Before she became anything and after she had been everything, Marlene Dietrich was a cabaret singer.
That’s why, before we go any further, we should take a minute and listen to one of her biggest hits, Falling in Love Again, from her first American movie, The Blue Angel (1930).
There’s that unforgettable voice, what one critic called “a whisky tenor.” It is a rich, deep, melancholy female voice. She is never in any hurry to sing a song or speed through the lyrics, holding each note a bit past the legal limit, seducing you as you listen.
Dietrich was born into a prosperous family in Berlin in 1901, but her childhood was marked by tragedy. Her father died in 1907 when she was just five. Her mother remarried seven years later to a military officer, who had been best friends with her father. She had known him all her life. Two years later, her stepfather died of wounds sustained during World War I. At just 14, she had already lost her father and beloved stepfather.
During the years following World War I, Berlin was not only the third-largest metropolitan area in the world, it was arguably the most important city in the world. The city was abuzz with artists, writers, intellectuals, singers, filmmakers, scientists and more. A musical child, Dietrich was drawn to the vibrant and often decadent nightlife of the cabarets in Berlin. She was a chorus girl and singer during her late teens and later became a well-established figure in the cabaret scene throughout the 1920s. More than a bit notorious, Dietrich was renowned for not wearing underwear during her performances—and not being shy about that in the least. It was, admittedly, part of her appeal.
Dietrich performed in a number of stage plays in Berlin throughout the 1920s while also establishing herself as a recognizable figure in the German silent film industry. By this point, Dietrich had married Rudolph Sieber and had a daughter with him. They formally separated after five years of marriage but never divorced, remaining friends until his death in 1976. Her big break came in 1930 when she landed the role of Lola Lola, the cabaret singer who causes the downfall of a respectable teacher in Josef von Sternberg’s film The Blue Angel (1930).
Dietrich and von Sternberg came to Hollywood in 1930 after Paramount Studios distributed his English language version of The Blue Angel. The movie was a huge hit for Paramount, and Dietrich and von Sternberg moved to Los Angeles (with her daughter in tow) and made six more movies together. Dietrich and von Sternberg were lovers and lived together, but the tensions of her relentless infidelities with her co-stars eventually brought that relationship to an end.
Von Sternberg’s contribution to her career is immeasurable. Dietrich was never a great actress. She was certainly experienced, but never someone who brought a lot to a role. Von Sternberg understood the keys to Dietrich as an actress: how she was lit and how she was filmed. He created some of the most iconic images of Hollywood glamour with her. For instance, Dietrich was obsessed with the shadow under her nose—what she called her “butterfly”—and wanted it in every shot. She was clearly aware of her advantages and shortcomings as an actress. And her greatest strength was playing one character: Marlene Dietrich.
Dietrich was among the highest-paid actresses in the world during the 1930s, but her career started to stall towards the end of the decade. She continued to travel to Europe and became deeply disturbed with the rise of Adolf Hilter in her homeland.
In 1937, she started a foundation with her old pal from Berlin, screenwriter and director Billy Wilder, to help Jews and dissidents flee Germany and get established in the U.S. She pledged her entire salary of $450,000 from Knight Without Armour (1937) to provide additional funding for this foundation. Dietrich also renounced her German citizenship and became an American during these years. When the war started, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the sale of war bonds and did numerous tours worldwide, visiting U.S. soldiers for the USO. You might even say Dietrich was a bit too enthusiastic. She was known for going into the crowd of soldiers, and if one caught her eye, she would spend the night with him. Her logic: tomorrow, he will go into battle and may very well die, so why not give him an evening with Marlene Dietrich on what might be his last night on earth.
Dietrich’s film output slowed considerably after the war, but she appeared in several outstanding films, including Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil (1958) and Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg (1961).
