewitched by Dietrich's stage presence.

Singing her wild songs, she is a force of human nature.

The Blue Angel captures a moment in time

and also strikes out into the future.

Cinema was never the same again.

My name is... Emanuel Rath,

Professor of the local school.

You ought to know enough to take off your hat.

Well, are you still here?

I must ask you to stop entertaining the boys of my class.

Sure, I have nothing else to do.

The Austrian-born but American-raised von Sternberg

came to Berlin looking for a spark

to reignite his flagging Hollywood career.

The Blue Angel was a co-production between Paramount and German giants UFA,

with self-styled great Emil Jannings already set for the lead.

Produced by the legendary Eric Pommer,

and loosely based on the novella by Heinrich Mann,

the scandalous Weimar production was talk of the town,

especially the question of who would play the seductress, Lola.

But in a way I think we shouldn't overthink it

in a sense, because we're looking in hindsight,

we're looking at it from backwards

and seeing what came, what happened.

They didn't really there was going to be a Depression.

They didn't really know... they knew there was a Nazi element,

but there were a lot of parties on the Right

that were in Germany, so they didn't really know.

What they wanted to do was make money. They wanted

to compete in a market that they saw

was going to be THE market, the artistic market, the market.

They had a link with Paramount, it was possible to do this.

Now how could they compete? How could they talk

to the world cinema market with their product?

How could they do that? And maybe one of the ways

was to make film that could be in a sense translated culturally

in a strange way, I think.

But they knew that what they had to do

was international, whatever they had to do,

because the country was unstable. So we should talk a bit

about this relationship between UFA and Paramount

which led to The Blue Angel. Yeah, so UFA was probably

the strongest, most powerful studio in Europe at that time,

and it had been doing incredibly well in the Silent era.

It had made reputations, it had made art forms,

it had redefined cinema, it had brought a lot of the stuff

that we now see - Calagari, Metropolis.

Absolutely. All the kind of greats, yeah. Things that we now

all take for granted in cinema begin with that studio.

But as soon as sound comes along, that studio faces this existential problem

that most of the world that will buy their cinema

is English-speaking. So Eric Pommer,

the guy in charge of the studio, had built a relationship in America,

he understands America is the largest market for cinema in the world,

and he has this idea that perhaps by making films that are both in German and in English,

he wants to shoot the films together, side by side,

so each scene will be shot twice, once in German, once in English,

then he can start to play on the world stage again.

But he's in debt. The film studio had lost an enormous amount of money

on Metropolis, they are in terrible debt. So he goes

to Paramount and they do a deal. Paramount loans them $4 million,

in exchange for which there is sort of a distribution arrangement

whereby Paramount are guaranteed German screens for all their films,

and UFA get some distribution in America. The main thing UFA gets

is survival. But this is not a co-production deal.

So the first project they do, The Blue Angel,

the fact that it's an American-German production,

that's not part of the contract, it's a sort of a happy accident

based on this enormous amount of negotiating they've done over the amount of money

and the fact that there are a lot of Germans in Paramount at the time.

Well, Professor, how do you like me now?

Obviously central to the story of The Blue Angel

is director Josef von Sternberg. He had been born in Austria,

he had come to America, he had been brought up in Queens.

He had come to Hollywood and become an eminent director

in Hollywood. But he was very much caught up with this rivalry

with an old Berliner, Ernst Lubitsch,

and in fact when the production was put together

between Paramount and UFA, I think they wanted Lubitsch first,

because he was the premier director in Hollywood at that time,

certainly of romantic comedies, and Lubitsch wasn't interested

in going back to Berlin. He was far too big for that.

So it sort of fell to von Sternberg, who was having a bit of a lull,

you know, his films weren't making as much money,

and I think he knew he was in search of something,

he was in search of a muse, and he hadn't found it yet.

But he came to Berlin, and Pommer offered him a Rasputin project,

which he didn't want to make, and said so in a press conference,

"I'm not going to make Rasputin." And he then was handed this book

by Heinrich Mann, which piqued his interest.

Now, what do you know about the original novella

the film is based on?

Well, Heinrich Mann was the younger brother of Thomas Mann,

who was more famous, in fact more successful,

but he had written this book, which was called Professor Unrat,

which roughly translated means Professor Filth.

And it follows a kind of... the basic plot, the basic plot

is similar to that of the film. Although in the book

he turns Lola against German society in a sense.

