It’s her birthday today.
When I interviewed Dan Callahan about his book The Art of American Screen Acting, we discussed Marlene Dietrich. He has been obsessed since college, and also obsessed with trying to put her into words. What exactly is she doing. Why does she get the effects she does? HOW does she do that? Movie magic, okay. Collaboration with Josef von Sternberg, a director absolutely OBSESSED with her, obsessed to the point of emotional torture. Okay. He set her up properly so she could be perceived. But she’s DIFFERENT from other stars of her day (well, they were all different from each other. Now, so many “stars” have a sameness to them. They can interchange roles. Back in the day, though, you couldn’t put Barbara Stanwyck in a Carole Lombard vehicle. You couldn’t swap out Marlene Dietrich for Katharine Hepburn. Or Garbo.)
At any rate, I think Callahan’s chapter on Dietrich in his book is a major piece of writing, since it comes at it from a performance standpoint. He refers to her as “postmodern” – which I found fascinating and which we discussed.
Here’s our interview. It’s a doozy.
And just for fun, here she is with John Wayne. They had an affair. I mean, God, can’t you tell?
Marlene Dietrich was one of the great sexual personae, to borrow Camille Paglia’s phrase, and taking on Paglia’s idea that all the great personae were (and are) androgynous, an idea Dan discusses as well.
The Blue Angel
by Allen Ginsberg
Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.
She’s a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.
Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.
She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the whites of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.
She opens her eyes, and they’re blank
like a statue’s in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings.
—you’d think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.
Marlene Dietrich’s screen test for The Blue Angel
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