The Devil is a Woman (1935)

Approved.  I mean, everything is pretty darned tame in the movie.  But if you think about what is going on in this movie for even a second, yeah, the whole thing is pretty gross.  Basically, this is a movie accusing women of sexually manipulating men to do their bidding, ultimately leading men to try to murder each other.  There's some comic bits, but everything I'm reading says that this movie is meant to be take quasi-seriously.  There's some mild violence, but that's about it.  Oh, wait.  I completely forgot about the domestic abuse.  That's pretty awful.

DIRECTOR: Josef von Sternberg

I do not care for this.  Not one bit.

Okay, I thought that I would eventually come around on this box set.  But nothing got me more frustrated than each movie somehow doubling down on the worst elements of the previous films.  I know.  I'm alone in this loathing.  Everyone else seems to like these movies...a lot.  My reviews tend to be the only negative reviews of these movies.  Can I be more glib than normal?  I feel like people see "Old black-and-white movie" and that means that it is somehow a classic.  I know.  There's always Plan 9 from Outer Space.  But I honestly had more fun with Plan 9 than I did the Josef von Sternberg.  

Coincidentally, I'm teaching Josef von Sternberg right now in my film class.  I always had a von Sternberg slide, but I had never seen the movies.  Now, I've seen all of the movies that my slide and I can now give commentary on these films.  The thing that von Sternberg had always gotten praise for is the fact that he aimed to make every cell a work of art.  I mean, you really have to squint to see where he's coming from.  This is a dude who was all about mise en scene and I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to that.  What I watch when I watch movies like The Devil is a Woman is that it all feels a bit hokey.  It's all a cheaper version of what could be something great.  In the box set that I watched, I saw a bunch of movies that all tried to capture the wonder of foreign places that American housewives of the 1930s probably only dreamt of.  But it never really felt like anything even remotely authentic.  If anything, the takeaway I have from Josef von Sternberg is that he's more Epcot than bonafide traveller.  Golly, the broad stereotypes that these movies embrace honestly feel lazy.  

That's probably the most frustrating things about Josef von Sternberg movies.  Very rarely do Marlene Dietrich's characters feel like real people.  Instead, Dietrich leans in so hard into stereotypes and archetypes that it's incredibly hard to take the movie at all seriously.  Honest to Pete, I had an existential crisis thinking that I watched the von Sternberg movies through the wrong lens.  I thought, at one point, "This romance is so fake that all of these movies might have been satire or parody."  I just Googled it.  No, these movies were meant to be things that people watched to fall madly in love with Hollywood.  I don't get it.  Let's focus entirely on The Devil is a Woman, considering that this is technically a blog on that.  It doesn't hurt either that it feels like The Devil is a Woman is the ur-von Sternberg movie.  (Say that ten times fast.) 

The story is almost an epistolary story.  A jaded officer tells a young upstart about this woman who absolutely has him wrapped around her finger.  Marlene Dietrich's Concha, a borderline racist portrayal of a Spanish con artist, is awful for really no reason.  Now, can I admit that there are people in the world that are terrible like Concha?  Sure.  But if the role of storytelling is to create full worlds for these characters where an audience is meant to remotely relate to this character.  But do Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg want us to understand what makes Concha tick?  Honestly, I don't think there's even an attempt for this.  With the title The Devil is a Woman, this feels like a send up of the harlot character.  It's really weird, because Concha is the main character of the story.  Sure, we have to say that Don Pasqual is probably the protagonist of the piece because we are following his goals.  But the strange narrative that women use their sexuality to manipulate men is kinda gross.  And I'm not talking 2026 gross.  There seems to be some joy in showing how powerless men are over sexually attractive women.  I mean, I say "sexually attractive women."  But those drawn on eyebrows?  Sir, we must have a talk.

But since I introduced 2026 Tim, I want to have this paragraph unabashedly talk about how insane this entire thing is.  The key concept is that Concha is holding all the cards because she's so cunning.  Let's put this out here.  Concha does nothing clever.  If anything, she's almost comically honest about how promiscuous she is.  She sings a song about it and everything.  But even beyond that, there's a very gross assumption that men can't control their sexual desires.  Let's treat Don Pasqual as an abboration.  After all, if I'm adding a lot of myself into breaking down his character (because I still say that von Sternberg barely touches on any of it), I can force a reasoning for his behavior.  Pasqual is an older soldier, disappointed by his own station.  Success hasn't brought him the comfort that he expected and he meet Concha, a woman who pushes his every button.  Most people move out of his way.  She stands her ground. Cool.  I can see why, when she has her claws in him, that he continues to make toxic and self-destructive choices.  But that leaves Antonio, played by Cesar Romero (?!  That Cesar Romero?).  Antonio has the heads up on Concha.  He loathes her simply from the story that he was told.   He goes to meet her to kill her and then she asks for a kiss.  

That's stupid.  I'm sorry.  I refuse to believe that Concha is so much of a force of nature that people forget to kill her.  There's no real convesation.  She doesn't let him see a different side of the world.  If anything, Antonio is singularly focused, unlike the bored and tired Pasqual.  The fact that he's ready to kill Pasqual over this woman makes not a lick of sense.  I mean, the entire movie is almost a horror movie about this woman who can make men throw away their souls with a simple glance.  That's not love.  There's nothing romantic about this movie.  I don't understand why these men are losing their everloving minds over this woman outside the fact that the movie tells us that men are meant to lose their everloving minds over her.  I want something that seems real.  I want to have one moment of vulnerability that explains why Concha is somehow worthy of all of this attention.  But, no.  The title stays, implying that women have feminine wiles that are only used for evil.  Come on.  We can do better.  Von Sternberg knows that he has Marlene Dietrich and Marlene Dietrich is associated with being a bombshell.  That's not a movie to me.  It's just her being distant and removed for an hour-and-a-half.  That's so disappointing to me.  I want substance and The Devil is a Woman doesn't even say anything remotely true.  It's just attitude and vibes the entire time.

The movie is dumb.  These movies...they're dumb.  I know I'm alone in this.  Dietrich keeps playing these shallow characters and people don't act like people.  It's reading romance novels that aren't really challenging.  There are great romances out there.  It's not like the entire genre is trash.  But there is a lot of trash in this genre and Dietrich and von Sternberg added to it.