Word: dietrichs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though in the divorce his name had been linked with such luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Gail Russell, Wayne had a different altar ego. His new wife ?like the others?was of Latin extraction: a Peruvian exactress named Pilar Palette. "Just happenstance," he claims. "Whenever I've had free time I've been in Latin America...
...inside returns later in exteriors of the cafe which seem Expressionist: the hero wanders through the shadow-filled darkness barred from light, warmth, security. But the stove, like the stage at the end, gives the light a different meaning. Light is the core of the Romantic being, whether sexual (Dietrich, whose skin and hair shine) or metaphysical (the fire in the stove). Janning's pursuit of light, though it leads him into humiliation and death greatens his soul. Sternberg's emphasis on light-attraction over darkness' terror, on personal triumph in the middle of degradation, are Romantic themes whose Christian...
...Jannings' arrival yields to rigidity when he sits at his desk; but a prank subverts his authority and takes him to the entertainment district that night. Here huge shadows and trap-like streets, in the finest tradition of German Expressionism, stress his fears of this setting, fears augmented inside Dietrich's dressing room by a clown and a "professor" of magic who implicitly mock Jannings' position. The impingement of settings and objects on Jannings' security climaxes in a song sequence where Jannings seated in a theater box, is distracted by a ship's nude figurehead and other sexual objects...
JANNINGS'S reduction to poverty and dependence on. Dietrich increases--but the settings do not begin to imprison him. They remain as deep and spacious as ever. Rather, his consciousness of their distance and illusory nature grows. On their very wedding night Dietrich separates herself from Jannings with a veil. His relation to her becomes more purely visual as he goes through hell; the scope of his experience grows and grows, his vision becomes stronger and clearer as his life changes. Finally he is forced to play a clown in his home town while Dietrich backstage messes with a young...
...Jannings is forced to crow, we see Dietrich watching him, for the first time in close-up. As she sees his humiliation her cynicism takes on a new depth echoed in the final images of her singing. Jannings charges offstage to kill her; her flight is shot in high-angle, expressing the degree of freedom in even Jannings' most desperate action. Indeed, Sternberg cuts away to a doorway rather than showing Jannings being strait-jacketed. Later released, he returns to his old school desk to die the death of all Expressionist heroes. But Sternberg ends the film with shots...