The Devil Is a Woman ***** (1935, Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton) – Classic Movie Review 3122

Director Josef von Sternberg’s exotically beautiful 1935 romantic drama stars Marlene Dietrich in her last movie partnership with her real-life Svengali-figure. It is based on Pierre Louys’s story of obsessive love, La Femme et Le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet), which Luis Buñuel reworked later in his classic That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

Dietrich is at her most alluring as Concha Perez, a Seville siren luring men to their doom at the end of the last century, among them Captain Don Pasqual ‘Pasqualito’ Costelar, memorably played by Lionel Atwill, who suffers grandly.  ‘Lie some more,’ Pasqualito says to Concha, ‘you lie so well.’

Lucien Ballard’s glorious, gleaming black and white cinematography is so transfixing that you hardly dare say that movie would have been wonderful in colour. The director wanted to call it Caprice Espagnol (the name of the Rimsky Korsakov music), but the Paramount studio understandably insisted on this more suggestive title of The Devil Is a Woman for better box office.

It also stars Cesar Romero as Antonio Galvan, Edward Everett Horton as Governor Don Paquito ‘Paquitito’, Alison Skipworth as Señora Perez and Don Alvarado as Morenito.

Morgan Wallace, Tempe Pigott, Lawrence Grant, Charles Sellon, Hank Mann, Edwin Maxwell, Donald Read, Paco (Francisco) Moreno and Eddie Borden also appear.

Dietrich said that this was her favourite of all her films and kept a print of it in a bank vault for safe keeping. In the Eighties new prints were struck from this for re-release, accounting for today’s superb quality prints and DVD copies.

The Spanish government protested at the negative portrayal of the Spanish police and threatened to ban all Paramount films in Spain and its territories unless the film was withdrawn from worldwide circulation. So Paramount caved in and destroyed the original print after its initial run and the film was out of circulation until 1959.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3122

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