Angel (1937)

The Worst Film Ever

Pretty Good

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I've seen all of Lubitsch's films and I rate Angel as his worst. The faults are in a bland repetitive script and the strangely ambiguous, wooden performance of Marlene Dietrich. There are times she appears more masculine than her costars Melvyn Douglas and Herbert Marshall.The sexual playfulness and subtle daring - so delightfully evident in Lubitsch's other films - here often fall flat. Made a few years before Angel, one of Ernst Lubitsch's best films, also based on a play (Noël Coward's Design for Living), has a woman at the center of a love triangle. The shock, particularly for a 30s Hollywood movie, is that the three live together in a bohemian Paris flat. In his directing, as well as the performances of Frederic March and Gary Cooper, there is never a hint of homo-eroticism. Ironically in Angel the best scene, a climactic one between Douglas and Marshall, is full of sexual energy.Subtle sophistication was always an Ernst Lubitsch trademark. There is little evidence of sparkling wit and originality in Angel.

Looking at the criticisms so far voiced about Angel, the majority seems to feel it's a neglected Lubitsch masterpiece. Yet this was the film that caused Paramount and Marlene Dietrich to come to a parting of the ways. Marlene would not be back on the screen until she signed a new contract with Universal and made a comeback of sorts in something that would have been unthinkable for her in 1937. That film was a western, but the western was Destry Rides Again.Ernest Lubitsch and Marlene Dietrich hit a double dry spell in Angel. The sum and substance of it is that up and coming young British diplomat Melvyn Douglas meets a mysterious and alluring woman at Laura Hope Crews's palace in Paris who he falls hopelessly for. But the alluring as ever Marlene is merely the very bored wife of a senior diplomat who is a member of the nobility, Herbert Marshall. It also turns out that Douglas and Marshall are old army buddies.Somehow Lubitsch could not work his usual magic with Marlene. Her scenes with the two men seem to have no spark to them. In fact the ending is a bit of a shock, personally I think she made the wrong choice.Where Lubitsch did well in Angel was with the supporting players. Laura Hope Crews is quite a bit different as the worldly countess than as that pillar of southern society Aunt Pittypat Hamilton from Gone With The Wind. Some of the back and forth commentary between Marshall's butler Ernest Cossart and his valet Edward Everett Horton are also quite droll. What snobs those servants can be, much worse than the people who employ them.Sad to say Angel is a film with a lot of gloss, but no real substance behind it.

Wonderful Lubitsch comedy about a distracted husband, a neglected wife and an ardent suitor that has all the magic, humor, romance of the directors previous work. Dazzling camera work by Charles Lang make Deitrich look positively luminous. All the cast are perfect. The audience I saw this with at the LACMA Museum screening were utterly entranced by this neglected masterwork. Kudos to UCLA for restoring this treasure to its original splendor and to LACMA programer Ian Birnie for giving us the opportunity to see this little gem in all its glory. A 10 out of 10.........

Given the talent involved -- Dietrich at the height of her allure, Melvyn Douglas (who proved such a wonderful foil to Garbo just two years later in "Ninotchka"), support from such able troupers as Edward Everett Horton and Laura Hope Crews, and above all the famed "touch" of Lubitsch -- "Angel" should be a sparkling romp, a melancholy romance of renunuciation, a worldly social comedy, or better yet, all three.Instead it's a mostly tiresome slog through familiar territory, as if all involved were inspired not by Dietrich or Lubitsch but by the stolid Herbert Marshall as Marlene's aristo-Brit husband.While several recent writers on both Dietrich and Lubitsch have tried to tout this as an undeservingly overlooked film, it's really most worth watching for Crew's pre-Pittypat turn as a Russian emigre-turned-nightclub-hostess, and her few brief scenes can hardly save the picture.Dietrich fans are better off hunting up stills -- she does look terrific in the wardrobe of English Gentlewoman tweeds and furs, and her legendary collection of emeralds were rarely shown to better advantage.