Yes, it's the sort of same plot, but sort of reversed

or tilted upside down in a way. So he took that basic plot

and he thought yes, we can do something with this. And he saw the opportunity

to just create this story of a professor, very fastidious,

lonely, but you know, possibly a virgin,

who controls his pupils, you know,

and he's basically part of the old school.

He is part of the old Germany.

And then he falls in love, he's actually trying

to find his pupils, who he discovers are hanging out at the Blue Angel,

which is a very sort of, you know, risque cabaret club

So he goes one night to sort of try and catch them there,

and as he's there of course he spots the star of the show, and falls for her.

Ah, hold your horses.

It all came down to the leading lady.

This was von Sternberg's greatest trick,

to transfix the story with Lola.

He must have seen every actress and mistress in Berlin for the part.

Despairing, he took in a musical comedy at the Berliner Theatre

called Two Bow Ties, and watched Dietrich own the stage.

When she auditioned for him, she was insolent and elegant.

The director became as obsessed as Jannings' doomed teacher.

♪ You're the cream of my coffee, you're the salt in my stew

♪ You will always be my necessity, I'm lost without you

♪ You're the cream in my coffee, you're the salt in my stew

♪ You will always be my necessity ♪

All of this was all going on, and I think von Sternberg fell into a little bit of a despair,

because he was looking for his muse. He was looking for the thing

that would rescue his career. And on some level,

you know, as you were saying, bring the film to some other level.

He knew it needed a force of nature, and he goes to the theatre

one night, it's the Berliner Theatre, and there's a musical comedy going on,

which is quite light in many respects,

and on walks this extraordinary woman,

and is droll to the audience, and just owns the moment.

In English, critically. In English. She walks in

and speaks to the audience in English, and he's mesmerised.

And whatever instinct is, I think von Sternberg has it in that moment

and goes, "that is Lola."

And she's... you get to see her audition sequence,

you can see how she - Cos she would still have had to audition for the film,

- he didn't give it to her straight away. - A technicality, though, because she is

very, very defined in her audition. She clearly is not taking this audition seriously

in any way whatsoever. He asks her to sing the song "You're the cream in my coffee,

you're the milk in my tea," and she is taking the mickey out of that song throughout.

She's got her cigarette on the piano, she's kind of scornful.

But what she has is this instinctive knowledge

of how to make the camera work. So she will do three verses of "You're the cream in my coffee,"

and by the third verse, she's looking directly down the lens

with this darkness to her,

with this compelling gaze. So she starts "You're the cream"

and she ends looking hard at the camera. And it's absolutely riveting.

She's playing it so close up, she understands the camera.

It's almost like she's born to be a cinema actor,

she's born to understand the movie camera in a way that no-one has before.

I'm going to hold that camera with just my awesome personality,

without moving my face too much, without waving my arms around, just look at me.

And we do. And that is absolutely riveting for her. And she changes it.

She changes the profession, she changes acting

in the sense that I think she's under-rated in people saying,

people are saying this about Dietrich,

all kinds of things about Dietrich, but she completely changed acting,

because, as you say, she understood that if it didn't come down the lens, it wasn't happening.

And the relationship was with the camera.

How do you perform for the camera?

And she completely got it and then Garbo got it too,

it was all there. But she wasn't an unknown, was she?

No, she wasn't entirely unknown. I mean,

- she had been working in the theatre, she had made a few films. And some cabaret. - A lot of cabaret.

So she was sort of on her way up. She wasn't like famous or celebrated, but she was,

you know, she was on the scene. She was around. But it is fascinating, you know,

that the casting of her, that whole process,

was a bit like sort of looking for Scarlet O'Hara, you know,

just everybody pulling into it, not only Leni Riefenstahl,

but Lottie Lenier, Bridgitte Helm was considered for the role,

had been in Metropolis. And I think there was another actress

who was actually virtually cast,

and by the time von Sternberg saw Marlene Dietrich, that was it,

all gloves were off. But he had to fight for her. The studio -

Yeah, they didn't want her. No. Because this was a big venture,

- this was a massive picture. They wanted a name. - Absolutely.

And may I also ask you

to be my wife?

Wife? Ja.

You are so sweet.

I hope you realise the importance of this hour.

There is so much to celebrate in the film,

Von Sternberg's lavish take on German Expressionism,

and no-one ever lit Dietrich as he did.

