The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (115 page)

She has also done a lot of television: in the Grace Kelly part in
Dial M for Murder
(81, Boris Sagal);
One Shoe Makes It Murder
(82, William Hale);
Jealousy
(83, Jeffrey Bloom);
A Touch of Scandal
(84, Ivan Nagy);
Stillwatch
(87, Rod Holcomb);
Police Story: The Freeway Killings
(87, William A. Graham);
Once Upon a Texas Train
(88, Kennedy);
Prime Target
(89, Robert Collins);
Fire and Rain
(89, Jerry Jameson); in
Wild Palms
(93, Phil Joannu and Kathryn Bigelow); and
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
(94, Gus Van Sant).

In recent years, she has been seen in
Sabrina
(95, Sydney Pollack);
The Maddening
(96, Danny Huston);
Remembrance
(96, Bethany Rooney);
The Sun, the Moon and the Stars
(96, Geraldine Creed);
The Don’s Analyst
(97, David Jablin);
Deep Family Search
(97, Arthur Allan Seidelman);
Sealed with a Kiss
(99, Ron Lagomarsino);
The Last Producer
(00, Burt Reynolds);
Duets
(00, Bruce Paltrow);
Pay It Forward
(00, Mimi Leder);
Big Bad Love
(01, Arliss Howard);
Elvis Has Left the Building
(04, Joel Zwick).

Thorold Dickinson
(1903–84), b. Bristol, England
1937:
The High Command
. 1938:
Spanish ABC
(d). 1939:
The Arsenal Stadium Mystery
. 1940:
Gaslight
. 1942:
The Prime Minister; Next of Kin
. 1946:
Men of Two Worlds
(d). 1948:
The Queen of Spades
. 1952:
Secret People
. 1954:
Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer
(d).

Dickinson was a refugee from moviemaking. In 1956 he was appointed chief of film services for the UN Department of Public Information, after which he became head of London University film studies at the Slade School. It was a loss, hardly made up for by the results of his teaching or by the publication of
A Discovery of Cinema
in 1971. As more young people study film with the old-fashioned zeal that once marked potential poets, do they notice that they are often taught by older men who gave up the hope of making films?

Dickinson had begun as assistant on
Mr. Preedy and the Countess
(22, George Pearson). He wrote
The Little People
(36, Pearson), edited
Perfect Understanding
(33, Cyril Gardner), and was production manager on
Midshipman Easy
(35, Carol Reed). That rather spasmodic involvement was borne out by his work as director:
High Command
was a conventional and stagy thriller, while
Spanish ABC
was a Civil War documentary. But
Gaslight
has a great reputation for stylish melodrama, and
The Queen of Spades
is both very frightening and a brilliant evocation of Pushkin and Eisensteinian pictorialism. Anton Walbrook brings immense distinction to both.

Wilhelm/William Dieterle
(1893–1972), b. Ludwigshafen, Germany
1923:
Menschen am Wege
. 1927:
Der Mann, der Nicht Lieben Darf
. 1928:
Geshlecht in Fesseln
. 1929:
Die Heilige und ihr Nahrr; Frühlingsrauschen; Ich Lebe für Dich; Konig von Bayern; Das Schweigen im Walde; Eine Stunde Glueche
. 1930:
Der Tanz Geht Weiter; Die Maske Fallt
. 1931:
The Last Flight; Her Majesty, Love
. 1932:
Man Wanted; Jewel Robbery; The Crash; Six Hours to Live; Scarlet Dawn; Lawyer Man
. 1933:
Grand Slam; Adorable; The Devil’s in Love; From Headquarters
. 1934:
Fashions of 1934; Fog Over Frisco; Madame Du Barry; The Firebird; The Secret Bride
. 1935:
Dr. Socrates; A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(codirected with Max Reinhardt);
The Story of Louis Pasteur; Concealment; Men on Her Mind
. 1936:
The White Angel; Satan Met a Lady
. 1937:
The Great O’Malley; Another Dawn; The Life of Emile Zola
. 1938:
Blockade
. 1939:
Juarez; The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. 1940:
The Story of Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet; A Dispatch from Reuter’s/This Man Reuter
. 1941:
All That Money Can Buy
. 1942:
Syncopation; Tennessee Johnson
. 1944:
Kismet; I’ll Be Seeing You
. 1945:
Love Letters; This Love of Ours
. 1946:
The Searching Wind
. 1948:
Portrait of Jennie
. 1949:
Accused; Rope of Sand
. 1950:
Paid in Full; Volcano; Dark City
. 1951:
September Affair; Peking Express; Red Mountain
. 1952:
Boots Malone; The Turning Point
. 1953:
Salome
. 1954:
Elephant Walk
. 1956:
Magic Fire
. 1957:
Omar Khayyam
. 1959:
Il Vendicatore/Dubrowsky
. 1960:
Die Fastnachtsbeichte; Herrin der Welt
. 1964:
Quick, Let’s Get Married
.

