The oth­er side of Mar­lene Dietrich

You can define a star first by how lit­tle it takes to recog­nise them. We all know Mar­lene Diet­rich, the minute we see a wire-thin eye­brow, waves of but­ter-yel­low hair and a gleam­ing top hat. Or when we hear her: those low, state­ly notes singing of love affairs lost, aban­doned or entered into reck­less­ly, in a soft Ger­man accent that was nev­er elim­i­nat­ed by Hollywood.

The sec­ond way to define a star is by how much more depth there is to their per­sona than that line sketch. A new sea­son at BFI South­bank this month, Mar­lene Diet­rich: Falling in Love Again, replays the icon­ic high­lights of her career, but also delves into some less well-known films, includ­ing her work in the silent era and the only movie she made in Britain.

Diet­rich main­tained she nev­er worked in silent cin­e­ma, but actu­al­ly her first appear­ance on film came in 1923, and she worked in Berlin stu­dios along­side her screen career. For a glimpse of the impe­ri­ous lead­ing lady she was to become, see Cur­tis Bernhardt’s The Three Lovers, also known as The Woman Men Yearn For, from 1929. It’s an unusu­al kind of love tri­an­gle, with Diet­rich caught between two men, played by Swedish actor Uno Hen­ning and Ger­man Expres­sion­ist heavy­weight Fritz Körtner.

The first shot of Diet­rich, seen through the ice-frost­ed glass of a train win­dow, is a show-stop­per, and as the direc­tor would lat­er com­plain, the actress was already tak­ing charge of her own light­ing on set. Dietrich’s renowned per­fec­tion­ism and mas­tery of the cam­era began long before she moved to Hollywood.

That move to Hol­ly­wood, and Para­mount, came cour­tesy of her inter­na­tion­al break­through in The Blue Angel, a Ger­man talkie direct­ed by Josef von Stern­berg, in which Diet­rich plays Weimar femme fatale Lola Lola. Diet­rich and von Stern­berg would make six more films in Hol­ly­wood, a cre­ative part­ner­ship that reached ever greater heights of visu­al ambition.

To sam­ple the extreme edge of what Susan Son­tag called their films’ ​“out­ra­geous aes­theti­cism”, try 134’s baroque fan­ta­sy The Scar­let Empress, in which Diet­rich plays Cather­ine the Great from her ado­les­cent sex­u­al awak­en­ing, to the con­sol­i­da­tion of her pow­er from the boudoir to the fur­thest cor­ners of her empire. It has lit­tle to do with his­to­ry, but every­thing to do with the pow­er of pageantry, and explor­ing Dietrich’s par­tic­u­lar sex­u­al allure.

After Diet­rich part­ed ways with von Stern­berg, Para­mount tried her in lighter, but sophis­ti­cat­ed come­dies. There’s the delight­ful jew­el-thief romp Desire, which reunit­ed her with her Moroc­co co-star Gary Coop­er, and Angel, an ele­gant, adult Paris-set com­e­dy drenched in the bit­ter­sweet plea­sures of the famed ​“Lubitsch touch”.

In between the two, Diet­rich was loaned out to an Alexan­der Kor­da pro­duc­tion in Britain, 1937’s Knight With­out Armour, direct­ed by Jacques Fey­der and script­ed by Frances Mar­i­on. While she was shoot­ing this lav­ish romance set dur­ing the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, the Nazi régime tried to woo her back to the Ger­man film indus­try. Diet­rich declined, and donat­ed her fee for the film to help Jew­ish refugees flee­ing Germany.

After Angel failed to become a hit, Para­mount bought out Dietrich’s con­tract and she was labelled ​“box-office poi­son”. But Diet­rich launched one of Hollywood’s great­est come­backs with the com­e­dy west­ern Destry Rides Again oppo­site a young Jim­my Stew­art. She would con­tin­ue to gen­tly spoof her Lola Lola per­sona in capers such as Sev­en Sin­ners, her first film with John Wayne, which sees her caus­ing hav­oc in the South Seas and appear­ing in mil­i­tary drag.

In Jan­u­ary, the BFI is releas­ing a box set con­tain­ing Sev­en Sin­ners as well as three more of the post-come­back films Diet­rich made at Uni­ver­sal, includ­ing two more col­lab­o­ra­tions with Wayne and the flir­ta­tious charms of The Flame of New Orleans.

Post-war, Diet­rich returned to bombed-out Berlin to film Bil­ly Wilder’s A For­eign Affair, the most poignant of come­dies, in which she plays a cabaret singer sus­pect­ed of Nazi con­nec­tions by Jean Arthur’s uptight Con­gress­woman. Singing ​“The Ruins of Berlin”, a tune writ­ten by the same Friedrich Hol­laen­der who wrote ​“Falling in Love Again” for The Blue Angel, in a Ger­man club for an Aus­tri­an direc­tor and an Amer­i­can audi­ence, Diet­rich brought all the strands of her career togeth­er in one unfor­get­tably mov­ing scene.

There were more col­lab­o­ra­tions with big-name direc­tors to come (Wilder again, Hitch­cock, Lang, Welles) and a sec­ond (or per­haps third) career as an inter­na­tion­al con­cert per­former. Dietrich’s sta­tus as a lead­ing lady was sealed in the 1930s, but it was the years that fol­lowed that turn­ing her a last­ing, unas­sail­able star.

Mar­lene Diet­rich: Falling in Love Again is at BFI South­bank through­out Decem­ber; The four-disc Blu-ray box set ​‘Mar­lene Diet­rich at Uni­ver­sal 1940−1942’ is avail­able for pre-order from the BFI here.