With Friedrich Hollander's jazzy songs,

the musical genre is taking flight.

The director also paints a social duality between the film's two theatres,

The rules and tradition of Rath's classroom,

and the liberating decadence of the Blue Angel cabaret.

This is a morally ambiguous portrait of man's slavery to his passions.

There are scenes which are constantly surprising

throughout the film, and they usually involve her,

because you think you've got the measure of her,

and then she pulls the rug from under your feet.

And I'm thinking of the scene where the Professor proposes marriage to her,

and she just bursts out laughing, you know, and it's a long period of laughter,

and you think, God, she just finds him ridiculous.

And then she accepts. And then on their wedding night,

there is this incredible coquettish sequence where she uses the curtain

to emphasise her figure and play with him, to, you know,

increase his desire for her, if that was possible, he's already obsessed.

But she knows how to manipulate him into falling further

and harder than he previously had done,

because he's trying desperately on that wedding night

to sort of hold on to his sense of propriety. And she goes, I'm going to destroy you,

and sets out to do so. But we never know,

which is the greatness of this performance, we never know what made her.

We never know who made her. We never, never really know.

And we think of all the other divas, the Pola Negris,

all of these people,

we have some sort of kind of backstory,

some kind of thing that we can hold onto.

This is a force of nature. She doesn't have to explain,

and for me the genius of the film is

she's real, but is she?

You know, in a sense, there is the Professor

and he just completely disintegrates.

And when you play the picture back in your mind,

and watching this man start to unravel

where the battle between the ethereal and the real

comes in. Critically, the first thing he does for her,

before any of this unfolds, is he protects her from a sailor,

a drunken sailor who comes in, who the boss of the venue has agreed

to... sort of has pimped her away. And the Professor comes in

and saves her from this. So really, I think, the only thing

she can definitely see from him is that he has potentially the power to protect her.

She would never have encountered a guy like this.

This is something... she's an adventuress,

that old-fashioned word, she's going to go and check this, let me try it.

Let's see what he is. The more he moves into her world

and tries to become part of her world and dress,

you know, she backs off. That's not what she wants. Yeah. She backs off.

She's looking for something else. He's from outside her world. Yeah, she backs off. And he becomes

more and more disorientated, because in a sense,

he, a man like that would expect her to be stabilised at some point,

- I mean, that's why she got married, isn't it? - He kept her safe. - Exactly, and it doesn't happen.

And he falls deeper and deeper off the cliff.

I mean, the idea that we don't see her backstory

I think is really important, because it's actually almost a line in one of the songs.

"I was made that way," you know what I mean?

And you think - It's a nature thing.

It is my nature. It's just her nature.

♪ Love's always been my game, play it how I may

♪ I was made that way, can't help it ♪

Are we watching a musical?

- That's a very good question, and I would say absolutely not. - OK.

What we are watching - But there are songs. There are songs in it,

and you know, and it's set in a cabaret,

and there are songs - Friedrich Hollander wrote them, they're very jazzy, very famous.

They are very famous, and in fact they launched her

as a singer, you know, Falling in Love Again was her sort of signature tune,

both in English and German of course.

But still we're not watching a musical in the sense that we now know it.

♪ Like moths around the flame

♪ And if their wings burn

♪ I know I'm not to blame ♪

On the night of the premiere, Marlene literally left

and flew to Hollywood, she had a deal set up at Paramount,

and von Sternberg, as he saw it, was then her Svengali, her guide,

her manager - And also made a film, Morocco,

in order to prepare America for The Blue Angel,

because he knew that they don't want to see the opening scene and wait,

- they're not going to wait all the way through. - But the point

is that she's new, and what she puts on the movie screen that Americans had never seen before

was desire. She said when you go to a cinema,

you are attracted,

you dream of sexual things as much as anything,

from a movie star. And that, you know, up till this point,

cinema had been rather twee, I suppose, certainly in sexual matters.

But it was dangerous territory. It was dangerous territory,

because the movie code was coming in, and the movies were getting wild,

it was becoming a Wild West, literally Wild West,

inside the cinema in the dark.

♪ Try in vain, you can't explain

♪ The charming, the loving blonde women ♪

It's very interesting that the arrival of Dietrich in Hollywood

and the opening of Morocco first and then The Blue Angel in 1931,

around about then, coincides with that very small gap

in Hollywood movies known as the pre-code era,

which is post-Silent, and before the Hays Code censorship board comes down.

