safe
sex
by Douglas Messerli
Many have described Morocco as being a great romance, and there is little question that von Sternberg was one of the most romantically-inclined (a born Romantic and an inveterate romantic) directors of the period. And clearly, something immediately clicks between the new singer in town, Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) and the Foreign Legion private, Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) which results in an attraction that, despite the enormous wealth and suave demeanor of the outrageous named Kennington La Bessière (Adolphe Menjou)—who offers a weary sexually-seasoned woman everything she might need to salve her heart—she is willing to give up everything for Brown. But strangely this absurdly romantic duo only kisses twice, and the first time is certainly not very convincing if you compare it, for example, to the first kiss of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert (also a former Legionnaire) in Flesh and the Devil of just three years before. In the most intimate meeting between Jolly and Brown hardly anything one might describe as “romantic” happens; in fact, they both use up their precious time trying to explain to one another how they are not truly to be trusted, suggesting they are both a bit exhausted from their lives of intense love-making. Finally, both try everything they can to convince the other that they don’t really “give a damn” about one another. So, despite the fevered décor and the heat of the air, signified by the intense rhythm of perpetually beating fans, in which they intact their two ineffectual encounters, no spark seems to ignite them, and the scenes in which they play out their muted desires, one has to admit, are quite cinematically static, with not even a lush musical bar to egg them on. Their “romance,” in fact, is diluted by Tom Brown’s attempted murder and his knifing of the two local assailants—after which he can only warn his would-be lover something to the effect that she better “get lost,” because “there’s going to be trouble.” And trouble does follow with Brown’s arrest, the suspicion of his being romantically involved with the Adjutant’s wife, and his punishment of being sent off into battle at the Amalfi Pass.
Rather
than being a true adventure, a musical, or even a real romance, what most
defines von Sternberg’s work might be a kind of sex comedy—but not in the way
things usually happen in that genre. First, I think, it’s important that
we admit that Morocco, behind all its décor and heaving layers of
chiaroscuro, is a love triangle played out by three individuals who are all a
bit worn out from their past lives. They’ve all come together in order to get
away from the sexual liaisons and lurid business transactions they’ve endured
previously. And they’re also soured on the opposite sex, particularly Jolly and
Brown.
In
passing, I should explain that I also see La Bessière as equally disenchanted,
if not because of his past relationships, simply because of personal nature; in
terms of the mores of the film, the wealthy La Bessière is an effeminized being
who “loves” Jolly so passively—offering her only possessions instead of kisses
and hugs—that he hardly blinks at having to give her up, suggesting his only
happiness is her happiness, a viewpoint which transforms him
almost into a subservient eunuch.
But then that is not so very different
from the role Brown himself plays in abandoning Jolly so that she can enjoy the
wealth and protection that La Bessière can offer her, and becoming—as my young
movie-going companion Pablo described him—“mean,” rejecting her at the healing
way-station when she has clearly made the decision that he matters to her.
Despite the woman sitting upon his lap, Brown has been quite literally crying
in his suds—busily carving out a love-post like some rugby-playing schoolboy,
after whom he was probably named—an act that surely would have made Hemingway
snort with derision.
Indeed,
as Jolly makes clear from the beginning she too is dismissive of popular sexual
norms, appearing in her premier scene at the hurly-girly Lo Tinto’s
transgressive nightclub dressed as a man and, in the midst of the act, asking
for Madame Ceasar’s (Eve Southern) decoratively-worn flower—and in that act
symbolically stealing her virginity, sealing it up with a mouth-to-mouth kiss.
It hardly matters that Madame Caesar has no virginity to abandon, for, in a
sense, through that act Jolly is proclaiming not only her preference, at the
moment, for her own kind, but is hinting that she may soon return the woman’s
sexual purity by stealing her lover way.
