Emil Jannings was top billed in The Blue Angel, yet the 1930 film became Marlene Dietrich’s launch pad to stardom. The Blue Angel has been issued in a two-disc Blu-ray set, featuring the slightly different German and English language versions.
The production was a constellation of great talent. The Austrian Jewish Hollywood immigrant Joseph von Sternberg returned to Europe to direct the picture. Jammings was one of the great actors of German silent cinema; Dietrich was better known as a stage performer and brought her chorus girl experience to the production. The screenplay was adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat (1905). His scathing critique of German society was mollified by the conservative management of the film’s studio, Ufa. The unintended consequence was a more compelling drama—a social problem story turned into a tale of personal degradation.
Jannings plays an old professor, a pompous figure from the old order, an uninspiring pedant, a petty tyrant sad in his lonely isolation. The professor’s classroom bluster conceals a host of insecurities and inhibitions. Outraged by his students’ fascination with sexy cabaret singer Lola Lola (Dietrich), he ventures down dark streets to the Blue Angel, a waterfront bar where she performs in an elaborate if tacky stage show—a visual overload of images and motion.
Driven by moral indignation and sexual attraction, he confronts Lola and succumbs to her charms. The professor’s tragedy is that, in a society of too much rectitude and too little heart, his affair with the singer results in his dismissal from school. In an emotive traveling shot, the camera pulls away into the classroom as the old man cleans out his meager desk, revealing row after empty row of seats. He may not have been a great teacher, but it was all he ever had.
Lola is a husky voiced performer in skimpy, fetish stage costumes, wriggling and shaking her legs in ways that were profoundly provocative in 1930 (a jaded 21st century audience has seen this Beyonce act so many times that it has become a meaningless gesture). With a knowing smile, an air of ennui and a slightly bored droop of her eyes, Lola captivates the bungling, repressed professor. They marry (her attraction to him is left unexplained). He becomes entirely dependent on her and her mountebank manager, reduced to peddling racy postcards of his wife and enduring greater humiliations. The professor is forced to perform as a clown at the Blue Angel to the savage jeers of his former students.
At the time of its release, the Nazi press condemned The Blue Angel as a Jewish “villification of the German character and German educational values.” Jewish or not, they had a point: the screenplay is certainly a slap at discipline-without-understanding pedagogy. As for “the German character,” the film has been interpreted as satirizing the cruelty that fed Nazism, yet its analogues can be found in any human society where emotional sadism walks hand in hand with its masochistic flipside.
