Review of The Scarlet Empress (1934) by Emanuel D — 09 Aug 2007

If you?re after subtlety, watch another movie. This one is as in your face as Scream.

Josef von Sternberg directs Marlene Dietrich again. This is Dietrich as you imagine her. A sexy, sultry vixen who can pretend to be a dumb bimbo if it serves her wily ends. She plays here both the virginal school-girl and the dominatrix man-eater in this film that sees her transformation more like a Damascus experience than a gradual evolution.

Princess Sofia Federica (Dietrich) is a young aristocrat related to the Prussian royal family. The Prussian King arranges for her to marry the heir to the Russian throne. Her family feel they have done well to have been chosen for such a high-profile wedding. The little princess would become Tsarina of all the Russias but she looks an unlikely candidate just yet. She?s naïve and unworldly and seems to understand little of politics, not to mention the sexual politics and court intrigue of late 18th century Europe.

The Russian Empress commissions Prince August (C. Aubrey Smith) to escort Princess Sofia to Moscow. Prince August is tall, handsome, sultry and highly sexual in an obvious sort of way. He pouts his lips, squints his eyes and hisses as he draws breath. He is more creepy than sexy but that may be my entirely male or my entirely 21st century bias talking. In any case it is not beyond Princess Sofia?s bias who is entirely crushed by his magnetism.

On the trip to Moscow, Princess Sofia is accompanied by her mother who watches over her daughter and prevents her from arriving to Moscow blackened by the filthy, groping hands of Prince August. She catches the two in flagrante and it is clear to her as to Prince August that the little, virginal schoolgirl is curious if nothing worse.

When she arrives to Moscow she is received by the formidable Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (Louise Dresser), a less pompous aristocrat you will never know. She is tough and she is rough and as far as she is concerned Princess Sofia (now re-baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church as Catherine, a ?more Russian name?) is a womb recruited to produce a male heir to replace as quickly as possible the next in line to the throne, Elizabeth?s nephew and Catherine?s betrothed (Sam Jaffe).

To Sofia when still in Prussia, the Grand Duke Peter was introduced as some demi-god of charisma, strength and virility. In person her new husband turns out to be an imbecile, implicitly sodomite, brutally obtuse and self-centred and entirely incompetent to run his wardrobe, not to mention the largest country on earth. Catherine starts out accepting her fate and thinking of how to be a loyal wife in spite of Prince August?s persistent attentions.

The drama is now played out in the Tsarina?s palace, a gothic, grotesque place that organically grows out of German expressionist cinema. It is not just a matter of arches and ceilings and stairwells and mirrors. The entire drama is seeped in style ? in overdone costume, in overdone headwear, in overdone setting, in overdone statuary. It is style and design over matter. And that is because style here is matter.

Take the overdone statuary. Each room is decorated, for want of a better word, by grotesque statues that represent through leering exaggeration the mood set by the purpose of that room. Consider the chairs in the council chamber. The participants of the council are looked down upon by enormous thinking figures who seem to be contemplating with regret and devastation the disastrously wrong decisions taken by the dwarfed councillors.

It is in this chamber that Catherine bursts to protest against Elizabeth?s decision to exile her mother. Elizabeth explains that Catherine has obviously been under the wrong impression on what makes a dutiful wife and this must have come from the bad education provided by her family. It was now Elizabeth?s turn to teach Catherine the ways of the world.

And the lesson she teaches Catherine is how sex can be used to wield power, especially by women. Elizabeth has learned of Catherine?s attraction for Prince August so she commissions her to bring him to her imperial bed chamber, an errand that will have the double effect of grafting the Tsarina?s power over both of them.

This is when Catherine sees the bright light and falls off her horse. She is not blinded though. She wanders out of the palace and shags the first reasonably good looking man she comes across producing the much needed heir to the Russian throne.

Her character is transformed through quasi-miraculous metamorphosis into the sexual mistress Catherine is remembered as and the film uses no subtlety to represent this. This is a movie that slithers by the self-censoring production code that would emasculate American movies for a long time.

In one line on the silent-movie era caption cards that drive this early sound epic forward, we are told ?Catherine conquered the army? for which we are expected to read that she fucked her way to army loyalty.

When push came to shove ? excuse the pun ? Catherine could rely on her conquests, including significantly the leadership of the Church, to grasp from idiotic Peter the throne of Russia.

On two feet, in a white hussar uniform (even more jaw-droppingly sexy than the more extravagant outfits Dietrich sports in this movie), she stands in front of the throne of Russia as the winner of a palace coup. There can be little doubt that her smile is from the ultimate orgasm: that driven by power over many men.