The Scarlet Empress (1934)

Approved, but I'm starting to realize that Josef von Sternberg might be a guy who is pushing the pre-code stuff pretty hard.  There's this montage of people being tortured by the Russian government and there seem to be some topless ladies in that sequence.  Like, are you supposed to be shocked by the violent torture of people or the fact that a lot of them seem to be topless?  Also, there's an implication that Catherine is sleeping her way around the Russian royalty and military to get ahead.  Still, pre-code approval?

DIRECTOR:  Josef von Sternberg

I can't be the only one who thinks that this movie is absolutely awful, right?

Seriously, it might be my least favorite in the box set.  (I'd also like to note that, despite never having been played, it stalled out at two separate parts of the film.  The disc looks pretty darned immaculate as well.) In a million years would I think that a Josef von Sternberg / Marlene Dietrich box set would be a slog to get through, but I've now educated myself.  There are a lot of reasons that I really disliked The Scarlet Empress.  But I gotta say, I'm going to be rough on this movie.  Just because something is black-and-white and Criterion doesn't mean it's automatically a great film.

Let's start with the most unfair criticism ever:  Marie Antoinette did it better.  There are so many reasons that I shouldn't be able to get away with that trite accusation.  I adore Marie Antoinette.  Every so often, it slips into my Top 5, so to compare The Scarlet Empress to Marie Antoinette is borderline rude.  Nothing is Marie Antoinette.  It's just that they have such shared DNA that I can't help but make that comparison.  Yeah, they are different royal stories.  But ultimately, these are two women destined to marry boorish royals for the sake of joining two nations and siring children.  Both of them are miserable by the men that they marry and struggle with a loss of identity at the expense of playing the games that royalty plays.  Sure, both are true stories.  But you know what is also true about both these movies?  You watch both of these movies and both movies scream historical inaccuracy.  The difference, however, is that Sofia Coppola made Marie Antoinette in an anachronistic style for the sake of tone and storytelling.  Josef von Sternberg made his film the way he did because he's kind of lazy.

Man, I must be in a mood.  Like, I'm not pulling punches that absolutely deserve to be pulled.  Lazy is too mean.  Josef von Sternberg, from me guessing, is trying to do two things.  The first thing he is trying to do is make an epic romance.  I'm going to apply a little bit of German filmmaking history to this film, despite the fact that von Sternberg was Austrian.  The era that von Sternberg cut his teeth on film was during the Weimar Republic.  While this era in German cinema was defined by German Expressionism (weird, Tim-Burtony design stuff), it was also known for the historical and literary epic.  When all these ex-pats made their way to America, they took the filmmaking skills they learned in Europe and applied them to the American studio system.  Epic romances were in vogue, hence why we see the sendup of them with The Dueling Cavalier in Singin' in the Rain. Golly, I could not get The Dueling Cavalier out of my head when I was watching this.  The handsome man giving inappropriate kisses?  The romance that's not really there, despite the movie screaming that the romance is there.  It's all a lot.  Marlene Dietrich isn't helping with this, by the way.  She's really leaning into the whole Marlene Dietrich vibe. Anyway, I'm going to go into that later. 

But secondly, I do think that this is something that von Sternberg was probably really into.  Yeah, I was hoping that he was Hungarian too to justify this argument.  I'm sure that if I do a deeper dive, there's a connection to this Muscovite obsession that this movie implies.  It feels like he really wants to pay homage to this woman who took the more savage elements of Russian society at the time and weaponized it for her own good.  Yeah, there is a story here.  It's not that there shouldn't be a story about Catherine the Second.  The story, however, should not be what we got.

A lot of my beef with these movies is that Marlene Dietrich is never really asked to act a lot.  I have a fairly devious thing that I say that often has people turn on me.  *Ahem*  I rarely get excited to see that Anthony Hopkins is in a movie.  Now, I think that Anthony Hopkins, if watched sparingly, is an incredible actor.  Silence of the Lambs is something special.  Watching him as Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of the more inspired casting choices of history. But when you watch him too much, you realize he's kind of doing variations of the same thing over and over.  It's fine.  It absolutely does the job in almost everything he's played.  I just don't get excited because I can almost predict what the performance is going to be like.  Now, Marlene Dietrich isn't even at that level.  Marlene Dietrich gives the same performance and that performance isn't all that interesting.  Golly, I'm really going for the jugular in this blog.  I'm not usually this spicy, but Dietrich is giving off something very specific every time I see her.  That specific thing is "Lady who sleeps her way into power" and that doesn't really fill me with a lot of inspiration.

And this kind of performance isn't simply on Dietrich's shoulders.  If anything, she's the best part of this movie.  Golly, everyone in this movie is playing one emotion and playing it hard.  They're all about vibes.  The Grand Duke Peter, who is meant to be insane, just grins in every scene.  Catherine the First yells at everyone as a violent matriarch.  Count Alexei, geez...where do I start with him?  These aren't characters.  They are archetypes.  No one has motivation.  No one has nuance.  They represent obstacles.  But this is a story about real people.  I'm not saying that you shouldn't make the Grand Duke Peter not insane.  But also understand that mental illness is a nuanced thing fulls of highs and lows.  Catherine the First should be shrewish, but maybe make her a yelling character because she's scared what might happen to the kingdom if she lets her guard down.  I don't know what the heck to do with Count Alexei because he's there to be cold and handsome.  If he did the things that the movie says he did upon meeting the young Sophia, then lets figure out what makes him tick like that.

I'm not saying that story should never be told.  Yeah, there's something interesting about that idea.  But what Sternberg and Dietrich are presenting isn't a nuanced tale of a tortured person.  Instead, it's meant to be a romantic shortcut.  She is playing an archetype that is really never meant to be scrutinized because it feels like the final goal is pretty shallow.  These movies are kind of like reading trashy romance novels.  The original opening for this blog was just going to be an all-caps "MELODRAMA."  It's lowest common denominator versions of what relationships are supposed to be.  Yes, I appreciate that we don't have morally righteous protagonists.  That, too, would be boring.  But what we get is character change (I refuse to say "growth" in this situation) that honestly feels unearned.  

Even worse, this movie almost forgets why the overthrow of the emperor mattered in the course of history.  The movie starts with this torture scene.  When Peter ascends to the throne, there's a montage of violence across the land.  But really, the peasants and the citizens of Moscow are a complete afterthought in this story.  It should be about the people.  They are going through absolute hell throughout all of the events.  But what does the story focus on?  Sophia / Catherine.  Yes, her life in the castle was terrible.  But it was a cakewalk compared to what the citizens of Russia were going through that made this story inspirational.  And it's not like Catherine did all of these things with some political savvy that manipulated the innerworkings of government.  Instead, she took the advice of finding a lover and kept repeating that until she was able to escape the castle.  

Can I tell you my favorite silly moment?  To get Catherine out of the castle, the military dresses her up as a soldier so she can sneak past the guards.  But Sternberg doesn't give her a normal military outfit.  Nope, she gets a special, sexy military outfit.  Because she's Marlene Dietrich.  That's dumb.  That's so dumb.  

Ultimately, what this movie was shooting for was pagentry.  The goal was so that 1930s housewives could look at what they imagined Russia looked like and whisper to each other, "Isn't it all so majestic?"  That's not a great movie.