Next Lobotomy Room Film Club ... Desire (1936) on 15 February 2024

“Marlene Dietrich, with her pencil-line arched eyebrows, as the most elegantly amusing international jewel thief ever. She steals a pearl necklace in Paris and speeds toward Spain; on her way she has a series of encounters with Gary Cooper, a motor engineer from Detroit who is on holiday. Produced by Ernst Lubitsch, for Paramount, and directed by Frank Borzage, this is a polished light comedy in the "continental" style - a sophisticated romantic trifle, with Dietrich more chic and modern than in her von Sternberg pictures. When she eyes Cooper, she's so captivating, you almost feel sorry for him; there's an image of her standing against French doors that is simply peerlessly sexy. But you can also see why this European sophisticate longs for the American innocent. Cooper is a bit coy and rambunctious in his Americanness but wearing narrow-tailored suits and with his hair sleek he's the ideal Art Deco hero. And he's great when he leans close to Dietrich and says, dreamily, "All I know about you is you stole my car and I'm insane about you." When he's being threatened by her crooked associate (John Halliday), who remarks, tauntingly, "One mustn't underestimate America - it's a big country," he bends forward and says, "Six foot three."”

/ Pauline Kael’s review of Desire (1936) /

Considering the February film club almost coincides with Valentine’s Day and to prove that even Lobotomy Room can occasionally raise the tone, on 15 February we whisk you away to The Spanish Riviera for sumptuous 1936 romantic screwball comedy Desire! Gary Cooper stars as Tom Bradley, a naïve American automotive engineer who becomes entangled with Marlene Dietrich’s enigmatic Madeleine Beaupré – described by Pauline Kael as “the most elegantly amusing jewel thief ever.” Directed by Frank Borzage, with lavish costumes by Travis Banton and songs by Frederick Hollander (who wrote all of Dietrich’s best musical numbers – including “Falling in Love Again”) and featuring the two leads at the height of their considerable beauty, Desire is an Art Deco gem of a movie! Join us to wallow in sheer glamour over cocktails in the splendour of Fontaine’s in Dalston.

Lobotomy Room is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston. Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar. The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered on time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest. Facebook event page.

Some fun facts about Desire: it was originally meant to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch – and entitled The Pearl Necklace! Marlene Dietrich stars as a glamorous and amoral jewel thief who - due to wacky screwball hijinks - becomes entangled with unworldly vacationing American-in-Paris automobile engineer Gary Cooper. Desire reunites Dietrich and Cooper for the first time since their triumphant pairing in Morocco in 1930 (which was Dietrich's Hollywood debut). As Dietrich’s definitive biographer Steven Bach asserts, “Cooper was not just her first American leading man, but her best.” Decide for yourself on 15 February! 

/ Below: find someone who looks at you with the same delight as Marlene Dietrich contemplating these pearls! /

Trailer:

Reflections on ... Games (1967)

Recently watched: Games (1967). Tagline: “Passion wears a mask of terror in this strangest of all games!” I’m using this period of enforced social isolation to explore the weirder corners of YouTube for long forgotten and obscure movies. (My boyfriend Pal is accompanying me only semi-willingly). 

In this freaky and claustrophobic psychological thriller, a jaded, wealthy young high society couple Paul (James Caan) and Jennifer Montgomery (Katharine Ross) avert ennui by throwing wild, hedonistic “happening”-style parties, indulging in pranks and dabbling in the occult. (You can easily imagine the thrill-seeking Montgomerys “slumming it” at Andy Warhol’s Factory for low-life kicks). One day an unexpected visitor materializes at the door of their opulent Upper East Side New York townhouse filled with pop art and vintage pinball machines. She’s Lisa Schindler (Simone Signoret), an inscrutable, world-weary Continental woman of indeterminate age, garbed like a black widow (black turban, black cape, the long black leather gloves of an assassin. If you imagine Games to be a fairy tale, Lisa represents the wicked witch). She claims (unconvincingly) to be a door-to-door cosmetics saleswoman, promptly collapses from exhaustion and then effortlessly inveigles herself into their household. Anyway, Lisa alleges she possess psychic powers, which amuses them. Paul and Jennifer had imagined themselves to be blasé sophisticates, but the depraved Lisa is in another league entirely. Who is she – and why does she have a pair of loaded pistols in her trunk? Soon the unlikely ménage à trois is playing increasingly perverse and sadistic mind games. How long before someone gets killed? 

Truthfully, the "shock twist" that underpins Games can be easily deduced early on, but director Curtis Harrington maintains such a stylish and sinister mood you won’t really mind. In fact, any film by intriguing and durable maverick Harrington is always worth catching. An associate of Kenneth Anger’s, he graduated from underground avant-garde experimental cinema to low-budget horror movies (Harrington is an essential figure in the hagsploitation genre: in the early seventies he turned Shelley Winters into a scream queen in Who Sloo Auntie Roo? and What’s the Matter with Helen?) before later diversifying into television, helming episodes of series like Charlie’s Angels, Wonder Woman and Dynasty. Everything Harrington touches is imbued with an understanding of camp and an overtly queer sensibility. Maybe that’s why his camera embraces the male leads so appreciatively. (Games is a nice reminder of just how cute Caan was in his early male starlet days. His hair is even styled like a sixties-era Ken doll’s. See also Don Stroud in tight double denim as the horny grocery delivery boy sucked-into the weird rituals. Do yourself a favour and Google Stroud’s 1973 Playgirl pictorial!). 

