The Scarlet Empress

Josef Von Sternberg's outrageous masterpiece featuring Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great and Sam Jaffe as Peter, her half-wit foil. It's a thrilling film full of opulence, with Sternberg serving up his most assured direction. This is the best of the director's collaborations with Dietrich. It's full of bizarre touches, including highly ghoulish art direction, a WAY over the top performance by Jaffe and an almost way over the top performance by Louise Dresser (as a very bossy Empress Elizabeth Petrovna). The cinematography by Bert Glennon is stunning and the Travis Banton costumes are outlandish. The film reaches a near camp crescendo when Dietrich dons a uniform and rallies the Russian army to her aid. It's an insane, brilliantly conceived film. Sternberg produced, had a hand in the editing and also worked on the film's lighting (it would be hard to argue that Dietrich ever looked better!)

Truly one of the greatest films ever made (see the International Film Critics' Top 100 Films list as well). Dietrich was never more luminous, nor cinematography more gorgeous, than in THE SCARLET EMPRESS. It's in black and white, but you'll feel like it's in full and glorious color. History it's not, but who cares? This is the way things should have been.

......I saw this years ago, but some of the images-Marlene on a swing, the charging horsemen, the bits w/ Sam Jaffe and C Aubrey Smith, most certainly stand out. It was definitely the director's way of putting his worship of Marlene on display for all to see, Catherine might as well have been Cleopatra or Eleanor of Aquitaine for all the historical accuracy-ha ha-they use. This was a movie about excess as much as anything, curtains that go on forever, huge doors, loud music, etc. They just don't make them like this anymore and certainly couldn't afford to then, either. I don't think I ever saw Marlene anymore sensual than in this film, and I agree, her idea of playing a 'poor innocent gal'-that isn't put across well at all. Sometimes you just can't fake it, no matter how hard you try. *** outta ****, style over everything.

The equine theme running through this bizarre, campy, creepy, cynical, disturbingly beautiful bio-pic is quite significant, given the facts of the life and death of Catherine the Great, culminating in the wildly over-the-top final shot. This movie just drips with European social and sexual decadence, and also with incredibly lavish and languid imagery throughout. Dietrich and von Sternberg seem determined to prove that they could make the transformation of a naive romantic girl into a lascivious power-mad monarch somehow heroic, and also that American audiences would lap it up while denying the depth of the depravity they were embracing. This movie succeeds on every level, especially the subversive one...