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Nov 16, 2010 · The films starring his “discovery,” Dietrich, are the centerpiece of the director’s career and represent perhaps the highest point achieved in cinema’s early sound era. The Devil Is a Woman is something of a translation of the Sternberg/Dietrich relationship into visual poetry and metaphor.
The Devil Is a Woman is a 1935 American romance film directed and photographed by Josef von Sternberg, adapted from the 1898 novel La Femme et le pantin by Pierre Louÿs. The film was based on a screenplay by John Dos Passos, and stars Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, and Alison Skipworth.
Film critic Andrew Sarris described The Devil Is a Woman as the "coldest" of Sternberg's films in its uncompromising, yet humorously cynical, appraisal of romantic self-deception. This, despite the film's "sumptuous surface". [24]
The Devil is a Woman subverts the classic Hollywood romance trope. Marlene Dietrich is every bit the femme fatale. A woman of loose morals; luring men to her; then chewing them up and spitting them out while enjoying every minute of it.
- (4.7K)
- Paramount Pictures
- Josef Von Sternberg
This chapter relies on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the last film Sternberg and Dietrich made together, to develop an account of Sternberg’s antagonistic relation to the off-screen. More than most directors, he is a maker of self-sufficient images: this informs his understanding of narrative.
One grim scene in particular, shockingly explicit for what was by then a Code-era film, makes it chillingly clear that no matter how cruel and capricious Concha herself may be, she is still a woman in a world ruled by barbarous men. Dietrich tackles this role with great aplomb in what is easily her most down-to-earth and personable performance.
appearing opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman (1935), his first leading role, Romero seldom starred as a leading man and almost never got the girl. He appeared with Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and The Little Princess (1939) and with Sonja Henie in Happy Landing …