Dieterle was an actor by training. Having worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, he made his movie acting debut in
Fiesco
(1913). He worked steadily as an actor throughout the silent era in, among others,
Der Rattenfanger von Hameln
(16, Rochus Gliese);
Die Geierwally
(21, E. A. Dupont);
Hintertreppe
(21, Paul Leni and Leopold Jessner);
Lukrezia Borgia
(22, Richard Oswald);
Carlos und Elisabeth
(24, Oswald);
Waxworks
(24, Leni);
Faust
(26, F. W. Murnau); and
Qualen der Nacht
(26, Kurt Bernhardt).

In the late 1920s he worked more as a director, and by 1930 he had moved to Hollywood, originally to make German-language versions of American films.
Der Tanz Geht Weiter
was
Those Who Dance
(William Beaudine) and
Die Maske Fallt, The Way of All Men
(Frank Lloyd). Dieterle proved a prolific workhorse, serving Paramount, Warners, and David Selznick. His earliest American films are rarities today, although
The Last Flight
has a high reputation, and he is best known for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the biopics he made at Warners, and for the Laughton
Hunchback
which has an uninhibited grotesque romance. It is hard to see the
Dream
as anything other than Reinhardt gleefully making use of such camera technicians as Hal Mohr and Byron Haskin. Absurd but delightful, the
Dream
is lighter and funnier than most things Dieterle touched, though
Fog Over Frisco
is a fast-talking and faster-progressing Bette Davis movie.

The biopics are ponderous, Germanic works, suffering from staginess and the unrestrained histrionics of Paul Muni who, presumably, was to Dieterle’s taste.
Pasteur
and
Zola
are sententious films, pap history disguising cliché, but J
uarez
is more enjoyable because it goes further into exaggeration and because Bette Davis gives a truly hysterical performance that relieves Muni’s Aztec impassivity in the title role. Better than the Muni celebration of impossible heroes are Edward G. Robinson’s thorough immersion in the character of Reuter and Ehrlich, the man who found a cure for syphilis.

By the mid-1940s Dieterle was under Selznick’s wing and his sense of almost supernatural atmosphere was not unsuited to the producer’s dreamy-mystical conception of Jennifer Jones in
Portrait of Jennie
—indication of how often the women’s picture encourages moderate talent into abandoning caution. He also directed Jones at Paramount in
Love Letters
, an intriguing story of amnesia—and one of Jones’s best films. It should be added that Dieterle directed the flamboyant saloon opening to
Duel in the Sun
(46, King Vidor).
Rope of Sand, September Affair, Peking Express
, and
The Turning Point
all suggest if not a late flowering, a realization that his talent was for the lavish romantic. All the sadder then that
Salome
is a restrained movie and Rita Hayworth a rather inhibited voluptuary.

He returned to Germany in the late 1950s, but soon retired.

Marlene Dietrich
(Maria Magdalena Dietrich von Losch) (1901–92), b. Schöneberg, Germany
Dietrich is an extreme case—not just because she simultaneously emphasized the erotic and the ridiculous in sexuality, but because it is unclear how far this was her projection. Although she seemed self-possessed, tantalizing the feelings she aroused with her very indifference, it is possible that, more than any other great star, she was a cinematic invention—a message understood by viewers but not by herself. Was that knowingness the product of her mind, the vision of an audience, or the light laid on her skin by Josef von Sternberg?

Chapter 9 of
Fun in a Chinese Laundry
, von Sternberg’s elliptical, deadpan, but outrageous memoir, is like a short story describing the intense relationship between actress and director. Just like the films they made together, the tone of the chapter is contradictory: scathing and adoring; at one moment regarding the affair as history, the next attempting to show how it lived on. By his own claim, Sternberg alone recognized the qualities in Dietrich when he cast her in
The Blue Angel
(30). Of course, Dietrich was no longer truly young, and a collection of serious directors had used her already without properly “discovering” her:
Der Kleine Napoleon
(23, Georg Jacoby);
Tragodie der Liebe
(23, Joe May);
Menschen am Wege
(23, Wilhelm Dieterle);
Die Glucklicke Mutter
(24, Rudolf Sieber, her husband);
Die Freudlose Gasse
(25, G. W. Pabst);
Eine DuBarry von Heute
(28, Alexander Korda);
Die Frau, Nach der Man Sich Sehnt
(29, Kurt Bernhardt); and
Das Schiff der Verlorenen Menschen
(29, Maurice Tourneur). Sternberg’s minions thought that Dietrich was a commonplace German girl. Even after a screen test they saw none of the extra radiance that Sternberg intended. Dietrich herself is portrayed by Sternberg as hardly aware of her talent. But the chapter is written in retrospect and begins with one of those exercises in paranoid hostility so characteristic of the book: “Her constant praise [of von Sternberg] is rated as one of her admirable virtues—by others, not by me. She has never ceased to proclaim that I taught her everything. Among the many things I did not teach her was to be garrulous about me.” Certainly, after their parting Dietrich acknowledged von Sternberg, but often with the unconsidered Teutonic sentimentality that her career as a chanteuse indulged. It was not the way of Amy Jolly or Shanghai Lily to flatter anyone.

