Marlene is a mom in this one. She's married to a chemist who has radium poisoning of all things. He needs $1500.00 to pay for a cure so Marlene decides to go back to work performing on the stage in order to raise the money.
Marlene meets a rich guy while her husband is away getting cured and apparently has an affair with him. It's hard to tell exactly what's happening with that since the production code was starting to rear it's ugly head around this time and no mention of this kind of hanky panky would be allowed in the movies.
As usual Von Sternberg carefully photographs Dietrich making sure the light hits her just right, this woman positively glows. Marlene sings a couple of kind of racy songs and these musical interludes seem like they belong in an entirely different film.
When all is said and done the whole idea of actually putting Dietrich in some kind of domestic drama is almost to ludicrous to comprehend. The ideal Dietrich film would be 90 minutes of closeups of her with the key light beating down on her forehead.
93 minutes
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