This November, the Lobotomy Room film club
turns three! (We debuted on 24 November 2015). To mark the occasion, we’re taking
a sentimental journey and re-visiting the first film we ever screened: Seven
Sinners (1940).
The seven films director Josef von Sternberg
and his muse and leading lady Marlene Dietrich made together between 1930 and
1935 were dark, erotic, witty and sublime works of art. Together they honed
Dietrich's complex, sultry and feline persona and brought a whiff of genuine
Weimar decadence to mainstream Hollywood. By comparison Seven Sinners (made
after Dietrich and Sternberg’s personal and professional relationship
imploded) is pure trash - but campy, enjoyable fun trash of the highest order!
It’s a romantic comedy starring Dietrich as good time girl nightclub chanteuse
Bijou Blanche, set adrift and stirring up trouble in a South Seas port, while
pursuing a hunky naval officer (played by a young and still relatively unknown
John Wayne). Just wait until you see perennial Lobotomy Room favourite Dietrich
crooning “The Man’s in the Navy” in full butch military drag king mode!
Come sink a few cocktails, surrender to the
allure of Marlene Dietrich and celebrate the cinema club’s third birthday on Wednesday 21 November!
Lobotomy Room Goes to the Movies is the
FREE monthly film club downstairs at Fontaine’s bar (Dalston’s most unique nite
spot!) devoted to Bad Movies We Love (our motto: Bad Movies for Bad People),
specialising in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! Doors to the basement Bamboo
Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm prompt. We can accommodate thirty
people maximum on film nights. Arrive early to grab a seat and order a drink!
Firstly, one of the reasons I love showing
this particular film at Fontaine’s is that most of the action in Seven Sinners takes
place in a bamboo-covered Polynesian-style Tiki bar – which is essentially what the
Bamboo Lounge is! It’s an immersive “you-are-there” cinema experience!
Some quick context: like her Golden Age
Hollywood contemporaries Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, Dietrich had an
impressively long, decades-spanning career (she’d appeared in German silent
films in the twenties, made her Hollywood debut in 1930 and retired from
performing in the seventies) with ups and downs and peaks and troughs and a series of glorious “comebacks”. Alongside peers Crawford, Mae West, Greta Garbo and
Katherine Hepburn Dietrich was declared “box office poison” in 1938 because her
recent films had hemorrhaged money at the cinema. (They’re rightly acclaimed as unassailable masterpieces
now, but at the time Dietrich’s last few collaborations with Sternberg tanked commercially).
But Dietrich bounced back triumphantly as brassy
saloon girl-with-a-heart-of-gold Frenchy in the hit Western Destry Rides Again
(1939), and Seven Sinners captures her on the upswing. With these back-to-back roles,
Dietrich proved herself a more durable and resilient performer than previously given
credit for: she was skilled at adapting and updating her persona while keeping
her ineffably world-weary and sultry essence intact. Man-hungry, trouble-making, fun-loving chanteuse Bijou Blanche (“I’m a bad influence”, she purrs), is clearly in the lineage
of Dietrich’s “noble harlots” with a shady past (think of Amy Jolly in Morocco (1930)
or Shanghai Lili in Shanghai Express (1932)) but this time played for laughs.
In a relaxed, beguiling comedic performance, Dietrich displays warmer, earthier
and more approachable facets than in the earlier Sternberg films.
Tay Garnett (1894 - 1977) - the director of Seven Sinners - was efficient and
low-brow in comparison to intellectual and temperamental poet-of-film Josef von
Sternberg. But Garnett clearly learned a thing or two about how to present his
leading lady from Sternberg. She gets some dreamy close-ups with her face
enigmatically half-concealed behind veils, one of Sternberg’s favourite
techniques. (Bijou is ostensibly a down-on-her-luck nightclub singer – but has
a dazzling wardrobe and seems to have a matching parasol for every outfit
change).
Bijou is French (at one point she wistfully
reminisces about her childhood in a Marseilles convent school). Interestingly,
Dietrich - Germany’s most famous export - only occasionally portrayed German
characters onscreen. She just as frequently played French, Austrian, Russian –
even Spanish! In her films, she didn’t necessarily signify explicit German-ness
but rather a conception of all-purpose European sophistication.
