Original Title: Der blaue Engel. Social drama 1930; 109 min.; Director: Josef von Sternberg; Cast: Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Rosa Valetti, Hans Albers, Wilhelm Diegelmann, Kurt Gerron, Charles Puffy, Eduard von Winterstein, Carl Balhaus, Robert Klein-Lörk, Rolf Müller, Roland Varno; Ufa-Klangfilm.
Professor Rath finds himself in contact with an obscure variety singer due to the nightly escapades of his students. Naively, he marries her and is degraded to a clown. Ultimately, this leads to a mental breakdown and death. Rath tragically passes away after breaking into his former school at night and climbing onto the podium.
Summary
Images of devastating simplicity portray the tragedy of a lonely, intellectually-gifted yet love-starved idealist, who breaks down when he collides with the ruthless world. Every station along this person’s life path symbolizes something.
A symbol of the orderly, well-protected life of Professor Dr. Immanuel Rath is the old, beautiful town hall clock, whose chimes mark the perpetual routine of his life rolling by. Additionally, there is the poor little bird in the cage, to whom Rath gives all his love, undesired by any other human being.
A classroom is a symbol of the educator’s efforts to keep the air free from poisonous miasmas, with all their rigor and faith. He realizes that the temptations of life are stronger than pedagogical will. In order to save his students from the downward slope, he follows them to the “Blue Angel”.
Again, the symbol of “the other side of the world” is Faust’s study–Walpurgis Night, which combines the features of the pure maiden and the temptress (Gretchen and Helena) into one figure.
The man, who has been completely alone until this moment, yields to the woman’s allure: mysterious and colorful enchantment. The childlike part of him feels elated by the illusion of love, and he takes an undeserving one as his wife.
Here is the climax of the drama: Rath, Schulmann, and Bürger lose their teaching positions completely. This corresponds to the peripeteia and proves to be the catalyst of Rath’s inner turmoil, now that his foundation has been pulled out from beneath him.
He is inexorably tied to that woman and futilely rebels against his degradation, becoming a distorted version of himself. He had once sought to protect the young, but now he performs as a clown before the jeering throng every night.
When he is set to appear in his hometown, the place of his former life, madness erupts from him and he senses, for the first time, the full extent of what has happened to him and what he has caused. With only one longing driving him now – to cleanse himself, to atone – his derangement intensifies.
He drags himself back to his home and school with a failing heart, collapsing dead in front of the school desk, relieved by God’s mercy. As the old town hall clock rings out its chorus of “always practice loyalty and honesty” as a symbolic warning through the silent city, it seems a fitting final farewell.
Ernst Jäger’s review in Film Kurier No. 80 (April 2, 1930)
A full-dialogue German film has been selected to enlist the best minds in its linguistically-rich form, and Erich Pommer has taken the right path by entering into an alliance with the “literati” so notorious in the film world. Plenty of poets and writers in Germany now know it: we possess abundant, imaginative, wise, and wondrous talents in all the camps of combat and social groups, no matter if they are far from Berlin, even hostile to it, or spiritually rooted in the “Romantic”. They must now strive for a filmic connection that builds a bridge to literature.
The better film will finally come because the three or four key producers need and want it; otherwise, they could open a dance school or something similar. The better instrument of sound, color, and plastic film, born out of the black-and-white silence, requires better creators—the thoughtful, rather than the thoughtless, and intellectual workers instead of tabloid journalists. Such creators could include Zuckmayer, Rehfisch, Molnar, Kurt Goetz, Georg Kaiser, Eulenberg, Burte, Bert Brecht, Walter Hasenclever, Peter Martin, Lampel, Arnold Zweig, Friedrich Wolf, Otto Brües, Reinhard Goering, Alfred Neumann, and many more. With these talented people, the better film will come to fruition in the near future. Illiteracy, which was still possible with silent films, is now being exposed; for even the author must speak. The mental stuttering of the voiceless is coming to an end, and education is no longer viewed as a burden in film.
Adaptation.
We are just starting to explore this Pommer-Jannings-Sternberg film, just like Caligari was a revelation and an eye-opener when it first released. However, Caligari was removed from the global demand economy. For Pommer’s serious line, no deviation from the development line is needed. Between his most significant last silents: Homecoming [Heimkehr, 1928, directed by Joe May] (based on Leonhard Frank’s Karl und Anna) and the “Professor Rath” movie (based on Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat), there is no essential difference in direction, only a difference in formal description. This is achieved through the “small miracle” of language. Here and there, the “literati” of Heinrich Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, and Karl Vollmöller are working together. Although none of them are infallible, Zuckmayer is particularly a novice in the field of cinema. Vollmöller, on the other hand, is already an “old gent” with lyrical merits from the past and whose name is known in the U.S.A. But who has graduated among the filmmakers? The experienced production manager Erich Pommer must teach the new authors to search for, use, and employ techniques to make a new, international audience aware of their works. This audience, stretching from Paris to Tokyo, must be made aware of the impact areas that are screens, and for whom the individualistic poet of the “Kakadu” verses now has to write. In this new appeal to the generalization of individual design, the danger of material trivialization still remains, though playing only a minor role. Professor Rath and his opposite world of Heinrich Loh-Mann from the still delightfully readable book (for one mark at the yellow Ullsteins!) has now become the benevolent German Professor Rath. Observing and tracing the transformation of books written 25 years ago can reveal a crucial aspect of the problem of film in general. Authors such as Heinrich Mann, who wrote the book Unrat 25 years ago, provide a tragic course of all flesh which can be seen in the transformation of the professor to the “last man” [referencing The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann, 1924, directed by F. W: Murnau)]. Although these books may have been considered “modern” when they were released, they usually take another 10 years to be read more widely. On the international film market, it appears that the universal human drama, “The Eternal Human,” is becoming fashionable once more — especially since it fits protagonist Emil Jannings so well — and thus the authors have transformed the misanthrope and nihilist Unrat into a person of virtue who happens upon a blonde vamp. A male angelic soul, surrounded by the gentle comedy of overly pedantic teaching, is destroyed; for the woman is blonde, so bonde… (She is a blonde — “nothing else.”)
