Josef Von Sternberg really went over the top with this outrageous pre-code melodrama starring Marlene Dietrich about a devoted wife and mother (first seen as a single German girl swimming naked in a lake in her homeland) who becomes a kept woman in order to financially help her husband be cured of uranium poison. She later runs off with her son when he comes back and discovers her affair with Cary Grant, becoming a prostitute and later basically homeless in order to keep their whereabouts secret. She is forced to give him up, and is basically destitute when her fortunes turn and she becomes the singing toast of Paris. Von Sternberg lets Dietrich utilize every single emotion possible, running all over the world in every style, yet barely shedding a tear over all of heartache.
Herbert Marshall is the unfortunate husband and Dickie Moore the toted kid. Grant's suave lover keeps getting the shaft as it is obvious where Dietrich's heart really is. She is the whole show, even performing in a gorilla suit she strips out of to sing "Hot Voodoo". Movie stills make this appear to be better than it is, its deliberate camp so obvious that you may laugh at it, not with it.
Then, there is the editing, taking Dietrich down, down, down, ending up in a woman's shelter (15 cents a night) where she drunkenly stumbles in, tells off a bunch of old hags and stumbles right back out, and where do we see her next with no explanation of how she got there? Glamorously dressed to kill in Paris, of course, as famous as Josephine Baker. Only Von Sternberg and Dietrich could get away with this, style without substance and glamour without grace. The result is as phony as the curly blonde wig with arrows in it that she wears after stripping out of her gorilla fur.
Herbert Marshall is the unfortunate husband and Dickie Moore the toted kid. Grant's suave lover keeps getting the shaft as it is obvious where Dietrich's heart really is. She is the whole show, even performing in a gorilla suit she strips out of to sing "Hot Voodoo". Movie stills make this appear to be better than it is, its deliberate camp so obvious that you may laugh at it, not with it.
Then, there is the editing, taking Dietrich down, down, down, ending up in a woman's shelter (15 cents a night) where she drunkenly stumbles in, tells off a bunch of old hags and stumbles right back out, and where do we see her next with no explanation of how she got there? Glamorously dressed to kill in Paris, of course, as famous as Josephine Baker. Only Von Sternberg and Dietrich could get away with this, style without substance and glamour without grace. The result is as phony as the curly blonde wig with arrows in it that she wears after stripping out of her gorilla fur.