Cinema: The New Pictures: Oct. 3, 1932

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Blonde Venus (Paramount) presents a new excuse for Marlene Dietrich to play a bad woman. Excuse: sick husband. The picture graphs her degeneration. Excuse: mother-love. Toward the end, having left husband & child behind, she rises fast, her motto being "Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels fastest who travels alone." She completes the cycle in the arms of husband & child.

Director Josef von Sternberg wrote the story, quit Paramount and took Miss Dietrich with him when the story was rewritten, later returned to direct her in it. Von Sternberg, who has repeatedly denied being born Joe Stern in Brooklyn, opens with a sylvan swimming scene in Germany's Black Forest (300 miles from Berlin) where U. S. hikers surprise Berlin actresses off for the afternoon. One hiker (Herbert Marshall) marries Marlene Dietrich, takes her to the U. S. They have a child. Marshall contracts radium poisoning in his scientific research. To send him to a Dresden doctor, Marlene returns to cabaret work, lets a lisping politician (Gary Grant) keep her. The husband, cured and returned, threatens to take Marlene's child away. She is hounded down the scale until she gives up the child, flops in & out of a 15ยข flophouse, suddenly reappears as a toasted but disillusioned Paris diseuse. At this point her bony, impassive face, deep, hoarse voice, crazy- reckless look and swagger are unpleasant but impressive. Hardly the madonna type, she comes home for the ultimate pleasure of holding her child for a moment, decides to stay as her child's music box tinkles out the case for commonplace happiness. Good shot: a fake cabaret gorilla rocking formidably from side to side, pulling off one paw to expose a slender white hand (Dietrich's).

Tiger Shark (Warner Bros.) is a bloody cinema of tuna fishing in trawlers out of Southern California's San Diego. Edward G. Robinson is a Portuguese captain who saves Richard Arlen from the sharks, loses a hand to them, is married by Zita Johann for gratitude, not for love. When he finds that Arlen, his best friend, is in love with his wife, he bashes him with his hooked stump and throws him to the sharks, himself falls to them and dies of the attentions of a shark that crawls up his back as he is pulled back into the boat.

Noteworthy is the tuna fishing detail: the lookout man, the leaping school of tuna in the distance, the bait-thrower, the lashing together of double lines with two poles for the big tuna, the wild scenes with three fish continuously in the air, the sharks' sinister grey shadows beneath the surface. The tuna are the composite hero throughout, the sharks the composite villain. The sharks "settle everything," tumble drowning fishermen, end love triangles, horrify audiences. Robinson writhes and mouths his lines in an effective, fat facsimile of Lionel Barrymore's acting. Zita Johann, beauteous Austrian-born importation from Manhattan, is a convincing emotionalist, serious and big-eyed.

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