The partnership of Dietrich and John Wayne
together might sound incongruous, but in fact her Continental elegance contrasts
nicely with monosyllabic all-American cowboy types (by Seven Sinners she’d
already starred opposite Gary Cooper and James Stewart. Interestingly,
apparently Tyrone Power was the original choice for the role of Lieutenant Dan
Brent - a much prettier and very different actor to Wayne. Dietrich and Power wouldn't feature together until Witness for the Prosecution in 1957).
This is Tay Garnett explaining
how Wayne got cast in in the film (quoted in Flesh and Fantasy by Penny
Stallings, 1978):
“We needed a tough he-man type who could
use his fists and decided to borrow him from Republic. His name was John Wayne.
Marlene had the choice of all of her leading men. I decided not to mention
Wayne to her, but simply to place him in the Universal commissary where she
couldn’t miss seeing him. He stood between us and our table as we walked in for
lunch, chatting with a couple of actresses I had set up. She swept past him,
then swiveled on her heel and looked him up and down like he were a prime rib
at Chasen’s. As we sat down, she whispered right in my ear, “Daddy, buy me
that!” I said, “Honey, it’s settled. You got him.” Then, at a prearranged signal, Wayne came to
the table. If you didn’t know what was gonna happen, you’d be as blind as a bit
pony. Their relationship got off like a firework display. They were crazy about
each other, but every man on the picture wanted her. I did, but she wouldn’t
lay.”
Tay Garnett - what a class act! Dietrich
and Wayne would make two more films together: The Spoilers and Pittsburgh (both
1942) but neither is as anywhere as good as Seven Sinners. The difference was Seven Sinners is primarily a Marlene Dietrich film featuring John Wayne, and the
later two are John Wayne films featuring (and wasting!) Marlene Dietrich.
Speaking of partnerships: poker-faced Russia-born character actor
Mischa Auer (1905 – 1967) steals every scene he appears in as Bijou’s sidekick,
magician and pickpocket Sasha. He and Dietrich make a great comedy double-act.
(They appeared onscreen together three times: Destry Rides Again (1939), Seven
Sinners (1940) and The Flame of New Orleans (1941). Honourable mention must go to
Oscar Homolka as a genuinely sleazy and threatening villain.
A convention of all of Dietrich’s best
films is finding a pretext for her to wear male attire. It could be argued
Dietrich is never sexier than in lesbian chic / “comme des garçons” mode. In
Seven Sinners she memorably dons male drag to throatily warble “The Man’s in
the Navy”. One of the fascinating things about Dietrich is how her coolly
detached persona refuses to date or get old. She’s eternally modern! A lot of
the hot topic buzzwords of 2018 like androgyny, unisex and being genderfluid,
ambisexual or pansexual – Dietrich just effortlessly was all those things. And
she was doing it over eighty years ago! She was a product of the Weimar Berlin
cabaret milieu of the twenties, frequented drag bars and was openly bisexual off-screen.
She brought that kind of nonchalant European kinkiness to mainstream Hollywood
films. (And many of the looks she created all those decades ago are still being
referenced in photo shoots and pop videos by the likes of Madonna, Grace Jones
and Kate Moss today).
/ Below: Raquel Welch in the film Myra Breckenridge (1970) /
No spoilers but for a film offering so much
raunchy good-natured fun, Seven Sinners ends on a surprisingly bittersweet and
melancholic note. Remember: the plot is loosely inspired by the opera Madam
Butterfly, and in her films, Dietrich doesn’t always get her man. In the 1940s,
once America’s involvement in World War II kicked-in, Hollywood films with messages
about the nobility of self-sacrifice would abound.
I’ll give Dietrich’s definitive biographer Stephen
Bach (author of Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (1992) the last word: “Marlene’s
jaunty adventures in the South Seas had no higher ambition than amusement, and
the picture is the most effortlessly entertaining movie-movie she ever made.
Her glamour was never so accessible nor self-parody so cheerful … Bijou is the
character that defined Marlene for the decade to come: tough but touchable,
seductive but funny. She was a realist with scruples and a sense of humour. She
never gave a more likable performance
in her life.”
Read more about the Wild, Wild World of Lobotomy Room here.
What we showed in 2017.
What we showed in 2016.
Follow me on tumblr
Follow me on twitter
"Like" and follow the official Lobotomy Room Facebook page - for all your Lobotomy Room needs!
WONDERFUL MARLENE
ReplyDelete