Synopsis
The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930) is Josef von Sternberg's German drama — watch it online on iFILM. This is the film that made Marlene Dietrich. She plays Lola Lola, a cabaret singer in silk stockings and a top hat, and the camera had clearly never seen anyone quite like her before. Emil Jannings plays the professor who comes to the club to catch his students misbehaving, and stays to be destroyed.
Professor Rath knows he is ruined almost from the moment he meets Lola. Jannings, already an Oscar winner for other work, plays the collapse with a kind of painful precision — the dignity crumbling by degrees, the pride curdling into something uglier. Sternberg shot the whole thing twice over, running German and English versions simultaneously on the UFA stages in Berlin.
It was released at exactly the moment German cinema was absorbing sound, and Dietrich's song "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt" landed like a signal flare. The film launched her Hollywood career within months. Ninety-five years on, The Blue Angel is still the defining image of Weimar-era allure on screen. Stream it on iFILM.
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