Sublime melody in the desert: Gary Cooper, who has never looked so handsome, plays a legionnaire during the Rif war. Marlene Dietrich, for whom this is the first American film, plays a wandering singer. Adolphe Menjou, the most elegant man in Hollywood at the time, was a millionaire in love.
Classic drama? Yes, but directed by Sternberg, who uses all the resources of light to transform the plot of the novel by Benno Vigny (Charles Trenet’s father-in-law) into a work of art: he achieves this by magnifying each shot, despite the difficulty of sound recordings (it’s the beginning of speaking, the microphones are the size of soccer balls, and Marlene does not speak English).
The film is most famous for the first lesbian kiss in the history of cinema: scandalous, but the Hays code of censorship did not yet exist. We never get tired of this cheap romance, filmed like a baroque opera.
Thursday January 5 at 10:35 p.m. on Ciné + Classic. American drama by Josef von Sternberg (1930). With Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou. 1h31.
