Dishonored (1931)

Approved.  For being a movie about spycraft, especially spycraft that involves seduction as a means of gaining information, this movie is incredibly tame.  There are upsetting implications.  A caught spy kills himself off-camera.  Still, the moment is awfully disturbing and probably shouldn't be viewed by kids.  But as you will glean from my blog, this movie comes across more as silly than anything truly upsetting.

DIRECTOR:  Josef von Sternberg

Oh man.  I had such high hopes for the von Sternberg box set.  I teach about von Sternberg.  Marlene Dietrich is one of those cornerstones of cinematic canon.  You'd think their shared work together would be blowing my mind right now.  But I'll tell you, two movies into this set and I'm really questioning what people are seeing out of this movie outside of nostalgic charm.

Before I go dogging this movie too hard, I oddly like the last half hour of this movie.  That's a third of the movie.  I can't be saying that this movie is absolute garbage because it absolutely isn't.  If anything, the movie can be seen as something quite charming and of its era because there's a lot of fun moments.  Like, honestly?  If I wasn't being this turd who decided to write about every movie that he ever watched, I would probably write this off as simply something a little silly.  It's 1931.  A lot of what I'm going to talk about is in context of the fact that it is 1931 and the language of cinema is only being explored for the first time in history.  We're in the birthing pain times in cinema.  Is this to say that there aren't amazing movies during this time?  Absolutely not.  There are some real bangers in this era.  But something like Dishonored is one of those movies that can be seen as a bit charming because it doesn't know how the genre is going to look like in the long run.  

Because the faults of this movie come down to silliness.  The movie touts a real heavy subject.  Josef von Sternberg, in his opening text, promises to tell us about the secret history of World War I espionage.  There's something about history that we should all know and the only reason that we don't know anything about this spy is because she is a woman who is only forgotten because of her sex.  That's a rad concept.  Now, I'm watching this in a world where I've seen movies that have been adapted from the works of John Le Carre and Tom Clancy.  The espionage thriller has been honed to such a point that I tend to find the genre boring because it is so technically fact checked that these movies tend to feel like someone is citing tech specs on something that I don't care about.  Now, a subgenre of the espionage thriller is the spy-fi movie.  I don't think that von Sternberg is shooting to make a spy-fi movie because the entire subgenre of spy-fi doesn't really exist.  Spy-fi is stuff like James Bond or Mission: Impossible.  Even from an English teacher's perspective, I know that James Bond isn't how real spy stuff works.  I have all of those boring The Spy Who Came in From the Cold kind of movies to tell me how it really looked.  

I know that James Bond is silly, but I like James Bond.  So why don't I like Dishonored that much?  The technical answer is that James Bond originated from the world of Ian Fleming, a real life spy.  Now, Fleming's works were adapted into silly fantasies that teenage boys idolized.  But even the novels were a bit goofy.  But there was a certain verisimilitude to these films.  I could lie to myself quite easily and tell myself that these movies at least have a consistent universe.  But when I watch Dishonored, it seems like anything that involved even rudimentary research was avoided.  Every time the movie required a bit of spy jargon, it kept on going back to the same well of "Invisible Ink."  That's the big pull.  Let's have phone calls about invisible ink.  Now, it was silly once, but the movie used that bit twice.  It's what little kids thinks spy work looks like.  To bounce off of this, when the Russian is about to escape, he uses a wall that slides up from the ceiling.  The movie didn't let us know that we were doing goofball rules, but it certainly sticks by these rules.

So why do I like the last half hour?  Now, it takes me a minute to really make peace with a lot of what is happening in the movie.  One of the things that is always so weird to me when watching pre-WWII movies is that I have to remember that the relationships of soldiers and foreign nations wasn't always so --justifiably! --viotriolic.  As much as I understand the basics about World War I, I have such a hard time when anything really practical pops up over The Great War.  So when you watch this movie and you see that the protagonist of the piece is a spy for Austria and that the quasi-antagonist of the piece is a spy for Russia, my brain can't help but get lazy and start associating the ally and axis powers from World War II.  So I have to just shut my brain off a little bit and accept that X-27 is the noble hero...despite the fact that she gets executed.

Because that's where the movie gets interesting.  One of the false premises of the movie is that Marie really shows much aptitude for being a spy.  A lot of that isn't Marlene Dietrich's fault.  A lot of that is that she kind of just falls into the roll.  Much of the movie is her flirting with people and that's probably only one facet of being a spy, even in a world like Dishonored.  The latter third of the movie, there's at least something kind of interesting going on with musical notes, even if we don't quite understand the nuts and bolts of the information that Marie is communicating to Austria.  But that manic slamming on the piano in between violent scribbling is actually pretty darned cool.  Finally, the movie establishes that Marie possesses a talent that makes her a unique asset for the war effot. 

But that's not the piece that people tend to take away when it comes to this movie.  The conclusion of the film is far more fascinating.  Now,  I don't really buy the fact that Marie views Kranau as someone special.  There's this love interest that, like with Morocco, we're told more about than we actually experience.  Honestly, because I felt no chemistry from them, I kept all that information about him in the forefront of my brain and I kept seeing him as this potential monster because that's what the movie told me.  Now, it sounds like I'm really grousing about this ending, right?  Those people who know how it ends see this scene when she lets Kranau escape because she is attracted to him or loves him?  That's a Hollywood ending.  

But the great thing is that the movie doesn't let us off the hook that easily.  Kranau's escape is actually kind of a big deal.  I was watching this scene and I was supposed to be romantically moved by it.  Instead, I'm watching that scene thinking that Kranau was going to slaughter all kinds of Austrians because he's a really effective spy.  Coupled with that is that the relationship between these two didn't seem mutual.  If anything, it was like X-27 carried a torch for a guy who might have been borderline abusive, but that might be more of a product of 1931 than anything else.  Anyway, Marie is still shot.  Josef von Sternberg teases us that somehow, this great masterspy is going to somehow escape using her feminie wiles.  Instead, we have an interrupted execution only to be capped with the death of Marie by firing squad.  It's a heck of a choice to do all that, but I dug it.  Yeah, there were moments where I thought, "Man, Marie did bring out that music piece that kind of saved a bunch of people."  But then I realized the movie was kind of right.  She probably undid all the good that she accomplished with the music thing by letting Kranau go.  

Magicians and comedians both work on the premise of misdirection.  They build up suspense, make you think you know how something is going to go, and then turn right when you thought that they were going to go left.  While Dishonored is an incredibly immature film, mostly due to the juxtaposition of similar films that followed it, it does have a great dismount.  I don't think it is enough to save the movie.  But I at least have something memorable to take away.