|
The walrus and the mink, a love story. ("Das ewig Weibliche zieht uns hinan," as the joke goes.) Josef von Sternberg at Ufa is a wry ringmaster working an arena of knowingly heavy symbolism, the maid sees the dead parakeet in its cage and throws it away with a shrug. The barren classroom is the realm of the middle-aged bachelor (Emil Jannings), a clock chimes ponderously above its gates, grimacing figurines and all. Its opposite is the smoky jungle of the nightclub, where Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich) reigns with spangled thighs. Students crave the siren, the professor stumbles past nets and veils to censure her: "You are corrupting my pupils!" "Think I'm running a kindergarten?" Pedantic academia is no match for cabaret intoxication ("Art and science," proclaims the resident conjurer), the dazed fussbucket mops his brow with the lady's discarded bloomers and soon they are hitched. "I'm afraid I may have overindulged..." A doleful pagliacci wanders through the nautical décor (lifesavers, anchors, a ship's bare figurehead), in due time he's replaced by the husband with red nose and crumpled hat and egg on his face. The cuckold's howl reverberates to the end, and yet the tragedy is less that of a respectable man brought down than of a bourgeois tie insufficiently loosened, the surge of awakened emotion that can't break him free from the petty decorum of the study hall. (He lifelessly clutches his desk at the close in a Munch image.) The café's wandering lights and shifting backdrops distill the Sternberg métier, his experiments with off-screen sound are best appreciated by Hitchcock (Murder!) and Nabokov (Sobytie). Renoir is around the corner with La Chienne, and there's Sawdust and Tinsel, The Servant, Death in Venice, practically all of Fassbinder. Dietrich the carnal icon has the final word, singing "Falling in Love Again" like a flame warning the moths: "And if their wings burned, I know I'm not to blame." Cinematography by Günther Rittau. With Kurt Gerron, Rosa Valetti, Hans Albers, and Reinhold Bernt. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |