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Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the human face with carrying the plot or at least with taking up the narrative slack between intertitles, sound film with its additional resources for expounding the narrative opens a space for a face that is inscrutable. Sternberg’s films release the face for spectacle without thereby surrendering it to the gaze of the moviegoer: in its independence of the enclosed world of a narrative, Dietrich’s face is in a position to look out and back at the spectator. Contrasting Morocco with An American Tragedy (in which Dietrich does not appear), the Introduction argues that there is thus an image of autonomy that Sternberg and Dietrich construct and that contributes an (often overlooked) ethical dimension to their cinema of spectacle.

In this chapter, further complexity is added to the possibilities of cinematic narration that the book investigates. In traditional movies, viewers assume that the fictional world of the movie has a certain kind of objectivity or ontological subsistence. That is, they imagine about the fictional world that it exists independently of the cinematic apparatus that has, in fact, been deployed to construct it. However, some movies systematically acknowledge the constructed character of the fictional constituents that make up its narrative world. The narration of such films is, in one sense of the word, self-conscious or reflexive. There is an indefinite number of self-conscious strategies of film narration, and it is impossible to survey the extensive range effectively. For this reason, the author examines closely the ways that the director, Josef von Sternberg, exploited a mode of self-conscious narration in his last films with Marlene Dietrich, especially The Scarlet Empress (1934).

Movies projected women’s “proper place”: they did not come to anyone’s rescue; they were wives and mothers. Stuntwomen’s work decreased. Labor unions and guilds were formed—the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild. White men managed the studios and the guilds, controlled the work, ran the stunts, doubled for women, and, in blackface, doubled for minority actors. To enhance their stars’ profiles, studios demanded secrecy regarding stunt players who doubled them in action scenes. The Motion Picture Production Code delivered “morals” to movies. A few stuntwomen, such as Helen Thurston, succeeded in action roles (Destry Rides Again, 1939).

This chapter examines Blonde Venus (1932), Sternberg and Dietrich’s characteristically atypical take on the fallen woman film genre. Dietrich’s character is as much liberated as cast out from the family home when she resumes her earlier career in show business and is condemned by her husband for prostitution. Yet the downward trajectory of the fallen woman genre never really exerts its grip on Dietrich, for she remains a mythical being. The chapter interprets the film as a critique of the patriarchal institution of marriage in which standards are expected of the woman that are not expected of the man: Dietrich’s character’s husband shuns her for selling her body, even though he attempts to sell his own (to a medical researcher). The question of the film that the chapter explores is the reconcilability of fairy-tale romance and everyday marriage: Blonde Venus does not take for granted the transition from the one to the other.

The Scarlet Empress (1934) redeploys costume drama as farce and as a critique of despotism. The chapter analyzes how Marlene Dietrich does not so much play the role of Catherine the Great as replace the historical figure with her own Hollywood star persona. The power structures of despotism and the lawlessness of the sovereign are thereby parodied: promiscuity becomes the bond Dietrich’s Catherine has with her subjects and the studio-enhanced beauty of her appearance is substituted for the separateness of the royal person. With its spectacular yet rickety film sets, The Scarlet Empress is not an apologist’s chocolate-box rendition of European monarchical government but instead conveys its émigré makers’ sense of its pomposity. Rather than exposing what lies behind the spectacle of power, the film considers what becomes of power when it is nothing but spectacle and appearance.

In 1935, Marlene Dietrich becomes his last romance; she takes him under her wing, tries to shape him up and dry him out, and gets him a supporting character role in her upcoming film Desire, with Gary Cooper. But he is fired after suffering a heart attack in December 1935, and is confined to his home with a nurse until his death (from either a heart attack or ruptured ulcers) in January 1936.

