Blonde Venus (1932)

Passed.  This one feels very pre-code.  It has a bunch of girls skinny-dipping at the beginning of the movie, but you don't really see anything.  It's one of those things that we got with Psycho.  You are fairly certain you see something, but I'm pretty sure that you don't see anything.  But that's not the problem with this movie.  The problem with this movie is the same thing that you got from all of the movies about vaudeville acts from this era.  What is that problem?   Apparently every vaudeville act was somehow wildly racist because that's all that entertained audiences back in the day.  Also, the movie kind of dances in the prostitution zone without outright saying that Helen ever becomes a sex worker.   Also, we see a bathing kid's butt.  That's uncomfortable for many people.

DIRECTOR:  Josef von Sternberg

There's so much to do before I go to bed.  I'm now two movies behind and I just started setting up the house for Christmas.  So late night writing it is.  I'm really getting to worry about this Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg box set because I'm most of the way through the box and I realize that these two are pushing the melodrama well into the soap opera zone.  Like, in my head, Josef von Sternberg was one of those provocative directors who really opened the world to what it meant to challenge the system.  Instead, I am watching these movies and simply getting that these were almost incredibly lazy movies.  I know that there would be people who would wildly disagree with me out there, but first impressions aren't doing a lot for him.

The thing that makes me full on annoyed by Blonde Venus, and by extension Josef von Sternberg, is that the first act of this movie actually seemed halfway decent.  I'm talking, of course, before the scent that comments on the savagery of African dancers.  That was pretty gross.  But I'm watching Blonde Venus and I'm actually kind of taken aback.  For the first time in this box set, I'm watching Marlene Dietrich playing a character that isn't some kind of seductress.  I mean, she's still a woman skinnydipping in a pool with a bunch of other ladies.   It's a weird place to start a movie that actually is meant to stress how domesticated Helen is supposed to be.  Also, it makes Ned completely unlikable before making him to be the picture for domestic bliss.  But let's ignore those two bits completely because this was the first movie where I actually saw Marlene Dietrich play a sympathetic role from the outset.  Even before I had seen a Marlene Dietrich movie, I had always associated her with that Tiger Lady archetype.  To see her as a loving mother of a child and, while that may not be a stretch for a lot of actors, I find that shift oddly interesting.

But then Act II goes into full afterschool special.  I have to be aware:  I am not the audience of 1932.  But the message that Acts II and III bring us is the notion that women should not enter the workforce under any circumstance.  My goodness, the speed at which Helen is corrupted by the arts scene is incredibly laughable.  I want to take my time going down this rabbit hole because I have enough to say without feeling the need to rush this.  What von Sternbern did here was to create yet another morality play about the vice of the arts.  With Act I, we have the most wholesome mother and spouse that von Sternberg's mind could come up with.  Helen, Ned, and Johnny are the nuclear family.  In the case of Ned, he's actually gone nuclear and is dying of radiation.  It feels very much like the other films that Dietrich and von Sternberg made together.  Ned's diagnosis seems really made up.  I know.  I can't necessarily prove that what Ned says about his prognosis is malarky.  But, golly, does it feel really silly.  He could have just had cancer.  There's nothing wrong with giving a fictional character cancer. If anything, giving a character cancer may give a film verisimilitude.  But dying of nuclear isotopes or something is just absurd.  Lo, I digress.  She's the perfect spouse and she has left the debauchous world of jazz singing to take care of her family.  She has this moral high ground for returning to this sleazy underbelly.  She's only going to take care of her husband's medical expenses, despite the fact that Ned is willing to die so that she doesn't have to sell her soul.

