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A goddess amid apes, says Renoir of Elena et les hommes, and here's Josef von Sternberg with the coruscating precursor. A stroll through the magical German forest finds the first of Marlene Dietrich's incarnations, a water nymph spied on by the world's oldest Boy Scout (Herbert Marshall). (Mizoguchi in Utamaro and His Five Women has a vivid memory of this whirl of foam, foliage and flesh.) The dissolve from exotic pond to domestic bathtub showcases the cinéaste's remarkable liquidity of form as well as his disdain for plot, suddenly the rare bird is a New York hausfrau with a cherubic tyke (Dickie Moore) and a dying husband. Back on the nightclub stage to pay for his treatment, she slinks out of a squat gorilla costume for the delectation of the moneyed playboy (Cary Grant) in an outrageously loaded number, "Hot Voodoo": "That beat gives me a wicked sensation / My conscience wants to take a vacation..." The husband returns cured but unforgiving (his fedora brim cloaks Marshall's eyes during the confrontation), the heroine takes to the road with son in tow and "leaves a hot trail behind her." Visual splendor and narrative absurdity, maddeningly and magnificently fused in the purest of Sternberg's Dietrich fables. A flow of shifting locations and identities faceted like jewels, wife and mother and lover and whore and vagrant and star, a fugitive in a New Orleans courtroom and a role-player in a Texas cantina. "Queen of Hearts, that's me." Down in a flophouse, up in Paris lights, beggarly rags, sparkling tuxedo—against this exhilarating arbitrariness is the closed circle of normality, it leads back to a child's crib and a bedtime lullaby like a dirge. Ophüls takes a different tack with the matter in The Reckless Moment. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. With Gene Morgan, Rita La Roy, Sidney Toler, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Morgan Wallace, Sterling Holloway, and Hattie McDaniel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |