Word: dietrichs
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...dominated in very real ways by their female stars. The classic examples are Lillian Gish and Mac Marsh, who provided the polarities from which Griffith fashioned some of his greatest films. The "screwball" Depression comedies (with Lombard, Colbert, Arthur and the rest), the great foreign sirens (Grabo, Dietrich, and Lamarr), the singing blondes from Fox (Faye, Grable, and Monroe), Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn, are genres unto themselves-this is at least half of the Hollywood product, and a half that could never have existed without women. As the key to the gold mine, all these women had immense power...
...movies, with their tough girl reporters and wise-cracking hoofers. As always in popular art, comedy can get away with more social comment than serious work (just as comedy is the easiest place to hide from social comment). The series instead has concentrated on the direct sexual themes of Dietrich in Shanghai Express, Garbo in Queen Christina, and Mae West in She Done Him Wrong. The last film does, of course, touch on the economics of Miss West and her jewels-this is the film version of her stage success Diamond Lil. And for that matter, there is some doubt...
...Dietrich movie is instructive, however, more in what it implies than in what it delivers. For one thing, the plot of the movie denies the gut reaction to Dietrich as femme fatale. The image of the cold-eyed castrator stands up, in fact, in only two of her films- The Bine Angel and The Devil is a Woman, the first and last movies, respectively, of her six-year association with Josef von Sternberg. In most of her work, Dietrich is notable mainly for her almost martial sense of loyalty to her man. She may flirt in Morocco with everything...
...amount to a "last-reel syndrome": you can get away with anything, so long as everything turns out all right in the end. We resist these endings now, just as one feels the people involved in the movie must have resisted their necessity. In a sense, we know better-Dietrich wouldn't have followed Cooper, just as gangsters (Cagney in Public Enemy or Muni in Scarface) don't have to die-and we ignore the insistence of the censors on "just retribution...
...movies of Mae West deny "just retribution" on almost every level-the Production Code was set up in 1933 to counter the popularity of her films. Suffice it to say, Mae got away with murder-sometimes literally. But the main difference between her movies and those of Dietrich is in many ways implied by the difference in their physical charms. I was horrified to hear someone behind me at Currier House exclaiming: "Can you imagine they used to think she was beautiful" What he didn't realize is that no one, except Mae West, considered her a sex goddess. Even...