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Before the contortions of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, the paroxysms of Josef von Sternberg's "Messalina of the North." The pièce de résistance comes early, historical atrocities dance in the psyche of the little princess, the camera peeps into her swinging hoop skirt after dissolving from the phallic human clapper in the vaginal torture bell. "Glorious destiny" takes her to Russia, where Marlene Dietrich's open-mouthed parody of innocence gradually gives way to a conqueror's rapacious guile. Along the way, Count Alexei (John Lodge) seizes her for a kiss and offers a whip afterward: "Now you may punish me for my effrontery." The Empress (Louise Dresser) presides with Midwestern truculence, her son the Grand Duke (Sam Jaffe) resembles a grinning skull beneath a rumpled peruke. (He marches his soldiers down palatial corridors on rainy days, and wields an oversized drill that corkscrews through the eye of the Byzantine Christ hanging on the bedroom.) The birth of an heir is the ongoing concern, "nothing less than a boy will do. We don't want any more women on the throne." Sternberg pursues his fairy-tale bizarrerie all the way through, his supreme enshrinement of the perverse Muse. Lang's Die Nibelungen is the starting point for the totality of mise en scène, a deranged opulence of veils and furs and misshapen gargoyles bearing down on the heroine. (It takes a gaggle of ladies-in-waiting to open gigantic doors, the kind of mordant wit that continuously tempers grandiosity.) The skeleton at the banquet, the cavalcade up the marble staircase, the net before the lens that blurs Dietrich into an abstract Wesselmann nude. "I think I have weapons that are far more powerful than any political machine." The astonishing blend of Eros and Thanatos builds to a scabrous orgasm, the fragile candle that becomes a flamethrower bearing her overthrown husband's mad rictus. Straight into the veins of Visconti and Bertolucci this flows. Cinematography by Bert Glennon. With C. Aubrey Smith, Gavin Gordon, Olive Tell, Ruthelma Stevens, Davison Clark, and Maria Riva. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |