CLASSIC MOVIE REVIEWS:

JAKE AND BOOMER'S SILVER SCREEN HOMEPAGE

Hello, fellow movie buffs. This page is our tribute to the ground-breaking work of filmakers of the 1920's and 1930's. We will offer our views and reviews of selected films from those eras, and at the same time give you the opportunity to tell us what you think. Take a second to check out our inks section.

ABOUT US

We are graduate students just about ready to be unleashed upon the world. Since we are in our final year, we have some time to kill. We figured it would be fun to give this home page a try.

ABOUT THE PAGE

First, it should be emphasized that we are aiming for quality, rather than quantity. For any given week, we may review no more than one or two movies, but we will try to make each review as detailed and informative as possible. In addition to our discussion of a particular film's content, we will try to provide our readers with a list of credits, hypertext links to other databases, and some background information about stars, directors, production, etc., where possible. Each of us will give his own review and separately rate the movie, using one to five film clip icons. The rating system will be as follows:

Abysmal. Completely lacking in merit -- bad acting, writing, cinematography, etc.

Poor. One or two redeeming qualities, but inferior overall.

Average. Not outstanding in most respects, but worth a viewing.

Good. Solid acting, writing, cinematography, etc. Superior in many respects.

Excellent. A true classic. Superior acting, writing, cinematography, etc. Few, if any, flaws.

...And now our feature presentation

The Blue Angel (1930)

Cast ........................................ .....................................Credits
Marlene Dietrich. . . .Lola Lola .......................... ............Studio . . . . UFA (Germany)
Emil Jannings . . . . Professor Immanuel Rath .................. Director . . . . Josef Von Sternberg
Kurt Gerron . . . . Kiefert (The magician) ..................... ..Screenplay . . . . Robert Liebman,
Rosa Valetti. . . . Kiefert's Wife .................... .......................Heinrich Mann, Karl Vollmoeller,
Hans Albers. . . . Mazeppa ........................... .......................and Carl Zuckmayer
Reinhold Bernt . . . . The clown ....................... ...............Photographed by Guenther Rittau and
Eduard Von Winterstein . . . . Headmaster .............. ...............Hans Schneeberger
Hans Roth . . . . The janitor .......................... ..................Edited by Erich Pommer
Rolf Meuller . . . . Pupil Angst ...................... ..................Production Design by Emil Hasler and
Rolando Varno . . . . Pupil Lohmann .................... ..................Otto Hunte
Carl Ballhaus . . . . Pupil Ertzum ..................... ..................Music by Frederick Hollander
Robert Klein-Loerk . . . . Pupil Goldstaub ............. .................and Franz Waxman
Karl Huszar-Puffy . . . . Innkeeper .................... ...............Editing by Erich Pommer
Gerhard Beinert. . . . Policeman
Wilhelm Diegelmann . . . . Captain
Ilse Feurstenberg. . . . Rath's Maid

TAKE ONE: BOOMER

..........The Blue Angel is a bizarre tale of obsession and self-destruction. Professor Immanuel Rath is a prudish, pudgy, middle aged bachelor with a certain zest for intimidating his students. When he learns that the owner of a local girly bar, The Blue Angel, permits his students to partake of the the carnal delights on display at the club, he journeys down to the club in order to prevent his students' further moral decay. While in hot pursuit of his wayward students, Rath meets the star attraction at The Blue Angel, Mis Lola Lola. Immediately he is smitten, and he begins his self-destructive odyssey which culminates in his own death.

..........Anybody who has had bouts of obsessive behavior will see a bit of themselves in Rath. Here the viewer will graphically understand how untrue the addicts mantra, "I can handle it," can be. Before one realizes how deeply mired in their own vice they are, the bad habit has so firmly taken grasp of the person that he or she actually becomes the servant of the obsessive behavior. This is literally the case in The Blue Angel. Rath is absolutely sure he can tame the wildcat Lola and make her a part of his world. At one point when he discovers that his new bride sells semi-nudes of herself, he commands that this will not go on as long as he has any money left to his name. However, in the space of a few years, Rath is forced to sell the photos himself just to help make ends meet. In the very end, Rath is forced to prostitute himself, donning clown makeup so as to entertain the very people who once respected him and now hold only contempt for him. Rath could not handle Lola just as sure as the average addict can't handle his poison of choice.

..........I do agree with Jake that the film also represents a clear condemnation of what Weimar Germany became in the late days of the Republic. In this context, The Blue Angel could clearly be read as a call to revolution. Rath represents the once great Germany, a country of great art and high intellectual achievement. However, that Germany becomes diseased and dissolves in corruption and perversions of every imaginable kind. Unless something is done, the call seems to go, the once great Germany is destined to become an international laughing stock. In the end, death of the once great German culture would be the ultimate outcome. I don't know if this film was intended in any way to represent such a call to arms, but one can certainly understand how some people in Weimar Germany might have read it that way.

..........If The Blue Angel does hold that kind of hypnotic power, much of the credit is owed to Emil Jannings. Jannings does a masterful job of bringing Rath to life and then throwing him into the depths of a personal hell. The role of Rath is a demanding part with huge emotional range. We see Rath first as a haughty, demanding professional. Then we see Rath as a foolish schoolboy who is willing to throw all caution to the wind for a woman he really does not know. This gleeful naivete dissolves into a sullenness which eventually leads to full-fledged insanity. Jannings is believeable in all aspects of this role and is guilty of only slightly over-acting.