This chapter discusses Wong's trans-Atlantic Career over seven years. It details her stardom in Shanghai Express with Dietrich and Daughter of the Dragon with Warner Oland and Sessue Hayakawa. It uncovers Wong's Vaudeville routine around Europe based upon Noel Coward song, Half-Caste Woman. Wong's relationship with family and mother's death is analysed. It also evaluates the controversial casting of German actress Luis Rainer in lead female role in film adaptation of Pearl Buck novel, The Good Earth, bypassing Wong. Wong responded to racial casting by announcing trip to China.

This chapter discusses Anna May Wong's huge popularity in 1920s and 1930s Europe. She had leading roles in silent films: Song, Piccadilly, Hai-Tang and others. It discusses how citizens of London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere embraced Anna May Wong as representing Chinese womanhood and beauty. It also details her lively personal life in Europe including dalliance with Marlene Dietrich. At that time, there is limited Chinese presence in European cities.

With dialogue in early talkies complicating international product exchange, the film industry cherished the notion of music as a ‘universal language’. But this music required degrees of translation, both in the literal textual sense and in the matter of adapting ‘foreign’ customs, cultural and social, and musical styles. This chapter explores the issues principally through case studies of five key singing stars of early American and European sound films: Al Jolson, Maurice Chevalier, Carlos Gardel, Marlene Dietrich, and Richard Tauber. German producer Erich Pommer’s goal of combining universal appeal and nationalistic attractions, most evident in the multilingual Congress Dances, is also explored. After the mid-1930s, film music’s universal language significantly changed in response to technical developments, Hollywood’s solidified world power, and its development of a pervasive orchestral soundtrack style partly shaped by exiled European composers. European elements and local accents remained, but were now subsumed in a global American product.

This chapter relies on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the last film Sternberg and Dietrich made together, to develop an account of Sternberg’s antagonistic relation to the off-screen. More than most directors, he is a maker of self-sufficient images: this informs his understanding of narrative. In the face of the positive treatment of the off-screen in film studies over recent decades, the chapter defends Sternberg against the criticisms leveled at cinemas of mere spectacle. The carnival atmosphere and unreliable narrator of The Devil Is a Woman are prompts for investigating and contesting the fictional world by which a viewer frames the individual shots of a film. The eccentric architectural space of The Blue Angel (1930) is treated as a reason for attributing to Sternberg a longer-term interest in disentangling cinema from the viewer’s cognitive practice of elaborating, with the help of the off-screen, a world around the shots of which a film is composed.

The international film trade changed dramatically with the generalisation of sound films. It became more difficult for Hollywood to export English-speaking films than during the silent era. One solution was multiple-language films, which helped French stars to become even more popular in France. The Hollywood studios quickly opted for dubbing as the best solution. The first two Paramount films dubbed into French were Derelict (as Désemparé) and Morocco (as Cœurs brûlés) in 1931. How were these dubbed versions received by critics and the trade press in France? Popular film magazines did not object to dubbed versions so much, while cinephile magazines considered they were rushed jobs. This chapter studies the evolution of the reception of dubbed films in France in 1931–3, using evidence from the trade and popular press. It traces the beginning of the opposition between original-language versions for upmarket movie theatres, and dubbed versions aimed at popular neighbourhoods.

Mamoulian's second film, the gangster picture City Streets (1932), was based on a screenplay by Dashiell Hammett with Gary Cooper co-starring with Sylvia Sidney. From there, Mamoulian moved on to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), in which leading man Frederic March was transformed by groundbreaking special effects from the respectable Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde, a monstrous sexual predator. Restlessly exploring genres, he next made Love Me Tonight (1932), an innovative musical pairing the songs of Richard Rodgers with stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette McDonald, and a sophisticated tragic-comedy with Marlene Dietrich, The Song of Songs (1933).

