The Blue Angel

The Blue Angel

Der Blaue engel

Professor Immanuel Rath is a strict and humorless schoolmaster who is shocked when he discovers the boys in his class have been spending their time at a sleazy cabaret called The Blue Angel, where an entertainer named Lola keeps the men in thrall and sells suggestive postcards of herself. Rath goes to the club in hopes of catching his students and giving them a severe dressing-down, but he instead finds himself entranced by the carefree atmosphere of the club, and is struck by Lola's earthy, sensual beauty. Rath finds himself strongly attracted to Lola, and she later entertains him in her dressing room. When word of Rath's infatuation with Lola spreads to his students, he is taunted mercilessly, and eventually Rath is dismissed from the school. While Lola agrees to marry Rath, she shows little affection for him and delights in humiliating him, making him her servant and forcing him to play a clown in her stage show.

About director:

Josef von Sternberg ((1894 – 1969) born in Vienna, Austria) was an Austrian-American film director. He is particularly noted for his collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich. He had dropped out of high school in his first year, unable to deal with English and determined to learn on his own. In 1941 he made the splendid "Shanghai Gesture" lying on a couch. He studied and collected modern and primitive art, painted and sculpted (including his own tomb stone), designed two homes he had built for himself, travelled, read and taught. Films were not his obsession, he concluded. He was unable to prevent Howard Hughes from re-editing his next two films, and having them re-shot by other directors. In 1959 he began teaching at UCLA and in 1965 published a marvelous autobiography "Fun in a Chinese Laundry".

Selected filmography: “The Docks of New York” (1928), “The Blue Angel” (1930), “Morocco” (1930), “Shanghai Express” (1932), “Blonde Venus” (1932), “The Scarlet Empress” (1934), “The Devil Is a Woman” (1935).

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