Word: dietrichs
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Into the cinema firmament swam no new star to replace Garbo and Dietrich. Seasoned performers carried on competently rather than brilliantly...
...habit in a man" and the director has not been able to discard his former habits of originality and his finesse, even though sloppy work is now the mode for Hollywood. He knows very well how to make a good shot, how to make five extra and Marlene Dietrich Paddling about in a property pound look like six syivan nymphs; he can throw the property sordid glamour over Marline, the whore refusing a be in a flop-house because she intends to return to the respectability of the stage. Von Sternberg's fault is that he is old-fashioned...
...Miss Dietrich, if one still has hopes that she may prove to be an actress, she is still hampered by the same old stereotyped parts in implausible plots. At any event, she is not just a simple German girl, she is a woman with considerable charm and magnificent stage presence. Under the husk of an artificial and assumed manner she may some day reveal something more than a pleasant pucker of the lips, a husky feminine bass voice, a pair of legs, and an engaging way of drawling "off-ten", "yesss...
Blonde Venus (Paramount) presents a new excuse for Marlene Dietrich to play a bad woman. Excuse: sick husband. The picture graphs her degeneration. Excuse: mother-love. Toward the end, having left husband & child behind, she rises fast, her motto being "Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels fastest who travels alone." She completes the cycle in the arms of husband & child...
Director Josef von Sternberg wrote the story, quit Paramount and took Miss Dietrich with him when the story was rewritten, later returned to direct her in it. Von Sternberg, who has repeatedly denied being born Joe Stern in Brooklyn, opens with a sylvan swimming scene in Germany's Black Forest (300 miles from Berlin) where U. S. hikers surprise Berlin actresses off for the afternoon. One hiker (Herbert Marshall) marries Marlene Dietrich, takes her to the U. S. They have a child. Marshall contracts radium poisoning in his scientific research. To send him to a Dresden doctor, Marlene returns...