The task of Jannings’ film.
Emil Jannings demonstrates his remarkable talent for showcasing the inner collapse of a poor hero through his posture and gait – from a proud worker at 8 o’clock in the morning to a pitiful postcard vendor by midnight. (A figure from a Georg Kaiser play, indeed.) He makes even the more genuine elements just as effective: all the grimaces of decline are depicted perfectly, as well as the splendid wig variations – not even excluding the authentic ones. No one plays the role of the suffering man in pain as unsentimentally as Jannings does; his special crowd-pleasers are the smiles he bestows blissfully and the loving gaze he casts upon the dancer, Lolo. His face shines with a radiance akin to that of twenty roast geese in a pan, and the box scene is met with huge applause. These are classic moments of the greatest art of mimesis. He now speaks as well, and that is the main theme of the entire film: how Jannings can be presented in the two worlds. The solution is brilliantly composed, and one can understand why the Americans, who have seen the foreign version of the film, predict its great success abroad. The spoken word in this film has the greatest impact, stumbling into eroticism with a kind heart as Traumulus. When he confesses to the dancer that she has beautiful eyes, he proclaims “Oh yes…oh indeed…very beautiful…” – or when he proposes a toast to the outcast according to an old saying, he declares “I allow myself something special!” He paints with words, timidly and uncertainly, and carries his comedy more compellingly than big sighs and tears (which surprisingly flow very little in this Sternberg talkie). Is the labored, heart-sick tone of the dying Rath present in this film? No. He dies silently, all too silently. Until his wedding to the vaudeville girl, Jannings’ career is on the rise. The insanity outbreak still hangs a bit on the mercy of the loudspeakers. Undeniably, Jannings has a bright future ahead of him in the world of talkies, even if he takes on more of a supporting role.
Sound film peak.
This perfectly realized film serves as a testament to the master of mid-star films in the U.S., Josef von Sternberg, who could possibly be one of the twelve greats. Günther Rittau allows Hanns Schnerberger to photograph with a moderate realism, preferring the half-lit atmosphere of the “Blue Angel”, and sending the magician ensemble of Kurt Gerron and Rosa Valetti in front of the sure camera in Otto Hunters milieu-realistic buildings (erected with Emil Haßler). Every line in the best episodes is a small event. All other types of acting are also excellent: Eduard von Winterstein, Wilhelm Diegelmann, Karl Houzar-Puffy – and if Sternberg were not so far away in Hollywood, and had he had a better understanding of current Berlin stage art, he would certainly depict the gymnastics activity he presents, from the pupils’ perspective, even more intensely and without stereotypes. Not only does the girls’ class sing the song from Otto Ernst, “Flachsmann als Erzieher”… German student tragedies in film present these complex dualities. If Sternberg holds Jannings’ detention hour and catches the students cheating or teaching them to pronounce the English “th”, then, of course, this kind of student humor is ignited. Sonically, it is all masterfully done and deserves recognition for the standard performance of UFA’s sound film technology. At the sound camera: Fritz Thiery.
Marlene Dietrich.
Marlene Dietrich bestows a strange, pessimistic love upon the unfortunate Emil Rath in this film, which is exquisitely portrayed. One can easily believe that she financially ruins and morally drains him, even though this is not shown. Dietrich’s delivery is compellingly elegant-ordinary, a heady mix which the audience loves. Part of the stormy applause is no doubt for her singing, which follows the school of Margo Lion, and for which Friedrich Holländer has written perfected music. No woman had yet spoken in a German sound film before, but Dietrich achieves the fullness of her voice, and when she says something on the screen, it creates the illusion of life. “But always think: respect for the predator” – Wedekind has rarely been depicted so realistically in his earth spirit, as in the Jannings-Dietrich scenes of this film.
The silent atmosphere of Pommer’s sound film.
The tragic downfall of the professor to the cackling of the madman – skillfully handled by Robert Liebmann – is an immense accomplishment. The song transitions have some great ideas, like the ironic contrast of saying that the professor will soon be selling postcards and then showing him destitute and already doing it. The crossfade between 1925 and 1929 is also well done. Liebmann and Sternberg agree on the style of economy, omitting anything that does not say something directly. The courage to make a silent film in the era of sound films is being reborn. We have long called for this, for when life is silent, the film should not chatter. To be successful, one must be more logical in the motivation for creating a silent film. The iconic ending of the film is bold and daring, and ultimately, liberated from the melodramatic musical accompaniment. Otherwise, one can hear “Death and Transfiguration” [“Tod und Verklärung”, 1889] by Richard Strauss here. Currently, a new principle prevails. Pommer is highly praised for being a seeker, even there. This conclusion, however, appears to lack the presence of sound – even if it were the heavy breathing of the marching. Yet, the vision is strong enough and Pommer will continue to use the values of the silent film in his upcoming productions of sound films; that is what makes him great – the balancing reason with which he puts the biggest names and the best artists at the service of his films. Now, one can see and hear it again: it is worth it.
