Review of The Scarlet Empress (1934) by Luc A — 30 Apr 2012

The great Jozef von Sternberg was New York's best student of the German expressionist style of cinema. To drive this point home, Sternberg populates the movie with appropriately grotesque gargoyles whilst focusing the audience's attention on the lascivious Marlene Dietrich as the young, sex-mad princess Catherine (only once she has spent a first night with a Hussar does she act with any conviction; Marlene I am afraid, does not do innocence well.....).

Aptly, Jozef is quoted as saying that "I care nothing about the story, only how it is photographed and presented." And indeed 'The Scarlet Empress' represents terrible history telling but great cinema... the two being able to coexist most happily as the great Soviet propaganda movies confirm.

Historians write that Peter III (portrayed to great effect by Sam Jaffe as a half-wit and a lunatic) was in reality a serious, reform-minded monarch who implemented 220 new laws in his short 186 days in power: proclaiming religious freedom, abolishing the secret police, instituting compulsory education for the nobility, dispensing them from obligatory military service and giving them the freedom to travel abroad. For the first time in Russia's unusually bloody history, killing a peasant became punishable by law!

Watching the Scarlet Empress leaves the viewer woefully ignorant of Peter's true greatness. Instead Marlene Dietrich works her seductive charm and our sympathies are misdirected to the Lady Macbeth-like figure of Catherine: although her hand in her husband's murder was never proven; the murderers were richly rewarded by the newly-crowned empress and the hated secret police was soon reinstituted under her reign.