In life things always turn out the way they have to, in the cinema it’s a little different. This is how Trude Hesterberg should have made the career that Marlene Dietrich initially didn’t want. And that’s how it happened: Heinrich Mann suggested his lover Hesterberg for the leading role in the film adaptation of his novel “Professor Unrat”. However, he was not able to assert himself with this: the director Josef von Sternberg, who was born in Vienna and became known in Hollywood in the 1920s, decided on the then unknown Marlene Dietrich.
Apparently, she wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the offer, but then she played the whirlwind girl Lola-Lola so convincingly that she became a star. And not only in Germany: “The Blue Angel” was released in cinemas worldwide in 1930.
In its retrospective of the films of Josef von Sternberg, the Film Museum is also showing the English-language version “The Blue Angel” (June 10), which was made at the same time and is hardly known in this country. The other films he made with Marlene Dietrich in Hollywood are also on the schedule, such as “Morocco” (in which she wears tails and kisses a woman), “Dishonored” or “Shanghai Express”. The films with Dietrich are his best-known, but Josef von Sternberg’s silent films are also shown: there is live music in the cinema for “The Salvation Hunters”, “Underworld” or “The Docks of New York”. The retrospective will continue in September.
Retrospective Josef von Sternberg, until June 23, movie museumSt.-Jakobs-Platz 1