One of Games’ themes would appear to be the collision between American naivety and European “old world” decadence. Lisa has a powerful monologue where she explains that three times in her life, she had to scale a barbed wire fence to survive: “by the third time, I grew to like it”.  Much as I admire puffy-eyed French actress Simone Signoret's performance as the manipulative woman-of-mystery, Harrington originally conceived Lisa with Marlene Dietrich in mind and it’s fascinating to speculate how she would have interpreted the role. (There's no way Dietrich - who hadn’t made a film in years at this point - would have agreed to doing the part, but still!). My favourite moment in Games: an imperiled Katharine Ross is wandering through the house at night in a long filmy white trailing nightgown and carrying a candelabra, looking like every idealized woman on the cover of a sixties or seventies Gothic romance pulp novel come to life.

Additional reading:

In Games’ opening party sequence, one of the most prominently featured guests is strikingly glamorous Czech actress Florence Marly. Marly, of course, made an unforgettable impression as the titular Queen of Blood (1966) in Curtis Harrington’s earlier science b-movie. Read my analysis of that one here. 

Read Dreams Are What Le Cinema is For's perceptive analysis of Games here.

 

Reflections on ... The Devil is a Woman (1935)

From the Facebook event page:

If visionary director Josef von Sternberg was the Leonardo da Vinci of cinema, then German glamourpuss leading lady Marlene Dietrich was his Mona Lisa. The Devil is a Woman (1935) was the last of the seven exquisite films the duo collaborated on together. And boy, did they conclude in high style! Sumptuous and bizarre, it’s a kinky and cruel black comedy about sexual humiliation, tinged with sadomasochism, and offering one final swooning and ambivalent valentine from von Sternberg to his gorgeous muse.

Set in a dream-like, deliberately artificial turn-of-the-century Seville, it stars Dietrich (clad in a wild wardrobe of lace mantillas) as heartless gold-digging femme fatale Concha Perez (variously described as “the most dangerous woman you’ll ever meet!” and “the toast of Spain!”) cruelly pitting virile young Antonio Garvan (Cesar Romero at his most handsome) against the self-destructively besotted Captain Don Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill – deliberately styled to resemble von Sternberg himself) for her own amusement.

The Devil is a Woman is a deliriously perverse, borderline-surreal spectacle! Come see the movie the Spanish government successfully banned and that Dietrich herself called her favourite (“because I was most beautiful in it”) on Wednesday 21 August!

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), specializing 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!

[The account below is cobbled together from my introductory notes plus some random reflections and musings on The Devil is a Woman]

The director Josef von Sternberg (1894 - 1969) and Marlene Dietrich (1901 - 1992) made seven films together in which he obsessed over lighting his muse’s face, trying to capture her mystique and crack her mystery. They had a volatile and complicated professional and personal relationship that had reached the end by 1935. The Devil is a Woman was the last movie they collaborated on and a lot has been read into it and how von Sternberg represents Dietrich onscreen this final time, looking for traces of bitterness, disillusionment or heartbreak.  What has certainly been noted is that the actor Lionel Atwill (1885 - 1946) who plays the masochistically-besotted Captain Don Pasqual – the man Dietrich cruelly torments in the film – seems to be deliberately styled to look just like von Sternberg. 

Also: in their previous films Dietrich tended to play “noble harlots” - essentially variations of a prostitute / fallen woman who actually operates with a far higher code of honour and more courage than the conventional society who judges her. In Devil, though, the man-eating, gold-digging character she plays (cigarette factory trollop turned nightclub chanteuse Concha Perez) is just plain bad!  

Interestingly, in Devil von Sternberg seems to deliberately reference The Blue Angel (1930), the first film he and Dietrich made together. Concha is a Spanish kissin’ cousin of the amoral Lola Lola, the German cabaret singer Dietrich plays in Blue Angel. And Atwill watching Concha sing in Devil’s musical number “Three Sweethearts Have I” echoes Emil Jannings watch Lola Lola sing "Falling in Love Again".  More perversely, von Sternberg also seems inspired by another Dietrich film he didn’t even direct himself: Song of Songs (1933), with Atwill and the great character actress Alison Skipworth (1863 – 1952) playing variations of the roles they enacted in that movie.

Asked late in life which was her favourite of the seven films she made with von Sternberg, Dietrich replied The Devil is a Woman. When pressed why, she snapped, “Because I was never more beautiful!” She may well have a point. Certainly Concha’s Spanish senorita costumes (heavy on the lace mantillas and giant tortoise shell combs) are among the most outrageous and elaborate Dietrich ever wore on-screen, and they’re created by Paramount Studio’s top designer, Travis Banton (1894 - 1958). But since then we’ve learned no one ever told Marlene Dietrich what to wear and in fact it was an active hands-on collaboration between Dietrich and Banton. Dietrich could easily get a co-designer credit on everything you see her wearing in the von Sternberg films.  It’s difficult to pick a favourite, but I do particularly love the macabre heavily veiled black widow / angel of death look Dietrich wears towards the end in the hospital scene.