And all the films, or many of the films made in that time,

are as erotic and as edgy and as carnal as The Blue Angel.

To be or not to be.

To be or not to be,

that is zuh - Right. Wrong.

You are evidently dissatisfied

with the accepted pro-nun-ci-a-tion

of the word 'the.'

The.

Zuh.

The!

Zuh!

The.

Zuh. The.

Zuh.

Say now.

The. Zuh.

The! Zuh.

Sit down!

There are two critical moments in this film.

The first one is when Marlene speaks in her dressing room.

Up until then, the Professor has been blowharding around,

histrionically shouting at his kids, you know, it's a huge voice, everyone is speaking loudly

and overacting enormously. She is natural.

She is very understated, she is very funny,

she is very charming. That's when acting changes.

And then the next thing that happens is she sings Falling in Love Again.

And the song begins with her just standing on stage

in this slightly strange blousy skirt, until she pushes one of her chorus line girls

off a barrel, and crosses her legs,

and we see her stockinged thigh in full profile.

And that becomes the defining marketing image

for the film, it becomes a defining image in concepts of cabaret, I mean,

it becomes this image of sexuality that then pervades, in a way,

through film culture, I mean, to some degree, in certain respects, till today,

this, you know - Oh God, yes, yes, yes.

It's the making of an icon in that one image.

The top hat. The top hat. The stockings, suspenders,

and all that. I mean, it is - And is it true she had

a lot of influence over her own costumes? She did. In fact... She made them.

...she used to walk up and down, you know, wherever it was, and there were quite a lot of,

you know, transgender or transvestite performers who were sort of on the street,

maybe not performers, you know, a little more than that,

and she basically took the idea of the costume from them

and made it herself. So the top hat, it's, yeah, I can do that.

So yeah, she created that look. But she, she always from then,

exploited what we would call the masculine aspect of herself,

and she understood that first of all,

for an American audience, she wasn't an American,

so that was OK. That's right. She could cross those boundaries.

That was cool. But she also understood her audience.

She understood the people who were watching her,

and they were looking at this woman crossing borders.

All of her movies and some of them literally were about going across borders, really,

changing the status quo, changing the attitude and the look

of what a woman was. There had to be the next step

after the Flapper, after all of that.

It had to be the next step. And of course, for the Nazis,

this was one of the reasons that she and von Sternberg

and the whole thing had to go.

Obviously we do talk about this film in terms of Marlene Dietrich

and what she has given cinema.

It was directed by von Sternberg and he wasn't only her Svengali,

the figure who managed her career, he was a brilliant director,

and he brought... well, he absorbed something from Berlin.

He absorbed something from the great German expressionist films

while he was there, he knew and understood it.

And if you look at The Blue Angel,

it is very much a German Expressionist film still.

It has all these modern elements, this kind of modern idea of sexuality and gender,

yet it has a fairytale aura. The scenes of the Professor

walking through the town,

and that could be Caligari, that could be something very bad. Yes, but also

he's limited as a dir... what is amazing about what von Sternberg does

is that he is incredibly limited as a director

because the German sound cameras could not be moved.

It was a very early form of sound, so he would be setting most of his scenes,

there were some scenes that he could move and that would then presumably be in post-production,

but the vast majority of his scenes, the camera does not move, it's fixed, set, people come in

and out of the scene, rather like actors on a stage.

He then fills that scene with so many bits and pieces,

which is why it often looks incredibly busy. There's people lifting curtains,

there's people doing stuff. So the story is being told

by what's being held in this single frame, and you don't notice

that he's limited in that way. It feels like you're moving

because there's so much constant movement -And that starts from the very opening scene,

which is the street scene and the market, someone picking up geese

and putting them in a thing, it's absolutely busy with people doing stuff.

And it looks like he's moving all the time. Of course not, it's a fixed camera.

That's why the interiors are so interesting.

I mean, the only two travelling shots

that I can think of are in the school room,

with the empty desks when it moves. It looks as if the camera is travelling back,

dollying back,

But that's why the actual club, the Blue Angel set,

is so fascinating, because it's just festooned with stuff.

And one of the fascinating things about this is that he's drawing on Berlin cabaret,

but it's not really Berlin cabaret, because they wouldn't have dancing bears in Berlin cabaret.