Now, I'm going to get frustrated and fast.  I hope you are fans of Breaking Bad because that show was incredible.  It took a morally gray area about how Americans don't care about educators and health care and, over the course of many seasons, showed how intoxicating the criminal underworld could be.  That show took its sweet time, pushing Walter White down more upsetting moral conundrums until he left that show completely swallowed by his own desire for power.  Now, I would love to pretend that Blonde Venus took any time for this because we're meant to feel sorry for Helen as the movie progresses.  My biggest angry reaction to this movie?  I don't feel sorry for her at all.  If anything, Josef von Sternberg goes out of his way to make Helen as unlikable as possible.  She goes into this whole thing on the side of angels.  She's going to sing a few song anonymously, work late hours, and then get out so that Ned can survive his nuclear isotope problem.  That's pretty moral to me.  I could see, over the course of that story, that someone is willing to only pay her if she does some morally unscrupulous things and she begrudgingly has to do those things. That would make a compelling tale, ultimately leading her to go on the run from Johnny Law and live the life of a vagabond.  Cool.  That's not what happens.  I mean, it kind of is. The problem is that she is taken in by Nick Townsend, a gross millionaire with a heart of gold. Honestly, the movie doesn't know what to do with Nick.  This is a guy who goes into seedy nightclubs and, in a very Pretty Woman sense, seduces women who are down on their luck.  But he's, like, charming while he does it?  This movie is very afraid to make Cary Grant look bad, despite the fact that this is Cary Grant's breakout role.  

The frustrating thing about this whole movie is that she genuinely cheats on her spouse.  Nick Townsend, who should be allowed to be gross in this movie, keeps giving her outs.  He says that he wants to kiss her, but keeps stressing that she has a dying husband.  And do you know what Helen  does?  She kisses the heck out of Nick Townsend.  She goes on sexy expensive vacations with Nick and Johnny just gets to watch her mom having moments with a dude that is not his dad and that's supposed to be okay.  When Ned discovers all of this, we're supposed to be a little mad at his obsession of wanting the kid, even though he's just a big dumb man who has no idea how to raise --or apparently bathe --a kid. But Josef von Sternberg makes a point that Helen has become bad news. Why do we have to throw Helen in the mud like that?  This could have easily been a story of a woman who had to sacrifice her soul to save her husband only to be punished by said husband later on.  Nope.  Let's make her crappy and put all of the onus on her.  

When Nick returns to the picture towards the end of the movie, he does the thing that makes me mad in a lot of rom coms. (Admittedly, this is more on the "rom" and not the "com" end of the spectrum.)  When films have love triangles but don't want to deal with the consequences of that love triangle, one of the characters has to be unfathomably mature about the whole thing while the more emotional people indulge their own feelings.  In the case of Blonde Venus, Nick has to propose to Helen (Also, before I forget!  Did this story change on the fly between scenes.  There are so many scenes where Helen says that she will never do something only to have her do that exact thing in the next scene!) and drag her to see Johnny, despite the fact that she said that she would never see Johnny again.  He then makes himself scarce when Helen and Ned start repairing their relationship, but still makes his point known that the limo would be downstairs when Helen was ready to come home.  Nick is a sleaze. He stole another man's wife with the power of his pocketbook and spends the final few minutes repairing it all, without word one of how he actually felt in that situation?  It's simply too convenient of an ending and it frustrates me because it's just a deus ex machina.  The problem went away becuase the story needed the problem to go away.

From a completely practical side, I too would have been mad at Helen if I was either O'Connor or Smith.  Did you see how nice that marquee was that Helen got out of nowhere. Sure, she probably didn't ask for that marquee.  But from what I understand, Helen bailed on O'Connor after one show.  That's not okay.  Clearly, one performance didn't make up for all of that investment.  Sure, there was no contract, but I don't think that anyone would have thought that she was up for prostituting herself just that quickly into performing at that lounge.  

Like, it's all so melodramatic.  I know that there was probably an audience that ate this crap up.  I like a good woman's picture.  I tell you, you show me a good Rita Hayworth or Joan Crawford picture and I can feel like anyone else.  It just feels like these stories are so saccharine that I can't ever feel like there's anything real to embrace.  It feels like everything I hate about Hollywood tear-jerker movies and that's a bummer because I was expecting to get challenged in this box set.