The Scarlet Empress

Turner Classic Movies showed the last two of von Sternberg’s pictures with Marlene Dietrich back to back, The Scarlet Empress (1935) and The Devil is a Woman (1936). The films inadvertently display the ossification of Von Sternberg’s art into something like mannerism. Both pictures concern sexual humiliation, the director’s obsessive theme probably best exemplified by 1930’s The Blue Angel. Catherine the Great in The Scarlet Empress is sexually humiliated – her ferocious mother-in-law is involved in an affair with the young officer that she loves – and, then, uses her physical allure to humiliate every one else, including, it seems from the delirious montage, the entire Russian nations. The film’s décor is so strange and utterly overpowering that the picture ultimately seems to be about nothing more than the motion of a beautiful woman moving somnambulantly through a dream-like landscape of huge terra cotta sculpture depicting horrific martyrdoms and petrified processions of monks (there are vast icons, not small jeweled objects, but huge murals on all the walls). At times, The Scarlet Empress becomes completely abstract – some scenes are shot through a mesh of veil that atomizes Dietrich into a grid of discontinuous lips and eyes. There’s all sorts of sexual perversion, spectacular, if elliptically shot scenes of torture and rape, and huge processions that seize the screen and will not let it go. This is Russia as imagined by Guy Maddin, toy villages buried in fake snow, huge bells ringing in jagged Soviet-style montages, cavalry riding up a vast flight of steps between cyclopean figures of St. Sebastian shot full of terra cotta arrows and tormented stone monks. It’s one of the greatest spectacles ever filmed, so overwhelming that von Sternberg’s vision ultimately became embodied in Soviet film practice – Eisenstein’s late Ivan the Terrible (Parts I and II) shot during World War II borrows the film’s décor for its portrait of the mad and sadistic Tsar. Dietrich is good, starting as a dewy-eyed innocent, and ending as a Valkryrie – literally, the film uses Wagner’s music for Brunnhilde to accompany the wild cavalry charge through the snow and up the interior steps of the palace (exactly why the Queen is riding a horse, and her destination – doesn’t she live in the palace? – is completely unclear). The film’s soundtrack, which is extraordinary, is a medley of tunes from Tchaikovsky (heavy on Marche Slav) and Wagner – a royal wedding is scored to something that sounds like Wagner’s Valhalla motif from the Ring – the film climaxes with orgasms of bells from the 1812 Overture. Although The Scarlet Empress is a very great film, it is also a dead end – the druggy, hallucinated fever dream dense with suggestions of sadism and kink. Ultimately, it’s inert. The Devil is a Woman is also spectacular to behold: von Sternberg’s imaginary Spain is all filigree, odalisques from Goya, grotesque masks (the film is conveniently set during carnival) and gloomy, fog-soaked barren woodlands, tortured trees like forms from Caspar Friedrich looming in the mist. But the plot is almost non-existent – based on a decadent novel by Pierre Louys, The Woman and the Puppet, the film luxuriates in abject debasement: the hero is a middle-aged soldier obsessed with a courtesan who continuously degrades him. She uses his money and his advantages to finance her affair with a sullen, girly-looking pretty-boy matador. Again and again, the hero returns to her and is humiliated. In the end, he fights a duel with his best friend, played by Cesar Romero, realizes that the courtesan loves his opponent, and to avoid hurting her, fires his pistol into the air – although we know him to be a lethal, “dead shot.” The consequences are dire and predictable. This subject matter clearly fascinated many important directors – apparently, falling into obsessive love with a beautiful cold-hearted woman is an occupational hazard for film makers: Bunuel filmed the novel in the seventies as The Obscure Object of Desire, Roger Vadim re-made the picture with Brigitte Bardot, and there were, at least, two silent versions of the story as well. Bunuel’s version is the most interesting – without explanation, he uses two women who look completely different for the old man’s object of desire. The problem is that the story doesn’t resonate and can’t develop into anything very interesting – the dire result of the obsession is a foregone conclusion as soon as the camera luxuriates on the film’s female star in the first reel. Classical Hollywood film-making can impart glamour to a dog or a fly – of course, a beautiful woman can be transformed into an unearthly, and wholly fascinating, image of desire. But once the magic has been applied, then what?