Josef von Sternberg | Blonde Venus / 1932

the rhine maiden

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Furthman, S. K. Lauren, and Josef von Sternberg (screenplay), Josef von Sternberg (director) Blonde Venus / 1932

 

With a script by Jules Furthman, one of the best screenplay writers in all of Hollywood history (among his works were Morocco, Body and Soul, Shanghai Express, Mutiny on the Bounty, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and To Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Nightmare Alley) and directed by the great von Sternberg, Blonde Venus is a wonderful movie that still doesn’t quite succeed. The more I think on it, I perceive it as two very different films under the same title, with a single actress performing with partners, who themselves couldn’t be more different from one another.

     The film begins in pre-Hitler Germany with Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold with the lovely Rhine maidens swimming nude in a river where nearby lurks a dragon, actresses on break with taxi carefully protected by the driver (the dragon) who growls at the American boys exhausted from a Sunday walk through the woods who come upon the maidens, actresses from the city on a short break. If you might miss the visual allusions, von Sternberg provides his audience with the musical score from that early scene in Wagner’s opera.

     Among the Americans is Edward ‘Ned’ Faraday, played by Herbert Marshall, a British-born actor who after this film and his best, Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, followed by several romantic roles—in which, frankly, I never found him convincing—in which he played several uptight and dangerous Britishers and during World War II often played, in particular, British spies working for the Germans. Predictably, it appears, since here he plays a student who is studying in Germany, which explains his meeting up with Dietrich and his return there after he has discovered he is suffering from a rare disease brought on by his mysterious experiments with radium and other chemical substances. If nothing else, it’s certainly not a healthy situation, with his lab just off the kitchen where he works much like Wagner’s Alberich experimenting with some kind of alchemy that will, if successful, bring him great amounts of money.

      But now, in their poverty, his wife Helen Faraday—using her husband’s name which itself calls up the electromagnetic and electrochemical discoveries of Michael Faraday—serves as a toiling mother with the sacred ring round her finger, Ned refusing to permit her to return to her cabaret career, even though it was her singing that enchanted him into marriage. Although outwardly appearing happy and certainly doting on their son, Johnny (the amazing child star Dickie Moore, on whose birthday I coincidentally watched this film) she looks clearly uncomfortable and out of place, and of course nothing like how we are used to seeing Dietrich.

      Their central joy seems to be focused on their son, for whom many a night they perform as bedtime storytellers, a duo ritualistically acting out their river meeting, their quick courtship, and their marriage to the absolute delight of Johnny who seems never to tire of the tale.

     When Ned finally consults a doctor, he hears of a possible cure discovered by his old teacher back in Germany. The traveling and living expenses, however, are clearly unavailable to the tenant-house dwelling family, and despite Ned’s dismissals of the idea, Helen determines to return to work.

    From the moment Helen crosses the doorway to the world outside, von Sternburg’s film becomes another kind of movie as if, almost by magic, Helen is pulled out from the backdoor theater waiting line to the stage where Ben Smith (Gene Morgan) hires himself on as her manager, pitching her to theater owner Dan O’Connor (Robert Emmett O’Connor) who transforms her into Helen Jones, a version of the Dietrich we all know and love.

      Suddenly it is as if the drab actor has been bewitched by the camera, coming alive to partake in what Richard Barrios describes as “a rococo cornucopia of attitudes and arabesques” with Dietrich teasing “the audience with her takes on every conceivable variety of sex, up to and including bestiality and incest.” Becoming the overnight sensation, The Blonde Venus, she joins a chorus line of scantily dressed native girls as a full gorilla on a chain, vaguely terrifying her audience as she darts off and on the stage before doing what can only be described as a kind bestial striptease, taking off elements of the gorilla suit bit by bit until she herself becomes a native queen, of which the lyrics hint, tossing off in the style of German cabaret sprechstimme Ralph Rainger’a and Sam Coslow’s "Hot Voodoo":

 

                Did you ever happen to hear of voodoo?

                Hear it and you won't give a damn what you do

                Tom-tom's put me under a sort of voodoo

                And the whole night long

                I don't know the right from wrong

                …….

                Hot voodoo make me brave

                I want to misbehave

                I'm beginning to feel like an African queen

                Those drums bring up the heaven inside me

                I need some great big angel to guide me

                Hot voodoo, makes me wild

                Oh fireman, save this child

                I’m going to blazes

                I want to be bad

 

    Within the night she has won the love of her Wotan, the wealthy politician playboy Nick Townsend (Cary Grant) who is more than willing to provide her with the sum for a ticket to send her husband off to Europe. She tells Ned that she was able to convince her director to provide her with an advance.