During
their encounter together soon after, both Jolly and Brown speak with great
disdain about the opposite sex, making it clear that neither of them is to be
trusted. And both speak of their failures to revitalize themselves in their
relationships with the opposite sex. If Brown has inexplicably joined the
Legion to get away from his lurid past, so too does Jolly explain that that
there is a foreign legion for women as well. Their conversation summarizes
their respective positions:
Tom Brown: What in the name of
10,000 corporals did you come into
a country
like this for
anyways?
Amy Jolly: I understand that men are never asked why they entered
the Foreign Legion.
Tom: That's right. They never
asked me and if they had I
wouldn't have told. When I crashed the
Legion, I ditched
the past.
Amy: There's a foreign legion of women, too. But we have
uniforms, no flags,
and no medals when *we* are brave;
no wound stripes where we are hurt.
Tom: Look here, is there
anything I can do to help you?
Amy: No. I've thought that before. Or, do you think you can
restore my faith in men?
Tom: Not me. You got the wrong man for that! Anybody who has
faith in me is a sucker
Amy: You better go now... I am
beginning to like you.
Tom: I've told women about everything a man can say.
I'm going to tell you something I've never told
a woman
before: I wish I'd met you ten years ago.
Even
though they are clearly attracted to one another, these two hurt beings realize
that if they dare to get involved sexually, it can only result in further pain
and suffering. And, in that sense, they purposely pose as beings who are
asexual, particularly to anyone whom they might respect. Sex, as Brown
suggests, always involves trust, a faith that is sure to be misplaced.
Furthermore, what can either of them truly give to one another: Brown a
penniless private, Jolly a needy woman of loose morality? The only thing they
can honestly offer each other is a later meeting.
In
the very next scene, Brown is caught standing next to his guard with his
leg resting upon his hip in the manner of another eccentrically asexual comic,
Harpo Marx.* Bodily contact is definitely safer with the same sex. After all,
isn’t a man’s decision to join up with the Legion similar to the decision of
women of previous ages to get themselves to a convent, to join up in a world so
closeted that heterosexual relationships are restricted and controlled. The
film even begins with Brown being dressed down for having let his eyes
stray to the body of a nearby native girl.
One
might describe Morocco, accordingly as a kind of comic burlesque
about “safe sex,” a position, one might argue, similar to one in which the
director himself had been positioned in relationship to his beloved star,
Dietrich. Is it any wonder, as Cooper reportedly complained, that von Sternberg
filmed the tall, lanky Cooper so that he too had to keep “looking up” to the
leading lady. Von Sternberg was no fool, and, of course, he knew, from the
example of his fellow German-speaking Wagner, that by denying his audience
something that they had come to expect, they’d long for it even more. The woman
we see hugging onto Brown’s towering frame throughout the movie offers him no
more sexual satisfaction than the two dolls (racist representations,
presumably, of black sexual fulfillment) that Jolly carries about with her
everywhere. They are simply sexual surrogates.
To
find sexual satisfaction, from this film’s inevitably macho perspective, the
woman has to be able to give up everything, to toss off her shoes, as Jolly
does, and wade out into the desert sand to follow behind her man like the other
sexual slaves trailing the Legion everywhere they go. It hardly matters how she
might be dressed, what her gender might be.** In a few hours, it is clear, the
wind will whip everything away. But at the end of a long day’s wandering, at least
sex is a real possibility. After all, she’s entering a fairy tale, isn’t
she?
*Although Harpo is
presented as a chaser of the fairer sex, he gives equal treatment to the male
characters in most of his movies, grabbing their legs, and using their torsos
as handy resting posts.
**It reminds me a bit of
Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, where, after Port Moresby and his
wife Kit’s relationship falls apart in Morocco, Kit (autobiographically based
on Bowles’ lesbian wife Jane) dresses in a robe and wanders off into the desert
to be picked up by a passing Arab trader who hides her from his harem, the
women believing she must be a beautiful young boy.
Los Angeles, October 10,
2014
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (October 2014).
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