GK Chesterton once said that art, like morality, consisted in knowing where to draw the line. Director Josef von Sternberg didn't strip Marlene Dietrich, Hollywood's greatest love goddess - he covered her up, swathing her in furs, veils and feathers, and in so doing created a subject far more erotic than any literalness could have achieved. What made her so enigmatic was her cold disdain and sullenness, refined to include not only the weary glance but also a radiance brimming with soft lights and shadows. Throughout the seven films they made together, von Sternberg elaborated and developed increasingly more baroque variations on the subject of the femme fatale. Dietrich's provocation and passivity, sexuality and serenity, remain constant.
All six of her von Sternberg Hollywood vehicles are featured in this collection. Out of the Mediterranean fog steps Dietrich into her first American picture Morocco, a North African wonderland of rippling light, heat, desire, sex, and Gary Cooper. In the First World War thriller, Dishonored, she portrays a Viennese prostitute whose services are engaged for the purpose of espionage; its equation of sexual magnetism with political power is explicit. Shanghai Express is pure visual poetry, a tremendously lavish producion featuring fluttering pennants, slatted sunlight, latticed shadows, a long train ride from Peking to Shanghai, plus Dietrich as the notorious Shanghai Lily. Blonde Venus has her emerging from a gorilla suit while singing 'Hot Voodoo' - one of Hollywood's most delicious pieces of camp kitsch. Dietrich is Catherine the Great in The Scarlet Empress, one of the most visually extravagant Hollywood pictures ever made, and the aloof, cryptic, Spanish seductress Concha in The Devil Is a Woman - a dazzlingly sumptuous, stylized tour de force that is the most outrageously decadent of the von Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations.
And that’s not even half of what’s on here.
A collection of 18 classic Marlene Dietrich films, most of which are making their DVD premiere. Features Angel, Blonde Venus, Desire, Destry Rides Again, The Devil is a Woman, Dishonored, The Flame of New Orleans, Follow the Boys, A Foreign Affair, Golden Earrings, Morocco, Pittsburgh, The Scarlet Empress, Seven Sinners, Shanghai Express, The Song of Songs, The Spoilers, Touch of Evil.
The Leopard 
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Marlene Dietrich: Movie Collection