Berlin cabaret would be much smaller and more intimate,

it would be more transgender, it would be more transgressive - Wilder.

And so what he's done is... he grew up next to a carnival,

and in a sense, he's thrown the carnival into the cabaret.

And that's, in a way, the way that we understand Berliner cabaret

is quite often shaped by this film. But in fact,

it was a slightly different proposition.

It was a much darker proposition than this shows it to be.

More transgressive in its way, yeah. And von Sternberg, again

- we have to remember he's trying to get an American audience. Exactly. - That's all that matters.

- But the world can't handle it. Absolutely not. - In Americathey're bringing in the Code,

- in Germany the Nazis come in and the film is effectively banned. Degenerate. - Yeah. Exactly.

Except for Hitler, who had his own private copy.

And used to show it again and again. Yeah, all the films, yeah.

But you know, the world, she's ahead of the world.

And this whole film is really difficult

for most countries to deal with, because it's going into a place that they hadn't quite expected.

♪ Falling in love again, never wanted to

♪ What am I to do? Can't help it ♪

The Blue Angel marks an end and a beginning.

Despite becoming a big hit, the film would be banned by the Nazis

as degenerate. Von Sternberg whisked Dietrich off to Hollywood

in greatness. Jannings stayed, joined the Nazi Party,

and declined as Rath does in the film, reduced to a clown.

The great feast of Weimar cinema was ending, but The Blue Angel lives on,

a complex, erotic depiction of what it means to be human.

What is so remarkable about the story of the Blue Angel

and the story of Marlene is that she wanted to escape it.

She wanted, as you were saying, she wanted to throw off this role

and try different things and be someone different.

She wanted to throw off von Sternberg's influence,

she wanted to move into the future. She was an adventurous actress.

Yet so many things happened to her.

The American audience didn't want her to be different, for one thing, That's Hollywood through and through,

we've typecast you and that's where we want to keep you.

So she was trapped in that Hollywood machine. And then obviously what came along

was World War II,

and a whole echo of her past, and her efforts during the war

- were extraordinary. - Yes. - I mean, she brought in other actors,

she helped rescue them and give them a home in Hollywood,

and she went out to Europe, knowing her place in terms of German history,

knowing that she carried this echo of old Berlin with her,

and that was a very powerful tool, and she sung to the American troops.

I mean, her war effort was extraordinary,

probably at the expense of her career. Well, I mean, critically,

and I think The Blue Angel is a good example of this,

she also sang to the German troops.

So Lily Marlene was a song on the lips of the German army.

The Wehrmacht was singing that as they went into battle.

So every now and then she would grab the mic

and in German, speak to Germans who may be listening to her

and encourage them to not take orders, to overthrow Hitler.

She was desperately trying to sort of encourage Germany to walk away from the war.

So she wasn't just raising money and singing to the American troops,

she was also trying to save Germany from itself in a way.

And it's exhausting for one woman to do all those things. It was extremely brave.

I mean, her last two big pictures,

she plays in Hitchcock's Witness for the Prosecution... Witness for the Prosecution, yeah.

...in which she is a cabaret singer once again, and the soldiers come up and say,

we want to see your legs, and they would tear her skirt off.

And this is a woman who is a mature woman,

she's still got beautiful legs, but that's who she is.

And at the same time she's defending her husband,

defending that part of herself that is trying to protect him,

and then of course in Judgement at Nuremberg,

she really stands up and says, this is what Germany is,

this is who I am, this is what we try to do.

So it was always a part of her definition of herself,

her native country, and her determination

to shape herself in relation to that, no matter what people were doing to her.

She was a very complex woman, but she was incredibly intelligent about her space in the world.

And what I love about the Hitchcock story

is that Hitchcock of course famously bossed his blondes around

- as much as he possibly could, and she took absolutely nothing from him. - Nothing.

She said no, you're not lighting me like that,

I'm not standing there, I'm doing this, I'm doing that, and in effect, she directed herself

through the Hitchcock picture, and he eventually succumbed and said, OK, fair enough,

you're Marlene Dietrich, do what you want, and it was fantastic. But I think by that stage,

she knew herself so well she was comfortable in her own skin.

I won't say she was comfortable in her own iconography,

but she knew how to use it.

