1935 - THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, or she sure enjoys screwing with guy's minds.

Von Sternberg's final film with his "Barbie Doll" Marlene Dietrich is incredibly beautiful to look at from a visual approach.  However the very thin story is another matter  Even at 75 minutes there seems like an awful lot of padding in the running time of the film.

The story is told in a rather sophisticated flashback style.   Lionel Atwill who looks like Von Sternberg, is a Spanish army officer who is infatuated with Dietrich a man eater if there ever was one.  Into this mix is Cesar Romero playing a Spanish revolutionary also nuts over Dietrich.  The film generally seems to be about Dietrich screwing with both of these guys for most of the running time.

John Dos Passos a writer known for his social criticism of American life in his books and novels somehow got mixed up in this thing but I have to believe that the overriding influence in the story and screenplay was that of Von Sternberg.

 

Von Sternberg not only took directorial credit but also cinematography credit as well for The Devil Is a Woman.  It's certainly one of the most beautiful black and white films I have ever seen.  As usual Von Sternberg really pours it on with his photography of Dietrich, she is almost a creature from another planet.

The film was unsurprisingly a financial failure.  Audiences probably didn't know what to make of a  Dietrich/Von Sternberg collaboration which was another film in his strange Marlene Dietrich fetish film series.  Lionel Atwill's complete obsession with Dietrich is clearly a representation of that relationship.

 

The complete weirdness of The Devil Is a Woman is probably a film of interest more for film buffs and scholars than the "average" film goer.  It understandably ended Von Sternberg's working relationship with Dietrich.

75 minutes.