Blonde Venus (1932)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

best movie i've ever seen.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Von Sternberg must have been railing lines of coke when he came up with this soapy drivel. Look, you've got Marlene under your thrall. Put her in some movies where she can sing a bit, show her legs a bit. Can't be that hard. What you don't have to do is create a movie with more plot points than an entire season of Breaking Bad. I mean, one minute she's crawling through a Mississippi flop house, the next scene she's in a white tux singing French to the French. On the other hand it is beautifully photographed. Marlene, well, even when she's on the lam, staying in a rooming house with chickens, she's the hottest thing in movies. I mean, holy smokes, look at the way she brushes the pigeon off her shoulder. I had trouble deciding which male lead I wanted to punch in the face harder: the sap Faraday (Marshall) or the obnoxious Townsend (Grant). I can't see how Dietrich's character could have spent more than 10 minutes with either of them. Dietrich deserved better writers.

Oh dear, only a couple of years on from the brilliance of The Blue Angel, Sternberg is back in the US and all the innocence has gone. All that beauty and charm, the wondrous and sexy costumes, the natural movement and the free actions, the whole 'I can't help it', has gone. Dietrich is all spruced up and got to act all 'mummy'. Needless to say there would have been problems with the Code but if the lovely, seeming, naked bathing at the start were allowed, surely there was no need to pile on the sentimentality so crudely. I guess it is clear she sleeps with Grant for money at the start and has to be seen to 'pay for it' but then why oh why have her go back to playing 'mummy' at the end? Very sad. The film itself as melodrama is okay, I suppose, but it could and should have been much more.

Eccentric Director Josef Von Sternberg was a Visualist. His Style and Strength Came from Eye-Catching Camera-work and Lighting Combined with Stunning Sets and Costumes. His Best Work was with Marlene Dietrich, an Androgynous Actress with Unbridled Style and Presentation that was Always at Home in Bizarre Outfits and Seemed Born to Play Playful and Strong Women.In this Film She is Asked to Ping Pong Between Glamorous Stage Star and Loving Wife and Mother in a Heartbeat. She Pulls it Off but the Film does Labor Through the Complexity of that Situation. Her Scenes in the Confinement of Living Rooms and Her Child's Bedroom are Absolutely Stagnant and Droll, Especially Compared to the Others where Her Son is Not at Her Feet or Riding Piggy-Back.Cary Grant and Herbert Marshall do Their Best to Compete with Dietrich but can Barely Keep Up and are Mostly Reduced to just Playing Off the Allure. Dicky Moore as the Child Never Seems Phased at All the Hopping Around.The Movie Shines When Dietrich is On Stage, or Apart from Husband (Herbert Marshall), Grant (Her Lover), and Her Child. The Scenes with the Aforementioned are Necessary but Stiff, and Rarely Amount to Much More that Plotting. Worth a Watch for the Musical Numbers with Sizzling Titles Like "Hot Voodoo" and "You So and So" and to Ogle an Always Beautifully Different Marlene Dietrich in Her Prime. She Can Make a Gorilla Stirp-Tease Seem Sublime and Dress in Glittering White Top and Tails Like No One Else Could or Would Ever Dare to Try.

Josef Von Sternberg really went over the top with this outrageous pre-code melodrama starring Marlene Dietrich about a devoted wife and mother (first seen as a single German girl swimming naked in a lake in her homeland) who becomes a kept woman in order to financially help her husband be cured of uranium poison. She later runs off with her son when he comes back and discovers her affair with Cary Grant, becoming a prostitute and later basically homeless in order to keep their whereabouts secret. She is forced to give him up, and is basically destitute when her fortunes turn and she becomes the singing toast of Paris. Von Sternberg lets Dietrich utilize every single emotion possible, running all over the world in every style, yet barely shedding a tear over all of heartache.Herbert Marshall is the unfortunate husband and Dickie Moore the toted kid. Grant's suave lover keeps getting the shaft as it is obvious where Dietrich's heart really is. She is the whole show, even performing in a gorilla suit she strips out of to sing "Hot Voodoo". Movie stills make this appear to be better than it is, its deliberate camp so obvious that you may laugh at it, not with it.Then, there is the editing, taking Dietrich down, down, down, ending up in a woman's shelter (15 cents a night) where she drunkenly stumbles in, tells off a bunch of old hags and stumbles right back out, and where do we see her next with no explanation of how she got there? Glamorously dressed to kill in Paris, of course, as famous as Josephine Baker. Only Von Sternberg and Dietrich could get away with this, style without substance and glamour without grace. The result is as phony as the curly blonde wig with arrows in it that she wears after stripping out of her gorilla fur.