I guess I wasn't sure what to expect ... all I knew about "Blue Angel" before I saw it tonight was that it had Marlene Dietrich in it and it was supposed to be a classic. That's it! I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the story that this movie told.
To summarize the plot briefly: A stern, straight-laced professor (movingly portrayed by Emil Jannings, an actor I am not familiar with) falls in love with and marries Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a nightclub/cabaret singer. He is briefly happy, but then his life takes a tragic nose-dive into disrespectability and self-loathing.
Although the professor is portrayed as a stern disciplinarian who is feared and hated by his students, we see he actually has a very soft, sweet side underneath his gruff exterior. A particularly well-done, subtle scene at the very beginning of the movie involved the professor at breakfast, whistling for his pet bird. Anticipating the bird's tweeting response, the professor is ready with a lump of sugar in his hand for his beloved bird. When the bird doesn't respond, he walks to the cage and pulls out a stiff, obviously dead bird. The professor just stands there, dumbfounded, while his housekeeper walks over to him, takes the bird corpse from his hand, and tosses it into the fire. The professor walks back to his table and sadly drops the lump of sugar into his coffee. A simple scene, but terribly moving, and terribly telling of the sweet, sensitive soul that lies within this man.
Upon marrying Lola, the professor is shunned by his colleagues and loses his college job. He is reduced to hawking sexy postcards of his wife at her nightclub shows and, even more pathetically, to performing as a clown in her nightclub act.
The end of the movie finds the professor returning to The Blue Angel, the nightclub in his hometown where he first met Lola. He adamantly refuses to go on stage as a clown in front of his former colleagues and students, but the manager and his wife coerce him into it. This scene brought me to tears as the professor stood on stage in clown make-up and costume, while the manager/magician poked fun at him and made him the butt of jokes -- calling him empty-headed, breaking eggs on his forehead, and forcing him to cluck like a chicken, all the while his wife is offstage making out with some handsome stranger who showed up at the show. So sad, and so tragic.
Emil Jannings did an amazingly wonderful job of portraying this multidimensional professor. The movie was in German with English subtitles, so for me it wasn't so much the words that he said, but his facial expressions that conveyed the emotions to me.
The pacing of this movie might feel slow to viewers of modern-day go-go-go movies, but I feel the pace was exactly right for exploring the characters and emotions of both the professor and Lola.
If you have the patience for subtitled, slowly-developing movies, I do highly recommend this one.
My rating: 8/10
To summarize the plot briefly: A stern, straight-laced professor (movingly portrayed by Emil Jannings, an actor I am not familiar with) falls in love with and marries Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a nightclub/cabaret singer. He is briefly happy, but then his life takes a tragic nose-dive into disrespectability and self-loathing.
Although the professor is portrayed as a stern disciplinarian who is feared and hated by his students, we see he actually has a very soft, sweet side underneath his gruff exterior. A particularly well-done, subtle scene at the very beginning of the movie involved the professor at breakfast, whistling for his pet bird. Anticipating the bird's tweeting response, the professor is ready with a lump of sugar in his hand for his beloved bird. When the bird doesn't respond, he walks to the cage and pulls out a stiff, obviously dead bird. The professor just stands there, dumbfounded, while his housekeeper walks over to him, takes the bird corpse from his hand, and tosses it into the fire. The professor walks back to his table and sadly drops the lump of sugar into his coffee. A simple scene, but terribly moving, and terribly telling of the sweet, sensitive soul that lies within this man.
Upon marrying Lola, the professor is shunned by his colleagues and loses his college job. He is reduced to hawking sexy postcards of his wife at her nightclub shows and, even more pathetically, to performing as a clown in her nightclub act.
The end of the movie finds the professor returning to The Blue Angel, the nightclub in his hometown where he first met Lola. He adamantly refuses to go on stage as a clown in front of his former colleagues and students, but the manager and his wife coerce him into it. This scene brought me to tears as the professor stood on stage in clown make-up and costume, while the manager/magician poked fun at him and made him the butt of jokes -- calling him empty-headed, breaking eggs on his forehead, and forcing him to cluck like a chicken, all the while his wife is offstage making out with some handsome stranger who showed up at the show. So sad, and so tragic.
Emil Jannings did an amazingly wonderful job of portraying this multidimensional professor. The movie was in German with English subtitles, so for me it wasn't so much the words that he said, but his facial expressions that conveyed the emotions to me.
The pacing of this movie might feel slow to viewers of modern-day go-go-go movies, but I feel the pace was exactly right for exploring the characters and emotions of both the professor and Lola.
If you have the patience for subtitled, slowly-developing movies, I do highly recommend this one.
My rating: 8/10