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The Scarlet Empress

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Year: 1934
Run-time: 1 hr 44 min

- This at first seemed like one of the lesser films from von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, but on reflection I like it a lot.  The set design is phenomenal - the insane chairs with grotesques hovering above the backs, the skeleton at the dinner table.  It's a fever dream, and the fact that it's shot in enough darkness to make the cameras of the time period strain to pick up these backgrounds makes it even more astonishing.

- This is from an era of period pieces when actors could just get away with American accents - I'm reminded of the excellent Youtube series on accents.  Surprisingly, I'm not entirely opposed to the old method - it allows the actors to be more naturally expressive.  It just sends a different directorial message, putting the emphasis more on commonalities between that time and place and now.  (It also inevitably comes off as insensitive to culture - I'm not saying we should go back to that mode.  There are necessary trade-offs to being inclusive, and they're worth it.)

- This is a landmark in that it's probably the last American film on our list that could be said to be "pre-Code" (or at least "Code-oblivious").  I was pretty shocked by the opening scene with its tortured nudes - to the point where I believed they must be wearing clothing - and the film's sense of eroticism is extraordinary.  Dietrich herself is sort of an icon of the pre-Code era, and while I think that's pretty reductive and ignorant of her extraordinary talent, I probably will be wistful of these early Dietrich films and what they represent.


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