“The Blue Angel" at the Last Picture House -- September 25.
Wednesday, September 25, 6 p.m.
The Last Picture House, 325 East Second Street, Davenport IA
Currently boasting a 96-percent "freshness" rating on review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes and hailed by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as "one of the best films I have ever seen," director Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel serves as the fourth presentation in the German American Heritage Center's German Expressionist Film Series, its September 25 screening at Davenport venue The Last Picture House sure to demonstrate why The Guardian lauded the classic as "a masterpiece of erotic obsession."
In The Blue Angel, prim educator Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) finds some of his students ogling racy photos of cabaret performer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and visits a local club, The Blue Angel, in an attempt to catch them there. Seeing Lola perform, the teacher is driven mad with lust, eventually resigning his position at the school to marry his beloved. However, married life with a woman whose job is to make men desire her proves more difficult than Rath imagined. Written by Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller and Robert Liebmann, with uncredited contributions by Sternberg, The Blue Angel is based on Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat (Professor Filth) and set in an unspecified northern German port city.
In presenting the tragic transformation of a respectable professor into a cabaret clown and his descent into madness, Sternberg's feature was the first feature-length German sound film and brought Dietrich international fame. It also introduced her signature song, Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Liebmann's "Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It)," and is widely considered a classic of German cinema. The Blue Angel was shot simultaneously in German- and English-language versions. Though the English version was once considered a lost film, a print was discovered in a German film archive, restored, and screened at San Francisco's Berlin and Beyond Film Festival in January of 2009.
Originally, The Blue Angel was scheduled for its Berlin premiere in April of 1930, but Germany's UFA Studios owner and industrialist Alfred Hugenberg, unhappy with socialist Heinrich Mann's association with the production, blocked its release. Production manager Pommer defended the film, and Mann issued a statement distancing his anti-bourgeois critique from Sternberg's more sympathetic portrayal of professor Immanuel Rath in his movie version. Sternberg, who declared himself apolitical, had departed the country in February, shortly after the film was completed, and conflict ensued. Hugenberg ultimately relented on grounds of financial expediency, still convinced that Sternberg had concealed within The Blue Angel "a parody of the German bourgeoisie." When it was finally released, the film proved to be an instant international success." Dietrich, at Sternberg's insistence, was subsequently brought to Hollywood under contract to Paramount, where the studio would film and release Morocco in 1930 before The Blue Angel would appear in American theaters in 1931.
The Blue Angel will be presented at The Last Picture House at 6 p.m. on September 25, and $15 admission includes a medium popcorn. For more information on the screening and the German American Heritage Center's German Expressionist Film Series, call (563)322-9944 and visit GAHC.org.
