Angel (1937)

Truly Dreadful Film

Thanks for the memories!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Blistering performances.

I've seen all of Lubitsch's films and I rate Angel as his worst. The faults are in a bland repetitive script and the strangely ambiguous, wooden performance of Marlene Dietrich. There are times she appears more masculine than her costars Melvyn Douglas and Herbert Marshall.The sexual playfulness and subtle daring - so delightfully evident in Lubitsch's other films - here often fall flat. Made a few years before Angel, one of Ernst Lubitsch's best films, also based on a play (Noël Coward's Design for Living), has a woman at the center of a love triangle. The shock, particularly for a 30s Hollywood movie, is that the three live together in a bohemian Paris flat. In his directing, as well as the performances of Frederic March and Gary Cooper, there is never a hint of homo-eroticism. Ironically in Angel the best scene, a climactic one between Douglas and Marshall, is full of sexual energy.Subtle sophistication was always an Ernst Lubitsch trademark. There is little evidence of sparkling wit and originality in Angel.

Ernst Lubitsch was an incredibly talented director, who to me rarely made a dud, with his best films even being masterpieces. Even his lesser films are worth a look, even if just once, and better than a lot of directors at their worst.'Angel' is not among his best films, being not in the same league as 'The Merry Widow', 'Ninotchka', Heaven Can Wait', 'The Shop Around the Corner' and especially 'Trouble in Paradise'. It is however, for all its imperfections, one of his more overlooked films. Some may say 'Angel' is a gem, others may say it's a rare dud. To me, it's neither but is much better than its reputation suggests.By all means it could have been better. It does lag in places, not helped by a story being a bit thin for the running time, with some of the romantic melodrama laid on too thickly at times. Herbert Marshall, who is more capable of giving a good performance but has also given some dull ones, is rather somnolent in his role. A few of the secondary roles are underwritten, Edward Everett Horton while still being very funny in particular is under-utilised.With those being said, while just lacking the famous "Lubitsch touch", being on subdued form and lacking the risqué edge, Lubitsch does direct with his customary class and subtlety. He also has some beautiful visual touches, in a lovingly photographed and designed film that clearly loves Marlene Dietrich, judging by now positively luminous she looks.Music is appropriately whimsical in places while also sweeping without being overbearing. The script does have some sparkling humour in the supporting roles and typically sophisticated with a warm charm. The story is less than perfect but has some fun and charming moments.Dietrich is as aforementioned luminous, has a class and elegance and gives her character good comic timing and pathos. In the supporting roles, Horton and Ernest Cossart are particularly entertaining with their back and forth standing out of the comedy.In conclusion, could have been better but overlooked. 7/10 Bethany Cox

ANGEL (Paramount, 1937), produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch, returns Marlene Dietrich to sophisticated comedy following her amusing role in DESIRE (1936) as a continental jewel thief. As much as this production could very well have been a cute romantic fantasy of an angel assigned from Heaven out to guide a troubled individual on Earth, what resulted was a domestic story about a bored wife who acquires the pet name of "Angel" from a complete stranger while her husband is away. While Dietrich's DESIRE proved favorable, ANGEL did not. The story begins on an airplane bound for France where Lady Maria Barker (Marlene Dietrich) registers at the Hotel Imperial. Coming to the Club De La Russia, 314 Rue De La Tour, to visit with an old friend, The Grand Duchess Anna Dmitrievna (Laura Hope Crews), the club's owner steps away to take care of matters, leaving Maria to step into a private sitting room where she encounters Anthony Halton (Melvyn Douglas), an American looking to meet someone for an amusing time in Paris. Mistaken for the Duchess, Maria agrees to show the gentleman around. After dinner, the couple rest on a park bench where Maria, refusing to give her name, finds herself embraced and kissed by a man who not only expresses his true love for her after only a short time, but dubs her "Angel." As breaking away to buy her a bouquet of violets, Halton returns to find his "Angel" gone. Sir Frederick Barker (Herbert Marshall), a British nobleman and delegate to the League of Nations, returns from Geneva to his British home and his wife, Maria. Unaware of her unhappiness and their dull existence together, things begin to change upon the visitation of her husband's wartime friend, a man wanting to meet his "Angel." Taken from the play by Melchor Lengyel, ANGEL contains some variations lifted from Lubitsch's own 1932 musical, ONE HOUR WITH YOU, where a doctor (Maurice Chevalier) innocently encounters a flirtatious married woman (Genevieve Tobin), who turns out to be the best friend of his wife (Jeanette MacDonald) whom she invited to their home. As with the husband and guest pretending to not to lead on their previous encounter to his spouse, Dietrich's Maria and Douglas' Halton do the same, but on more on a serious nature. Containing less wit than Lubitsch's previous efforts, the supporting cast contains some of the best known "comedy relief" types on screen, ranging from Edward Everett Horton and Ernest Cossart as the household servants, to the daffy Dennie Moore playing Cossart's fiancée, Emma McGillicutty. Interestingly all their roles, which might have given the story some life during some dull stretches, are sadly limited. For one of the film's better assets, there's that fine "Angel" theme score composed by Frederick Hollander. According to Robert Osborne, host on Turner Classic Movies where ANGEL premiered in January 17, 2002, during its tribute to Marlene Dietrich, Lubitsch and Dietrich both had high expectations for this film. In spite of Samson Raphaelson's promising screenplay, the film's box office failure lead to Dietrich's termination from her home studio. Fortunately the label of Dietrich as "box office poison" didn't last long with her reinvention screen persona in the hit western of DESTRY RIDES AGAIN (Universal, 1939) opposite James Stewart.Virtually unknown and/or forgotten among the film credits of either Dietrich or Lubitsch, ANGEL did get some exposure through its 1990s distribution on home video through MCA/Universal. Possibly viewing ANGEL more as a drama than a comedy might help accept the film for what it is rather than what it's expected to be. (**1/2)

Given the talent involved -- Dietrich at the height of her allure, Melvyn Douglas (who proved such a wonderful foil to Garbo just two years later in "Ninotchka"), support from such able troupers as Edward Everett Horton and Laura Hope Crews, and above all the famed "touch" of Lubitsch -- "Angel" should be a sparkling romp, a melancholy romance of renunuciation, a worldly social comedy, or better yet, all three.Instead it's a mostly tiresome slog through familiar territory, as if all involved were inspired not by Dietrich or Lubitsch but by the stolid Herbert Marshall as Marlene's aristo-Brit husband.While several recent writers on both Dietrich and Lubitsch have tried to tout this as an undeservingly overlooked film, it's really most worth watching for Crew's pre-Pittypat turn as a Russian emigre-turned-nightclub-hostess, and her few brief scenes can hardly save the picture.Dietrich fans are better off hunting up stills -- she does look terrific in the wardrobe of English Gentlewoman tweeds and furs, and her legendary collection of emeralds were rarely shown to better advantage.