The chapter focuses on Shanghai Express (1932) and analyzes its handling of the themes of prostitution, faith, and appearance. Sternberg’s film turns on the demand of Shanghai Lily (Dietrich) to be trusted without supporting evidence and shifts the object of faith from that which lies behind appearances to appearance itself. A redefinition of spectacle follows from this: it is not a mere given of the senses but involves a comportment and agency on the spectator’s part. Playing with the appearance of prostitution, the film toys with the moral guidelines of the Production Code. The chapter argues that it thereby not only sees how far it can go, but it also makes a philosophical question out of appearance itself, examining how the trust in love differs from knowledge. The make-believe and Orientalism of its reconstructed China are of a piece with its problematization of the difference between appearance and reality.

Stage Fright was the first picture Hitchcock produced under his new contract with Warner Bros. Filmed in England, it featured lyrics by Cole Porter, Marlene Dietrich as a femme fatale, and a controversial flashback seeded with misinformation. The primary concern of the censors was Dietrich’s rendition of Porter’s song ‘The Laziest Gal in Town.’ The Breen office found both the song and the performance so offensive that it had the chutzpah to edit the lyrics of one of the most accomplished songwriters of the day. The censors objected to Porter’s use of the Lord’s name (as in ‘Lord knows’), as well as Dietrich’s cleavage and gyrations. Both Porter and Hitchcock accommodated the censors, changing ‘Lord knows’ to ‘you know,’ dressing Dietrich from head to toe in a cleavage-hiding white gown, and cutting away from the star’s most suggestive movements.

The conclusion examines Sternberg’s films without Dietrich and gives a clearer idea of both what he brought to their collaboration and what Dietrich alone helped him realize. An ethics of the moving image is expounded in relation to fictional characters, direct audience address (in The Shanghai Gesture), and the contribution of the profilmic to cinematic fictions. Levinas’s iconoclasm is argued not to take into account the specificity of the human image in fictional cinema, as these images are the sum of the person they depict and hence do not exhibit the reductiveness for which Levinas censures images. Cinematic images of fictional characters, because they involve the profilmic in the actors’ physical distance and independence from the camera, are special cases of looking, different from both the look of the painter whose raw materials are not themselves figurative and the documentary filmmaker. Dietrich’s autonomy is in the image rather than from it.

Pozzi analyzes Fernanda Pivano’s definitive translations of The Old Man and the Sea and Across the River and into the Trees and identifies the many inconsistencies and errors. He argues convincingly for the need for a new, corrected translation. Pozzi goes on to interpret various symbols in Across the River and into the Trees, particularly the cryptic references in the scandalous sex scene in the gondola. Pozzi argues that Hemingway was making reference to Marlene Dietrich in that notorious chapter thirteen.

In 1932, Cary Grant had his first major role in a high profile film, working with the famed star-director team Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932). Chapter 7 explores the making of this classic film, and Cary Grant’s discomfort working alongside these two very temperamental personalities. It considers the crucial element that von Sternberg brought to Cary Grant’s image: his razor sharp hair parting. It also offers accounts of the making of Hot Saturday (1932) and Madame Butterfly (1932), and, in the process, the slow but steady improvement in Grant’s acting and on-screen presence.

Still in Ingrid Bergman’s thrall, Hitchcock made one of his most romantic pictures for her, Notorious (1946), in which she and Cary Grant work out many of the contrasts and tensions in their screen personas. Hitchcock was stymied by casting decisions not his own on The Paradine Case (1947), which was the last film he made for producer David O. Selznick, and then he foundered on miscasting again when James Stewart was given the central role of a queer academic in Rope (1948), his first color picture. Hitchcock made Under Capricorn (1949) as a valentine to Ingrid Bergman, allowing her to dominate an eight minute and forty-seven second take where her character confesses to a crime, a rare instance of acting for its own sake in Hitchcock’s work. Though Marlene Dietrich was superficially in the mode of the liberated women that Hitchcock enjoyed like Carole Lombard and Tallulah Bankhead, the Master was mainly bemused by Dietrich’s demands for special lighting in Stage Fright (1950), and so he lets her have her way as he lets Charles Laughton dominate Jamaica Inn.