..........Over-acting is not something that one could accuse Marlene Dietrich of in The Blue Angel. Her performance is decidedly understated, and that's a big improvement on much of the acting from that time. The part of Lola Lola calls for some singing, and although Dietrich was not a great chanteuse, there is a certain mesmerizing quality in her vocal displays in The Blue Angel. When she sings to Rath, the viewer feels as though Lola is singing directly to him, and, for a brief moment, the viewer can see what Rath sees in Lola. Dietrich succeeds in spaddes in bringing Lola's sensuousness to the surface, and one wonders if he could resist Lola's temptation were he in Rath's position. At film's end, the viewer both loves and hates Lola thanks to the artful Dietrich.

..........There is a lot of movie in The Blue Angel. There are numerous themes which run throughout the film, and these are explored through the use of numerous symbolic images. A viewer could watch this film a dozen times and still pick out new images over which to contemplate their signifigance. It is this complexity which makes TheBlue Angel a cinematic masterpiece. Few movies ever attain this level of complexity, and even fewer do it in as interesting and compelling a fashion. In the end, The Blue Angel stands as one of the truly great films ever made. My rating:

TAKE TWO: JAKE

...........While analyzing a particularly decadent fin-de-siecle German painting, a cultural critic of some note once asked, "Can Buchenwald be far behind?", and I must say that this incisive rhetorical question best sums up my reaction to The Blue Angel. Thinking back to the troubled days of the movie's initial release, one can almost see Adolf Hitler on the front row, munching very buttery popcorn and making frenzied notes in a well-worn copy of Herman Hesse's Der Steppenwolf. Comedic hyperbole aside, The Blue Angel is a superior film that does indeed bathe its viewers in the twilight glow of the late Weimar Republic, showing us a time when chaos held sway over order, irrationality over reason, and dissolution over integrity -- in short, a time all too vulnerable to social revolution.

..........At the opening of the film, Herr Professor Immanuel Rath (masterfully portrayed by Emil Jannings) is an almost archetypal representative of the German intelligentsia -- middle-aged, conservative, well-dressed, well-groomed, and blissfully complacent with the bourgeois comforts of his home. We do not have to wait very long, however, for the first foreshadowings of disruption and fragmentation to occur. When Rath rises from his sumptious breakfast table to feed his little songbird a bit of bread, he finds that it has died during the night. With seeming indifference, Rath's housemaid plucks the little corpse from his hands, tosses it into the furnace, and says "No more singing." The symbolic resonances of this scene are obvious, because Rath himself will soon be catapulted into the hell-like furnace of obsession. Given the vaguely Faustian undertones of the movie, one might even argue that the bird represents Rath's soul, committed irrevocably to the flames of damnation. As we come to learn, however, Rath's situation is much more akin to that of Harry Haller, the highly intellectual protagonist of Der Steppenwolf who risks personal disintegration in return for sexual gratification and human companionship. Unfortunately, much like Haller, the ill-fated Rath finds little, if any, of either.

..........To some viewers, the quality of Rath's life prior to his all-consuming obsession with the beautiful Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) might appear suspect. Indeed, in the first scene at the gymnasium, we see that his many years of bachelorhood have turned him into a self-important, officious prude who engages in habitual, almost mechanical idiosyncracies of manner (blowing his nose loudly into a handkerchief, pacing about his students' desks, etc.). Rath is, however, a figure of order and authority at this point, so powerful that he can put an end to the chaotic hijinks of his students by merely stepping across the threshold of the classroom. Perhaps he is lonely, but it is clear that his solitary lifestyle has engendered personal strengths, as well as personal weaknesses. At what juncture, then, does Rath begin to lose the identity that he has constructed over the course of untold years? In my opinion, it is the scene in which he first arrives at The Blue Angel, pushing through layers of finely-meshed net that seem to hang from the ceiling as literal embodiments of the snares and dangers lying within.

..........Suffice to say, if I were to discuss all of the movie's vibrantly imagistic moments, as well as the many symbolic resonances which underlie them, this review would be much too long, so I will limit myself to a few compelling examples. During Rath's first night at The Blue Angel, a disturbing, slack-faced clown wanders aimlessly about, pushed here and there by various people as they move through the back rooms of the club. In spatial terms, Rath and the clown begin very far from one another, standing almost at opposite sides of the screen, but as the scenes progress, they move closer and closer together, until Rath finally pushes the clown aside himself. After that night, the clown mysteriously disappears altogether, but we see his costume and make-up much later, worn by the utterly decrepit Rath. Expelled from his original profession, almost penniless, and worn down both physically and mentally by a loveless five-year marriage to Lola, Rath finally becomes the parti-colored buffoon, a figure that represents not only the soulless, carnival atmosphere of the nightclub, but also a fragment of his own psyche, the dark and masochistic part of himself that is drawn inexorably to ridicule and destruction.

..........Although The Blue Angel is undoubtedly too depressing for the tastes of many viewers, I feel that it accomplishes everything which it sets out to do. As previously noted, Germany was not a particularly pleasant place to be during the early 1930's, and this film reflects the social malaise of the times through a bleak allegory of personal dissolution. My recommendation to our readers? Go out and rent the 1970's screen adaptation of Steppenwolf, starring Max von Sydow. If you then find yourself longing for a movie that has equal or superior aesthetics but even more human misery, move on to The Blue Angel. My rating:

Marlene Dietrich is a Hollywood legend. We would be terribly remiss if we did not provide the reader with the opportunity to learn more about her. Here you will find several links to other sites which focus more directly on this enigmatic figure in cinematic history. Please check these out. You'll find links, portraits, and info. It is definitely worth your time.

Back to Main Page for Past Reviews