     Obviously, in Ned’s absence, Nick himself pulls Helen off the stage for his private attentions, setting her temporarily up in a friend’s Park Avenue suite, while providing a nanny for Johnny. And during this brief time without, symbolically speaking, both her son and her ring, she is happy, enjoying the female powers that her independence has suddenly allowed.

     When they hear of Ned’s cure and that he will return in a few weeks, the couple rush off for a final vacation. Ned, however, impatient to see his son and wife, returns earlier than expected to an empty apartment that hasn’t been visited for weeks, finding his message of early return and other mail still in the doorway.

      Upon Helen’s final return to her marriage, she discovers a man who is hardly recognizable in his determination for revenge, demanding she bring back his son and leave immediately.

      Helen does pick-up Johnny, escaping with him upon a sad road trip of day-to-day misadventures as she runs from the police detectives who attempt to bring her back her son back to his father and bring her to justice, without her quite realizing that it is her almost incestuous love of her Siegfried which will bring both of them down. Living with him in her own bed in hotel rooms, shacks, and shanties she is forced to lock him in as she takes on day jobs which include everything from farm work, dishwashing, and prostitution, part of the vast cornucopia of roles of which Richard Barrios spoke.

      She finally realizes she can never fully return to life as long as she holds onto her son, and finally living in the black quarter of small southern shanty-town where she spots another police detective, she lures him in as street walker to reveal her son, ready finally to give him back to the Alberich and dragon rolled into one, Ned Faraday.

     With vengeance on his mind, Ned hands over the $1,000 he sold for the formula that might have made him millions, dooming his own and son’s life to a world of poverty. Helen, for her part, hands over the envelope to a woman in such deep despair for her down-and-out condition that she is plotting her suicide for the morning.

      Almost immediately after she has said goodbye to her beloved Johnny, the film again is transformed into the other Dietrich world, this time in Paris where she now heads a night club with her secularly christened name Helen Jones, having used men to get to her position where, dressed in a white suit reminiscent of the tuxedo she wore in Morocco, she performs once more as a symbolic lesbian, briefly grabbing the wrist and petting the forehead of one of her chorus girls as she slithers down a leather path to sing in both French and English the lyrics of "I Couldn't Be Annoyed" (music and lyrics by Leo Robin and Richard A. Whiting). Here is the lesbian Dietrich we know best, still harboring the flames of a dead love, but perfectly happy to move on with her life as it is, powerful without a man in sight.

      But, of course, she becomes annoyed by the meeting, quite by accident, of Nick Townsend once again, taken to her club by a friend. The two meet up backstage after, of course, Nick telling her how much he still loves her and attempting to lure her on the ship he plans the next night to take back to the US, promising to book another suite for her in case she changes her mind.

       At the last moment she does join him, and in the last long scene returns with Nick, who has arranged the visit, to see her son for the very last time. Ned resists letting her in, but when Nick offers to pay, he permits her entry simply out of disdain for the victor’s offer.

      Johnny runs to her and she shows her love in kind as the two retreat for a few moments to the bedroom; she finally realizing that he has not been properly cleaned for days, asks him if he’d like her to bathe him, just as in the very first domestic scene of the movie. She is after all a Rhine maiden, and as the cycle demands she must return to guard the ring. She takes a large bowl from the kitchen, fills it with water, and returns to the bedroom, Nick (as Wotan) finally realizing it is time for him to retreat leaves the car, just in case. But once back in her proper place, her Alberich cannot do other than accept her return, as their son begs them to retell the old saga of how they met.

      Throughout this essay, I have tossing out links to Wagner’s Das Rheingold.* But I need to warn the reader these cannot be applied literally scene by scene, character by character, but rather remain in the background as leitmotivs that appear now and then within the plot, rather than functioning as a parallel unit of allegorical structure. In that respect Barrios was correct in his description of the work as a cornucopia, for it is a basket of various possibilities for its female hero that she must explore to discover her way back to world she most loves, caring for and protecting the sacred product of her marital ring, her son.

 

*I believe my comparisons with Wagner’s Das Rheingold are original; at least I have never encountered an essay discussing this aspect of the film. If such an interpretation exists, I came to similar conclusions, I assure you, without reading it.

 

Los Angeles, September 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).