Review of The Scarlet Empress (1934) by Brad S — 04 May 2015

Imagine a staircase leading to an open window. A bright light leaks from its center, white doves flying in in hopes to escape the snowy cruelty of the outside. Flowery confetti fills the atmosphere, spinning around in the circling draft of the wind; a gold silken sheet floats down the staircase with the slink of a python on the prowl. Spotted horses, covered in the furs of their master, stand alongside its initial steps, providing company for the lonely statues that adorn the corridor. As we stumble into this foyer, lost in a labyrinth of style, we're both transfixed and horrified, hypnotized by its incandescent beauty, sickened by its seemingly unrelenting movement.

Such disquieting allure infects "The Scarlet Empress", an epic in style over substance that uses the scheme of a biopic to give itself an excuse to call itself a movie. In reality, it's a moving painting: every scene is so crammed with ornate decor (ominous gargoyles, gnarled furniture, eye-clogging ball gowns) it's as though Leonardo Da Vinci was asked to set an empress' likeness in stone and ended up exhausting himself through a lavish series of works, dying from an overworked heart at its conclusion.

"The Scarlet Empress" is a carnival of decoration, born as the daughter of a hoarder with a mystical eye and dying as one of Prince's jilted lovers. The film begins beautifully and ends beautifully, but changing is its initial feeling of enchantment, which slowly descends into a pit of contorted exoticism. A terminal case of style over substance can sometimes work, but "The Scarlet Empress" is all style and no substance, the style being the result of a drug-induced fever dream. It's as if von Sternberg purchased a studio apartment and decided to fill it with a family of hot pink elephants.

But the film is made with a great deal of sensibility, and that's why its cloying ornamentation endures as such a lastingly daring experiment 80+ years later. So much of its outrageousness is done for the sake of simply doing it - doors are so meaty they require six well-dressed women to open them; Marlene Dietrich changes outfits at such an obsessive pace that loudness becomes a given, untouchable furs become a benchmark. Von Sternberg knows that these things provide for interesting fixtures to the eye, and is relentless with how much is put onto the screen. It's a conscious dedication, and it's riveting, however tiring it eventually becomes.

"The Scarlet Empress" is a "biopic", its heroine being Catherine the Great, portrayed by a meticulously photographed Dietrich. The film focuses on her transformation from innocent high society daughter to supremely sexual, ultra-cruel dominatrix. She is forced to marry the idiotic Peter (Sam Jaffe), but as her marriage progresses the more she coats in her confidence, lining up man after man to fulfill her most dreamy of desires.

The movie isn't a precisely researched source for the history books; it's a vehicle in which von Sternberg is able to go mad with every stylistic inhibition he has ever repressed, a vehicle for Dietrich to seal herself as a screen vamp for an eternity. She does not have to be an actress here - von Sternberg fondles her with his camera, bringing an unseen animal attraction to her erotic face, placing her in a room as though she is the center of the assorted configurations of decoration.

"The Scarlet Empress" was released just as the Hays Code was beginning to prosper, allowing for sexuality to ooze off the screen while retaining a snarky sense of bawdy humor. Dietrich is an actress whose persona feeds on sensuality - a film like this suits both her and von Sternberg's ebullient talents. With no story to speak of, the film often leans toward the unexciting (style can only enrapture for so long before it begins to wane), but it's momentous that the movie, almost a century old, was so ballsy in its design in a time where money spoke and artistry started as a whisper.