Marlene Dietrich is generally regarded as one of the great cultural figures of the 20th century; The Blue Angel is probably her pivotal work and the standard-issue work for critics. From there, she made Hollywood hits, (Destry Rides Again with James Stewart), plus grand dame comebacks (Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution or with David Bowie in Just a Gigolo), but many of the icon’s other films have slid into obscurity. This boxed-set from the BFI reworks and re-packages four of her films for Universal in the early part of WWII, and you’d have to be a hard-core cineaste to have seen even half of them. Looking sharp in blu-ray, this is an ideal opportunity to understand why Dietrich was an unlikely but major star, and remains a household name long after that star had faded.
This boxed set features four films; Seven Sinners, The Flame of New Orleans, The Spoilers and Pittsburgh. What’s striking is how different each film is; Seven Sinners is a romantic melodrama set in the South Seas, The Flame of New Orleans features misadventure between riverboat gamblers in the 19840’s, The Spoilers is a melodrama set in the Yukon gold-rush, and Pittburgh is a wartime recruitment film that somehow features Dietrich as the owner of a coal-mine. With different producers and directors, there’s plenty of evidence that Dietrich could be considered the author of these films; she seems to be the creative driving force.
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