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"What are you doing in this part of the world," a perennial Josef von Sternberg greeting. The "suicide passenger" is a performer (Marlene Dietrich) who crosses paths with a painter (Adolphe Menjou), just a couple of expatriates gracefully contemplating their destinies. At the nightclub she dons tuxedo and top hat and patiently waits as the strapping legionnaire (Gary Cooper) hushes the raucous crowd, the famous kiss on the female audience member is a privileged moment of the raw Dietrich delighting in testing the limits of her persona. "Nothing like independence, is there?" The void by the edge of the desert ideally serves this abstraction of Melford's The Sheik, where the screen's whiteness is filled by veils, shadowy grids, the sudden impulses of stoic characters. The Foreign Legion and the cabaret stage, zones of escape or rather states of suspension. Everybody is trying to ditch their past, men dutifully march this way and that, women meanwhile "have no uniforms, no flags, and no medals when we are brave, no wound stripes when we are hurt." Experiments with sound and silence—off-screen orchestra and applause heard in the dressing room, distant drums and bugles interrupting the engagement party. Dietrich and Cooper matched as ravishing camera subjects, their lyrical laconicism established in the way they wield a fan or tear a card. The issue with the cuckolded adjutant (Ullrich Haupt) is resolved under machine-gun fire, Ray in Bitter Victory has a vivid remembrance. "Caesar's wife is above suspicion." "Yeah? You may know something about ancient history, but I know something about husbands." The price of a smile, the pearl necklace that snaps, Menjou's incomparable wryness as Sternberg's stand-in. Off with the high heels for the romantic surrender, up the sandy hill that is the Paramount Pictures logo. Cinematography by Lee Garmes. With Eve Southern, Francis McDonald, and Paul Porcasi. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |