Wonderful character development!

Too much of everything

To me, this movie is perfection.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Der blaue Engel is the story about a totally dysfunctional marriage. When I saw the film for the first time, many years ago, I found it a depressing and nasty sight. For professor Rath, the spindle in the plot, is attached to love in the same way as an addict to hard drugs. He may not be the brightest person in the room, but at first he is a well respected member of his small community, and reasonably happy. But at the end, a few years later, he is just a wreck, and probably dead. My love for you, it came and went, so your feet are now in wet cement. I found it hard to believe that passion could completely destroy a sound character. It looked like a melodrama - which I detest. Nevertheless, Der blaue Engel deserves a second chance. For recently I saw the film again, and this time the narrative impressed me. The events are quite symbolic. In the first scene Rath whistles for his parakeet, but it has died. Rath is socially less clever than his pupils, with the exception of one, who is therefore nagged by his comrades. It is a tough school, they have their own coroner (joking). Rath is myopic and can not control his pupils. Later Rath meets the singer Lola, when he tries to withdraw his pupils from her bad influence. Lola makes cluck-cluck sounds, and Rat crows, indicating that there is an immediate and intuitive understanding. Naturally they marry. But Rath can not find his place in this troupe of performers. He ends as an unsound clown, who is only funny when eggs are smashed on his scull. It is understandable that Rat is soon a broken man. With a last effort he stumbles back to his school, and collapses into his old chair. His hand seize the writing desk, with such a strength, that the passing janitor is unable to remove Rath. Is he dead? Has he joined his parakeet? So, on second thoughts, Der blaue Engel has funny and comic elements. Rath is a born loser, with a resemblance with Laurel and Hardy, or Chaplin. If you are able to abstract from the melodrama, then Der blaue Engel is definitely recommendable. Don't forget to leave comments. I love it.

Seems like director Von Sternberg had an axe to grind with men or the middle class. Emil Janning's Professor is staid and repressed but seems like a decent person and I don't know why he must be seen to lose it so much, if, as the director said, this was not a political allegory. That is either disingenuous or the Professor is not the stable person he seems the first 2/3 of the film. The only other explanation is that Von Sternberg sees Lola (the amazing Marlene Dietrich) as a very destructive person. I found this an overly melodramatic film which makes a cartoonish depiction of a middle-class German. The acting is fantastic from Dietrich and Jannings but I found this a baffling film. I had expected that the Professor would fall in love and they would have a more stable relationship, but their relationship falls apart when the Professor is completely irrational at the attention his wife is getting. While this isn't unreasonable, that he becomes SO unhinged seems really unlikely. I don't understand why his seemingly sweet wife and also someone who seemed deeply in love with him turns away from him so quickly. If Von Sternberg wanted to make that storyline, they should have made the Professor a bit more unlikable. This was really a disappointing film. I hoped for a more nuanced, thoughtful depiction of a man learning to see the beauty in things he had previously looked down on. Von Sternberg makes the Professor a baffling character through which there is no throughline from his character before and after marrying Lola.

They released this film filmed in two versions, they acted all the scenes in both German and English, but when I decided to watch this film from the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book, I was going to watch the original German language version. Basically Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is the esteemed college preparatory high school educator who has punished many of his male students for spreading around the image of beautiful stage performer Lola Lola (Destry Rides Again's Marlene Dietrich). He hopes to catch the school boys in the cabaret club The Blue Angel, where she is the headlining act, and after her for himself he grows slowly passionate for her, and with a pair of panties snatched by a student he has a good reason to return there the following night. Having had a night of desire and such, Rath returns to class next day, with the Principal (Eduard Von Winterstein) furious to see the students running riot, and he is aware of the teacher's behaviour recently as well. He decides it is best to retire from the school, and with his newfound freedom he can marry Lola, but they cannot stay happy for long as their money problems grow, and to earn he is forced to become a stage clown in the cabaret troupe. Rath is often filled with jealousy and lust for his wife and her profession, she leaves herself open as a "shared woman", and he is being ridiculed for his past while performing as a clown. He performs his last act at The Blue Angel, and he is shocked to see Lola kissing her new love interest strongman Mazeppa (Hans Albers), and his rage turns into insanity, where he starts strangles his wife and is forced into a straitjacket. In the end, having been released from prison, Rath is not able to resolve his position as a school teacher, and he has obviously lost wife Lola, so he dies from extreme self pity clutching the school desks that once sat his loyal students. Also starring Kurt Gerron as Kiepert the Magician, Rosa Valetti as Guste the Magician's Wife, Reinhold Bernt as The Clown, Hans Roth as Beadle the Caretaker of the Secondary School, Rolf Müller as Pupil Angst and Robert Klein-Lörk as Pupil Goldstaub. Jannings - in his first talking picture - gives a mixed but equally interesting performance as the teacher turned performer with a troubled passion, and Dietrich is wonderful in her iconic top hat and black stockings as the seductive stage performer with a cruel streak, it is a film with some memorable sequences and moments that stand out, especially of course the cabaret stuff, making it a most watchable drama. Very good!

Let me join the ranks that herald this film as one of the great ones, an unforgettable all-time world cinema masterpiece that should be way higher in the IMDb scores, still relevant, powerful, not dated, with not one but two landmark performances. In the first half the film is very funny, but when Lola Lola starts clucking in the wedding reception the horror begins. This is my favorite Marlene Dietrich role, and for my taste the only sexy one, with baby fat and a rounder, younger, nubile face and body(before she turned into the more stern and severe deep-voiced German femme fatale). I find it amazing that her character in this 1930 film still turns me on. Jannings overacts grandiosely to match the extremely melodramatic, denigrating, tragic story, and gives one of the great acting performances of movie history (along with his performance in the silent The Last Laugh). The magician is perfectly sleazy yet human in his ignorance. The film piles it up towards its cringing climax, culminating in action not actually shown, an extremely intelligent move on Sternberg's part. And I dare anyone to come up with more horrible and painful sounds in film history than the professor's.