Pitting Marlene Dietrich against Ursula Andress is probably the most unfair fight in Battle of the Blondes, because I can't imagine any scenario in which Andress is going to win, except maybe a battle of who's still living. Andress was a Swiss actress who came to Hollywood during the fifties and made her big break in Dr. No (1962), playing the first Bond girl, Honey Rider; the scene in which we first see Andress emerging from the water in a white bikini in Dr. No is an iconic moment in mid-century cinema, but unfortunately, nothing Andress did thereafter lived up to that brief, wordless moment, and the closest she came to having a starring role was in She (1965), the film I chose to watch for Battle of the Blondes.
She, released by England's Hammer studio (usually associated with horror films), tells the story of an immortal woman in Africa who believes that a British soldier is her reincarnated lover of two thousand years past. Andress plays Ayesha, the immortal woman (and the "she" of the title), while John Richardson plays Leo, the soldier she seduces; Christopher Lee, star of Hammer's Dracula, has a supporting role as Ayesha's head priest Billali. Why Ayesha and Leo are white instead of black like every other African character in the movie is never explained, but She isn't the sort of film you want to think about too closely; you want to just watch it, and hope that your suspension of disbelief will be enough to keep the plot from falling apart all on its own. I'm not saying She is entirely without merit -- as expected, it succeeds mostly in the horrific aspects of the story, especially the ritual scene in which Leo almost loses his head, which is genuinely unsettling -- but the majority of the film is ridiculous, too self-serious to be campy and too silly to be effective. Richardson is really the star; Andress is only there to act as the centerpiece, looking pretty and wearing outfits reminiscent of what Cher would wear years later.
At the opposite end of the film spectrum is Josef von Sternberg's 1932 Shanghai Express, my choice for Marlene Dietrich. Shanghai is a bit like Grand Hotel on a train, with a disparate group of characters coming together and intertwining on a train bound from Peking to Shanghai before going their separate ways again after they reach their destination, but unlike Grand Hotel, in which much of the action derives from the personal relationships between the characters, Shanghai is set against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War, and the climax of the story actually takes place off the train. Dietrich plays Shanghai Lily, a woman of dubious morals who survives by jumping from one man to the next; other passengers on the train include Lily's former lover Dr. Harvey (Clive Brook); fellow fallen woman Hui Fei (Anna May Wong); a rich American (Eugene Pallette); a pompous missionary (Lawrence Grant); and a mysterious half-Chinese/half-white revolutionary (Warner Oland).
Shanghai Express was Dietrich and Sternberg's fourth film together (after The Blue Angel, Morocco, and Dishonored), and as much as I liked The Blue Angel, I have to say that Shanghai is the best I've seen so far. Part of this estimation probably comes from my natural inclination toward movies with large casts contained in small places, derived from a youth spent reading old Agatha Christie mysteries, but Shanghai is also a genuinely great film. Dietrich is phenomenal, as are Wong, Oland, and Pallette, who, despite the generally serious tone of the film, made me laugh out loud several times. Sternberg made a star out of Dietrich with The Blue Angel, and Shanghai is the height of the image he crafted for her; she is thin, beautiful, and intimidating in this film, lit beautifully (I believe the picture of her above this review is from Shanghai Express) and directed in every way to enhance her reputation as an exotic femme fatale. Dietrich was somewhat of an alternative to Greta Garbo in the early thirties, but where Garbo was soft and tragic, Dietrich was more assertive and dangerous, sometimes harboring a heart of gold, sometimes not, and she plays her part to the hilt in Shanghai.
The interesting thing about Marlene Dietrich -- and I mentioned this briefly in my post on Conrad Veidt -- is that as much as she was sold as a wholly foreign entity at the beginning of her career, playing up her German-ness whenever possible, she was one of the strongest Hollywood supporters of the Allied cause during World War II and therefore managed to supersede that "foreign" quality and become a permanent USO fixture throughout the early forties, performing for US soldiers both at home and on the front lines in Europe. One of her most famous quotes was also her answer to why she put so much effort into supporting the troops: "aus Anstand" -- it was the decent thing to do.
She: C+
Shanghai Express: A+
(pic via here)
No comments:
Post a Comment