It must be a hard job to write a book about a cultural totem that everyone seems to know about, or at least think they do. Yet, Prawer's little encyclopaedia about the Dietrich vehicle does everyone a favour by putting together scattered bits of information into one compact nifty number. Without resorting to academic jargon, it's pleasurable to read (if a bit pompous at points and Prawer is obviously in awe of Dietrich) and stirs up some healthy nostalgia too. It throws you right back to a period when film is seriously taken as an art form, making you hanker after 'the good old days'.
The book starts off with the origins of the film. The business world governing Berlin's film institution UFA ((Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft) decided they needed a project that would unite cultural prestige with the kind of popularity that promised commercial success. Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel about a professor who falls in love with a cabaret artist, after much controversy and 'adjustments' to the plot, became the chosen text.
Prawer also gives a good deal information on Sternberg's style and the ambitious aesthetics of the film. Sternberg's vision of film was one based on 'psychological rather than historic truth, moods and feelings rather than social realities', says Prawer. He did so with 'skilful deployment of the camera, of gradations of light and shade, of deliberately chosen and placed objects within an approved set design.' The Blue Angel was Sternberg's only German film, but he went on to make another six Dietrich-starred pieces in the United States. He said that Berlin in 1929 (when the film was shot) 'was an evocation by Goya, Beardsley, Marquis de Bayros, Zille, Baudelaire and Huysmans'. In other words, the clouds were clearing gathering in the sky, to borrow a much-favoured image of 1920s German cinema.
Great emphasis is also put on the music, and for those who understand German, Prawer takes pain to explain translations, the nuances of Berlinese and the general use of sound that was quite innovative for the time the film was made (like using extra-diegetic noises). When the film came out, and was a popular success, it divided critics. The left called it a 'tearjerking, unintelligent piece of philistinism' (the journal Weltbuhne) while the ascending Nazis saw in The Blue Angel a piece of 'Jewish erotic thinking...an attempt to subvert and besmirch the German character'.
While the left was partially right in criticising the film for its watered-down politics, The Blue Angel passed into history as a beautifully crafted document of the opposing forces at work at the turn of a decade that would shape 20th century history - and certainly lay down the blueprint for an endless string of imitations, either in film, musicals, cabaret and, oh yes, countless drag acts.
Reviewed by Antonio Pasolini
