The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 9-15
The Blue Angel (1929)
Directed by Josef von Sternberg
From his turn in The Last Laugh and other Oscar-winning performances, Emil Jannings had developed a keen ability to play a straight-man falling from grace. He is not as hypocritical and prophetic as, say, Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall—though the two share a brain-numbing day-to-day monotony in their livelihoods—in Sternberg’s film at the birth of the sound era, Jannings’s lovelorn English professor has a simpler problem, Marlene Dietrich. In her breakout role after a string of silent films, Dietrich purrs and slinks across a nightclub stage as the irresistible Lola Lola, seducing all of the local students, and eventually their professor, too. After an all-night rendezvous with his mysterious woman the professor is let go from the school, but this is a moment of clarity, for now he can marry Lola (in an overly extravagant and gossipy ceremony) and live the life he now believes he deserves. Lola’s attraction to the professor is strange and even astonishing—she continues her infidelities, her indifference to his feelings—but perhaps she keeps him around because of the way he idealizes her, or he is the perfect cover for her dalliances in prostitution. In this postwar, expressionistic look at German vaudeville, Jannings and Dietrich are a picture-perfect comedy team. Samatha Vacca (March 13, 3:10pm, 7:20pm at Film Forum’s “It Girls, Flappers, Jazz Babies and Vamps”)