Garrulousness is the antithesis of the von Sternberg Dietrich, so that praise in an alien style might be the most distressing. At other times, Dietrich turned into a sober haus-frau, eager to dismiss those first years at Paramount and to explain that von Sternberg created a woman that had nothing to do with her. One cannot escape the feeling that Dietrich never fully understood those years. Thus there is an artistic truth in von Sternberg’s grotesquely cruel reporting of rumor: “I was told that during the many films made after my ‘fiasco’ with her she would often go through a scene and finish it by whispering through the microphone, ‘Where are you, Jo?’ Well, I’m right here, and should she be angry once more, when she reads this, she might recall that she was often angry with me, and for no good reason.”

It is those later films that underline the crucial role of von Sternberg. With him, Dietrich made seven masterpieces, films that are still breathtakingly modern, which have no superior for their sense of artificiality suffused with emotion and which visually combine decadence and austerity, tenderness and cruelty, gaiety and despair. After 1935, however, Dietrich appeared in another twenty-four films, some only in small parts, like the dark-haired fortune-teller, maker of hot chili, who watches fatalistically over Welles’s destruction in
Touch of Evil
(58). In how many of those is she even presentable as a serious actress? In
Desire
(36, Frank Borzage); in
Angel
(37, Ernst Lubitsch); in
The Flame of New Orleans
(41, René Clair); in
Rancho Notorious
(52, Fritz Lang). Otherwise she is anything from dull, tense, tight-lipped, and inhibited to a ghostly imitation of her earlier self, florid where once she had bloomed, extravagant where she was implicit, more a female impersonation than the essence of the sadomasochist female that von Sternberg made her.

That may seem hard or exaggerated. After all, Dietrich survived for thirty years as a great entertainer, a singer, a mistress of hesitation, a wearer of clothes, a nightclub figure. But see those other films and realize how far reputation carried her. See
Judgment at Nuremberg
(61, Stanley Kramer);
Witness for the Prosecution
(57, Billy Wilder);
Stage Fright
(50, Alfred Hitchcock);
A Foreign Affair
(48, Wilder);
Golden Earrings
(47, Mitchell Leisen);
Kismet
(44, William Dieterle);
The Spoilers
(42, Ray Enright);
The Lady Is Willing
(42, Leisen);
Manpower
(41, Raoul Walsh);
Seven Sinners
(40, Tay Garnett);
Destry Rides Again
(39, George Marshall);
Knight Without Armour
(37, Jacques Feyder);
The Garden of Allah
(36, Richard Boleslavsky), and you will see a haughty, mannered woman striving to relax. Selznick believed that she was not an emotional actress, that she could not make audiences cry. She had tricks, to be sure: she could be girlish momentarily; she had the seductive ploys of a street singer; and she could always wear exotic costume with intimations of depravity. But in how many of these other films does she look strained, vacant, inept, unsure of herself? In how many of those films, either through makeup or her famous efforts to control the way in which she is photographed, is she trying to recreate von Sternberg’s image of her? If anyone doubts my comments on her other work, see
The Blue Angel
and then, in order, preferably, those six films she made for him at Paramount:
Morocco
(30),
Dishonored
(31),
Shanghai Express
(32),
Blonde Venus
(32),
The Scarlet Empress
(34), and
The Devil Is a Woman
(35). They are totally manufactured films: locations built at Paramount; foreign countries conjured up with light; the plots are literary farragos in which the visual poetry is everything. It would only be in keeping if the Dietrich in these films was not authentic but man-made. One might say made by love, except that so clear a confession offended Sternberg’s horror of excess. Thus, there is a feeling of tormented passion in these films, of exquisite physical beauty not delaying temporal decay. Invariably, they are love stories in which the lovers conspire by their own independence to avoid the frankest admissions to one another. For Cooper in
Morocco
and Clive Brook in
Shanghai Express
, expressions of love are extracted only under torture. Both men mistrust women and fear the dependence that comes with love. At the same time, they are moved immeasurably by the beloved. Dietrich is the perfect icon in this ecstasy of frustration, and she survives as the central figure in superb tableaux: as Amy Jolly the entertainer in
Morocco
, shyly wondering whether to kiss a woman in her audience; as X27 in
Dishonored
, a spy shot in immaculate black leather; most enchanting of all, sitting on the observation platform at the end of the
Shanghai Express
, a feather boa like a halo round her head; her legs open like shark’s teeth in
Blonde Venus;
as the depraved virginal
Scarlet Empress
, as hard as a jewel; and finally as a nun turned voluptuary in a Spain of the mind that involved Paramount in a lunatic quarrel with a country claiming to be the real Spain.