Written by Jules Furthman and S.K. Lauren from a story by Furthman and the director, Josef von Sternberg’s engrossing, heartrending Blonde Venus depicts a trenchant human odyssey brilliantly enacted by Marlene Dietrich in perhaps her finest performance. Among actresses, perhaps only Garbo’s Marguerite Gautier surpasses it and perhaps only Baranovskaya’s Pelageya Vlasova, Falconetti’s Joan and […]
Tag Archives: Sternberg/Grunes
Set to the music of Tchaikovsky, The Scarlet Empress dazzles with its opulence and the density of its German Expressionism, what Josef von Sternberg, its director, would himself describe as an excess of style. It is based on the diaries of Germany’s Princess Sofia Frederika (Marlene Dietrich, exquisite), who marries Russia’s Grand Duke Pyotr (Sam […]
In the shadow of Germany’s annexation of Austria on March 15, 1938, Hollywood’s most radiant, rapturous musical biography appeared. Its ostensible subject: Johann Strauss II (Fernand Gravet, so-so); but at the outset the film admits that it aims for the “spirit” of the music and of Strauss rather than the “facts” of his life. Directors […]
“We’re in China now . . . where time and life have no value.” China is in the throes of civil war. The Shanghai Express, departing from Beijing, includes a Chinese rebel who is taken by nationalists; the rebels halt the train mid-run to determine which of the passengers would make the best hostage to […]
Theodore Dreiser’s gigantic, moody, sociologically dense 1925 An American Tragedy is, for me, the greatest American novel of the twentieth century. Like its chief competition for that title, another 1925 book, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it is about the collision between an upwardly mobile heart, perpetually courting social acceptance, and realities that seem […]
Dennis Grunes 