In the early 1950s, she returned to her original career and became a cabaret singer, this time in Las Vegas. She was one of the first big stars to perform in Las Vegas and her residencies at the Sahara were enormous hits. She continued this for many years and the act was always the same. She’d start by performing in a slinky gown with an enormous white swandown coat. For the second act, she would come out in a black tuxedo and top hat, which allowed her to perform songs usually associated with male singers, such as I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.
Dietrich hired Burt Bacharach as her arranger, and together they reshaped her act into a one-woman show. In 1960, she finally returned to Berlin to perform. She was greeted by protests, a couple of bomb threats, and a lot of negative press. During her performance at Berlin’s historic Titania-Palast Theatre, Dietrich was heckled by several audience members. By the end, she had won over the crowd and received 18 curtain calls. Dietrich later performed in Israel and sang Pete Seeger’s antiwar song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? in German, breaking the taboo against speaking German in public in that nation. She later became the first woman—and the first German—to receive the Israeli Medallion of Valor for her work during World War II.
Dietrich’s health deteriorated in the 1960s. She suffered from alcoholism and fought off cervical cancer in 1965. She eventually recovered and made a few more films, finally retreating to her apartment in Paris in 1980. Dietrich lived there for the final 13 years of her life, dying from kidney failure in 1993 at the age of 92. She received a Catholic funeral in her church in Paris; her coffin draped with the French flag and bearing medals from the U.S., France, and Israel. Dietrich’s body was then taken to Berlin and buried near her parents in her old hometown, in a coffin covered with an American flag.
Her final film appearance was a brief one in Just a Gigolo (1979). She sings a heartbreaking rendition of the title song to David Bowie.
The song contains these lyrics, and when you hear them you can’t help but think of her spectacular, chaotic, exuberant, passionate, complicated, and tragic life.
But there will come a day when youth will pass away
What will they say about me?
When the end comes, I know
They’ll say I was just a gigolo
Life goes on without me
Here are my favorite Marlene Dietrich movies you can rent from DVD Netflix.
Although this collaboration with von Sternberg was the first movie Dietrich made for an American audience, it was not her first movie released in the U.S. The film was originally made in both German and English. Von Sternberg’s casting focused on finding bilingual actors so he could shoot both versions at the same time. He knew Dietrich from her cabaret work and silent films. When he called to ask her to take the lead role of Lola Lola, she was stunned—it was a big step up in her career.
The story is based on Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Rubbish. The book and film tell the tale of the seduction, corruption, and ruin of a respectable professor by a notorious cabaret singer, Lola Lola. The professor is played by Emil Jannings, the great German actor of early Hollywood. He won the first Best Actor Oscar for his roles in The Last Command (1928) and The Way of All Flesh (1927). Dietrich sings all the songs in this film, most notably Falling In Love Again. She absolutely revels in her role here as the scandalous temptress. This is one of those movies you really should see to have a complete education in film.
Another collaboration with von Sternberg, this is the film that introduced Dietrich to American audiences. And what an introduction it was. She again plays a cabaret singer, but her costumes and swagger steal the movie. Dietrich routinely appears in a black tuxedo, white shirt, bowtie, and a top hat—a favorite outfit during her Las Vegas shows later in her life. It was a bit scandalous for a woman to wear pants in films in those days. A woman didn’t wear pants again in American movies until eight years later when Katharine Hepburn wore pants to a formal event at a country club in Frank Capra’s Bringing Up Baby (1938).
This film is set in Morocco during World War I, and Dietrich plays Amy Jolly, the famous cabaret singer in a local nightclub. She gets pursued by an American member of the French Foreign Legion, Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). They are immediately attracted to each other and a melodramatic love affair ensues, complete with a love triangle featuring Adolphe Menjou.
