Blonde Venus **** (1932, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant) – Classic Movie Review 1274

Svengali-style producer-director Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 vintage romance provides a famous role for his protégé Marlene Dietrich as Helen Faraday, who works as the Blonde Venus chanteuse in smooth young millionaire playboy Nick Townsend’s nightclub. This is an early role for Cary Grant, helping him propel to stardom, via two Mae West vehicles, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, filmed the following year. There’s no upstaging Dietrich here, whether in a man’s suit or a gorilla suit, but Grant makes a strong impression anyway.

Helen is a sexy but fine woman, only working at the club nobly in order to pay for an operation for and save the life of her rather dull husband Ned (Herbert Marshall). Ned is an American chemist poisoned with Radium and expecting to die within the year. A doctor tells him that there is a famous German doctor who has had success treating radiation poison and recommends Ned to travel to Germany.

To get enough money quicker, Helen sells herself to Nick Townsend and, while Ned is away in Europe, she continues being with Nick. But later, when Ned returns cured, he discovers her infidelity with Nick and decides to make her choose between the two of them. Dickie Moore plays the married couple Helen and Ned’s son Johnny.

Blonde Venus is not quite first-level Dietrich, maybe, but very nearly and it’s still irresistible. The star’s emergence from a gorilla suit to sing ‘Hot Voodoo’ in the nightclub is stunning, and von Sternberg in his fourth collaboration with Dietrich provides the intriguing original story and as director casts his gleaming spell over the Victorian melodramatic-style proceedings.

Dietrich enchantingly performs three numbers, ‘You Little So-and-So’ (music and lyrics by Sam Coslow and Leo Robin) and ‘I Couldn’t Be Annoyed’ (music and lyrics by Leo Robin and Richard A Whiting), as well as the highlight song ‘Hot Voodoo’ (music by Ralph Rainger, lyrics by Sam Coslow), which is nearly eight minutes long and mostly instrumental, featuring jazz trumpet and drums, with Dietrich singing the lyrics towards the end of the sequence. The songs also include ‘Sidewalks of New York’ and Felix Mendelssohn’s Gruss ‘Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt’.

Sidney Toler, Hattie McDaniel, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Francis Sayles, Gene Morgan, Rita La Roy, Morgan Wallace, Dewey Robinson, Sterling Holloway, Mary Gordon, Cecil Cunningham, Marcelle Corday and Clarence Muse also co-star.

This Paramount Pictures movie has a screenplay by Jules Furthman and S. K. Lauren, a music score by W. Franke Harling, John Leipold, Paul Marquardt and Oscar Potoker, and cinematography by Bert Glennon.

Mae West always claimed to have discovered Cary Grant for She Done Him Wrong, angering him by saying that up until then he had only made ‘some tests with starlets’.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1274

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more film reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/