Filmikaze!

By: Josef von Sternberg (director), Jules Furthman, SK Lauren (writers)

Starring: Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, Cary Grant

Helen Faraday is a nightclub singer turned housewife, but when her husband needs money to have a life-saving operation, she decides to resume her career as a singer to raise money. She undergoes a chain of events that separate her from her husband and force her to make a choice between her lucrative singing career and her role as a wife and mother.

As much as it pains me to admit, I’ve got to say that I’m really not a Dietrich fan. There’s always been something that’s put me off about her even though she was undoubtedly talented, so I wasn’t especially enthused to have to watch Blonde Venus this week for class. Taking all that into account, I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing that the movie was so insulting, although I do know that I wished Dietrich hadn’t been singing so much in it, as her singing voice drives me crazy.

Oddly, this film annoyed me much more than Baby Face, which centered on the idea of the main character sleeping around for favors. At least in Baby Face, it was clearly and decisively the heroine’s choice, whereas Blonde Venus sees Dietrich whoring herself out to pay for her husband’s expensive medical treatments, and then turned out by said (now cured) husband when he discovers what she’s done. It was just so offensive to me as a woman on so many levels, I can’t even forgive it as a product of its time. The protagonist has no autonomy even when it comes to her child, and can choose to be either the warm, saintly mother figure or the cold-hearted bitch, with no grey area in between.

I’m not even going to get started on the degrading portrayals of the people of color in supporting roles. As you can imagine, it’s par for the course for Thirties cinema.

Blonde Venus is pretty to look at and I understand why I had to watch it, but I certainly won’t be doing it again.