And Dietrich is funny in this as well. She essays the coquettish and manipulative Concha in a haughty, petulant, foot-stomping and nostril-flaring register completely different from the aloof and inscrutable tone of her other performances in the von Sternberg oeuvre. Dietrich is seriously underappreciated as a fine comedic actress: see also Desire (1936), Seven Sinners (1940) and Stage Fright (1950) for further evidence of how funny she could be.

Someone who’s also very pretty in this film is Dietrich’s leading man, the Cuban-American actor Cesar Romero (1907 - 1994). Watch for the sensational bat-shaped mask Romero wears in the carnival scene. Swoon! About thirty years later Romero would memorably play The Joker in the campy 1960s Batman TV series. He refused to shave-off his signature pencil-line mustache for the role, so the make-up artist had to apply thick white foundation to conceal it. The suavely handsome Romero was a “confirmed bachelor” throughout his career and late in life when times were more enlightened, he openly admitted to being gay. He was also a long-term close friend of Joan Crawford (her nickname for him was “Butch”) and he regularly escorted her to nightclubs and film premieres when she was between husbands. 

The Devil is a Woman was a very unhappy and difficult production by all accounts, and then it was heavily censored. The original cut von Sternberg presented Paramount with was 93-minutes, but the final cut was only 76-minutes. We’ll never know what was in those lost 17 minutes (imagine if the footage was ever discovered in a vault somewhere! Oh, for a director’s cut!), but we do know a musical number was one of the casualties. Entitled “If It Isn’t Pain (Then It Isn’t Love)”, only the audio recording survives (you can hear it on YouTube).  It feels weird that – considering Concha is a nightclub singer – we only get to see Dietrich sing once (and the sole musical sequence “Three Sweethearts Have I” is relatively underwhelming in the von Sternberg - Dietrich canon). I’d love to know what the staging of “If It Isn’t Pain” was going to be!

To considerably complicate thing further, the Spanish government was so enraged by the depiction of the country in  The Devil is a Woman (the Spanish War Minister called the film “an insult to Spain and the Spaniards”) they demanded Paramount studios remove the film from circulation, otherwise all Paramount films would be banned from Spain. And Paramount consented! The “master print” was destroyed and the film was considered “lost” and went unseen for many years. Thankfully, both von Sternberg and Dietrich had kept their own personal copies of the film and it resurfaced in 1959 when von Sternberg began being honoured with career retrospectives.  

Devil was a critical and commercial flop in 1935 and von Sternberg’s career never recovered (he would never again enjoy full creative autonomy over his subsequent films. Of his post-Dietrich efforts, I highly recommend The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Macao (1952)). All these decades later, The Devil is a Woman remains a deeply strange, deliberately artificial and disorienting art movie. Von Sternberg offers no “moral centre” or guidance on how you’re meant to feel about the characters or the action (and none of the characters are remotely “sympathetic” by conventional standards). What’s it all about – and what is the significance of that ending? Prepare to be dazzled and dumbfounded! 

Details on the September 2019 film club

Together the inspired trio of pop art visionary Andy Warhol, director Paul Morrissey and leading man / homoerotic beefcake icon Joe Dallesandro collaborated on three notorious underground films. Cinema’s Sultan of Sleaze John Waters has hailed Flesh (1968), Trash (1970) and Heat (1972) as “the trilogy that changed the rules of male nudity in modern-day cinema both underground and in Hollywood.” While all three movies are gritty, sordid classics of style and substance, I’d argue that Heat (the final and most polished of their efforts) is the most entertaining – and it’s this month’s Lobotomy Room film club selection! Wednesday 18 September!

A freaky and twisted black comedy, Heat is a loose remake of Sunset Boulevard (1950) set amidst the desperate low-rent fringes of Hollywood’s underbelly. Dallesandro stars as a coldly calculating wannabe actor and hustler who finds himself caught between an aging washed-up actress (the magnificent Sylvia Miles – who died this June aged 94) and her mentally unstable daughter (doomed Warhol Superstar Andrea Feldman). Trust me - you’ve never seen anything quite like Heat! If you enjoy the squalid early “gutter films” of John Waters, Heat is a must-see!

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, specializing in the kitsch, the cult and the queer! Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8 pm. Film starts at 8:30 pm. We can accommodate thirty people maximum on film nights. Remember: the film is free so you can buy more cocktails! (One drink minimum). Event page.

Reflections on ... Seven Sinners (1940)

From the Facebook events page:

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).

 

/ Above: Dietrich in Seven Sinners. Below: the cover of Grace Jones' 1978 single "Autumn Leaves"

/ 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.”

Further reading:

Read more about the Wild, Wild World of Lobotomy Room here.

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