This performance earned Dietrich an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but her singing is what really steals the movie. The other scandalous element to this film is the big old smooch Dietrich plants on a woman’s lips in the nightclub. This was not a simple peck on the cheek—she leans right into the woman who is sitting at a table and kisses her right on the lips. The screenplay is by Jules Fuhrman, a favorite of both von Sternberg and later Howard Hawks. He was later nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
Marlene Dietrich wasn’t the kind of actress who portrayed housewives; it wasn’t really in her wheelhouse. Here, she plays a war widow in Vienna during World War I who is working as a prostitute to support herself. One night, she picks up a man who she thinks is just another john, but he’s actually with the Austrian secret service and wants to hire her as a spy. He’s seen her around on the streets of Vienna and is impressed with her gutsiness. The Austrian requires a beautiful woman to work as a spy on a dangerous mission, and thus she becomes Agent X-27. Another of Dietrich’s collaborations with von Sternberg, this is a surprisingly gritty film.
Spoiler alert: things don’t work out so well for her as a spy. Facing execution by firing squad, she demands to be dressed as a streetwalker and not wear a blindfold. This is an excellent drama, and I think it’s Dietrich’s finest performance. The film critic Andrew Sarris wrote of this film: “If Dietrich lives for love in The Blue Angel, and sacrifices for love in Morocco, she dies for love in Dishonored.” The outstanding black and white cinematography is by Lee Garmes, who also worked with Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Max Ophuls, King Vidor, and Nicholas Ray.
This was the fourth collaboration between Dietrich and von Sternberg. Guess what? She’s another scarlet woman! Who saw that coming? Anyway, this is a marvelous romantic thriller... with one pretty terrible casting decision: Swedish immigrant Warner Oland is cast as a Chinese character. He went on to play Charlie Chan in a series of films, which represents the awful Hollywood tendency of casting white actors in roles for people of color. If you can get past this terrible decision, it’s a crackup of a movie.
A British officer (Clive Brook) is boarding a train from Beijing to Shanghai, and his friends tell him the notorious Shanghai Lily (Dietrich) also is on the train. He doesn’t recognize the name at first, but quickly realizes she’s a former lover. Lily is what they called a “coaster” in China during that period, a woman who lived by her wits and traveled up and down the China coast. Basically, Lily is a courtesan. China is experiencing a civil war and the train trip is filled with danger, intrigue, and spectacular costumes. It has often been described as “Grand Hotel (1932) on wheels.” The best word to describe this movie? Sumptuous.
Marlene Dietrich in a Western? What? After Shanghai Express, Dietrich made three more movies with von Sternberg, but then the partnership came to an end. Her tendency to have love affairs with her leading man in every movie—and other infidelities—destroyed the relationship with von Sternberg, which ended in 1935. Dietrich was among the world’s highest-paid actresses at that point in her career, but her films were not sizzling at the box office. Her political activism and work with Jewish refugees in Europe were also distracting. She needed a jumpstart to her career and found it in this amusing western, which co-starred James Stewart.
Dietrich plays Frenchy, a saloon singer, and Stewart is Tom Destry, the new sheriff in town. He’s arrived to battle corruption, and… wait a minute. This sounds an awful lot like Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974), right? Brooks’ film is actually an homage to this movie. No doubt you’ve seen Blazing Saddles, but you really should see this one. Remember Madeline Kahn’s saloon singing character Lili von Shtupp (complete with a phony German accent) and her show-stopping song I’m Tired? Well, check out Dietrich’s number Whatever the Boys in the Back Are Drinking, I’ll Have It Too. This movie is just a delight.
After World War II, Dietrich’s career went into a long, slow, and gentle decline. In 1953, she decided to go back to her first profession: cabaret singer. She took up a residency at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, performing nightly for the then-astonishing sum of $30,000 a week. She continued her cabaret work well into the 1970s.
In 1957, her old friend Billy Wilder cast her in this searing courtroom drama set in the Old Bailey in London. The film is based on an Agatha Christie short story, where Dietrich plays Christine, the German wife of a man accused of murder. This film has a lot of twists and turns, so there will be no spoilers in this synopsis. The film also stars Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, and Elsa Lanchester. If you enjoyed the 2019 murder mystery Knives Out, you would really enjoy this one.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.