And I think that all that period in the war when she was, you know,

out there raising money, selling war bonds

and entertaining the troops, and again, you know,

the fact is that those songs, Lily Marlene in particular, but also later

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, was a real plea for, you know, human decency,

irrespective of which side you were on.

And I think that is the mark of a, you know,

not just a "good German," but a good human being. Which makes The Blue Angel

all the more momentous, doesn't it? Because that's the stone in the pond,

that's the moment it begins, and you can see it.

And if you retrospectively look at the film,

bring all this knowledge to it, suddenly it seems to be

a different film entirely. You're like of course, her power,

her kind of the way the film centres on her,

and the kind of strength that emanates from Lola,

beyond all the kind of the frisson of the sexuality

and all those things, you go, I can see the history

that comes from this film. Yes, and she is making a film

for German and American audiences, that's critical. You know, she speaks to both

from the very beginning of her international stardom. She's made German films before then,

but that's the moment that she breaks onto the world,

she's speaking to both those countries,

and it goes on like that, really, for the... it is sad

in one way that she's trapped, but actually she's so glorious in the way that she lives her life.

At the end of her life, she says that fighting fascism was the proudest part of her life,

but it begins with this movie, because this movie really is heralding the rise.

Hitler is in power three years later,

and that idea of the Berlin that this cabaret is set in is destroyed.

So she, if you like, she is capturing that moment,

she's holding onto it and then she's fighting back

- against the fascism that destroys it. I mean, an incredible story. - And then

she is one of the first women in cinema

if not the first, who didn't care what anybody thought about her.

- She did what she did. Which is pure Lola. - Totally, totally.

So while obviously we know a lot about Marlene,

what became of von Sternberg, you know?

He had this great career, but in a sense, he faded as well,

rather like the Professor. Yeah, yes.

I wouldn't say he was quite like the Professor,

I hope not anyway, but no, the fact is that he's, you know,

that collaboration with Marlene

was the greatest sort of collaboration

of I think any director-star ever, I mean, seven films in a row.

Now of course, there have been longer collaborations, but I think what von Sternberg did,

what he put into it and what he invested into her,

was the sort of chief moment of his, you know, his career.

He did, you know, he went on to make a lot of films,

but they just... they lacked that sort of lustre, you know,

I think he probably, you know, once he had lost his muse,

and she was his muse, then I won't say he lost his ability,

obviously not, he was still a very skilful director,

but he just lost that sort of extra little sparkle

- that would have pushed it over the top. - Now in the end,

we are just talking about a film.

It is a moment in history and it's a moment in world history,

but we're talking about one single film.

And so I'll ask a simple question, how good is The Blue Angel?

I think it's an incredible film.

It's a film... because any film that allows you to unpack so much from it,

and in some cases perhaps unintentional elements

that the people making the film at the time could never have known,

that all these years in the future

we would be still finding new things about this film

that we can pull apart and analyse and understand and revisit and rethink. In a way,

film is quite an ephemeral medium. You put it out and then it goes away,

there's no sense of this being eternal. But it's become eternal because of its quality.

People aren't going to watch this film

because of the irony of the careers of the people involved, or because of what they will do,

the reason that people still watch, talk about this film

and the reason that it still influences modern cinema,

is because it is a very, very good film,

beginning, middle, end. Everything about this film,

the setting, the acting, the music, the direction,

everything. The psychology of it. The psychology, the understanding,

the humanity is spot on.

Every now and then something comes together

in a work of art, but particularly in cinema, you know,

with the right mix of actor, writer, and director, studio,

the whole thing comes together and magic is created.

And this really is the magic of film.

The other thing that strikes me about The Blue Angel,

and it's the simplest thing in a sense, is its essence.

It is about human nature, about the human struggle.

And I don't know whether von Sternberg had this in his head,

I don't know whether it was on the page

and they were thinking about this as they made it,

but what comes out of it, and this all comes out of great art,

is a greater sense of what it means to be a human being,

and I think I get that from The Blue Angel, and that's what makes it great art.

Made in Berlin in 1930,

the film embodied the ethos of the fastest city in the world,

decadence and power, obsession and cruelty,

the freedom of art vying with the constraints of society.

Both on-screen and off, reputations were made, and destroyed.

Away from the sound stages, the Nazis were taking control.

This was one of the last great flourishes of German Expressionism.

♪ Falling in love again, never wanted to

♪ What am I to do? Can't help it ♪

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