The Blue Angel-Then and Now

It is twenty-eight years since I saw Der Blaue Engel and I am always a little surprised how well I remember it. Then at the age of twenty I was supposed to be spending a year at the University of Grenoble, but sometimes I would sneak off on the overnight train to Paris to see my friend Hans Stuck. Hans, who came from Berlin, was studying at the Sorbonne. I used to stay at his hotel, an ammoniacal fleabag near the Luxembourg Gardens called the Hotel D’Athènes. Until I met him the summer before, I had never heard of Marlene Dietrich. Hans spoke of her with awe. Back in Berlin he used to save up for months so that he could go to the café where she appeared and listen to those songs of hers that were like a mating call-Johnny,” “Peter,” “Allein in Einer Grossen Stadt.” For my education he took me that week-end, Dutch treat, to a luxury cinema off the Champs Elysées where L’Ange Bleu was playing in German with French subtitles. I believe there was a current English version too but I never saw it.

That original Blue Angel adapted by Carl Zuckmayer from Der Professor Unrat, Heinrich Mann’s study of obsessive degradation, was an effective simplification of the book that moved to its conclusion with the finality of a Greek tragedy played in a meat-packing plant. Yet, ham that the late Emil Jannings was in the role of the doomed professor, he was a ham of gigantic stature. Even to the way he blew his nose. And of course there was the nonpareil temptress, Marlene Dietrich, plump, raucous, as yet unstreamlined. With spangled. topper aslant her head, leaning back to display her frilly cache-sexe and black garters, dimpled and pouting as she sang “Falling in Love Again,” she was the eternally desirable trollop. Even the background music of Friedrich Hollaender’s Jazzharmonic Orchestra had a haunting decadence of its own. German jazz of the late twenties was unique.

FR

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Francis Russell

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It is twenty-eight years since I saw Der Blaue Engel and I am always a little surprised how well I remember it. Then at the age of twenty I was supposed to be spending a year at the University of Grenoble, but sometimes I would sneak off on the overnight train to Paris to see my friend Hans Stuck. Hans, who came from Berlin, was studying at the Sorbonne. I used to stay at his hotel, an ammoniacal fleabag near the Luxembourg Gardens called the Hotel D’Athènes. Until I met him the summer before, I had never heard of Marlene Dietrich. Hans spoke of her with awe. Back in Berlin he used to save up for months so that he could go to the café where she appeared and listen to those songs of hers that were like a mating call-Johnny,” “Peter,” “Allein in Einer Grossen Stadt.” For my education he took me that week-end, Dutch treat, to a luxury cinema off the Champs Elysées where L’Ange Bleu was playing in German with French subtitles. I believe there was a current English version too but I never saw it.

That original Blue Angel adapted by Carl Zuckmayer from Der Professor Unrat, Heinrich Mann’s study of obsessive degradation, was an effective simplification of the book that moved to its conclusion with the finality of a Greek tragedy played in a meat-packing plant. Yet, ham that the late Emil Jannings was in the role of the doomed professor, he was a ham of gigantic stature. Even to the way he blew his nose. And of course there was the nonpareil temptress, Marlene Dietrich, plump, raucous, as yet unstreamlined. With spangled. topper aslant her head, leaning back to display her frilly cache-sexe and black garters, dimpled and pouting as she sang “Falling in Love Again,” she was the eternally desirable trollop. Even the background music of Friedrich Hollaender’s Jazzharmonic Orchestra had a haunting decadence of its own. German jazz of the late twenties was unique.