Rent Morocco (1930)

Classic Dietrich - Morocco review by PT

A fantastic showcase for Marlene Dietrich, which makes the most of her talents. Von Sternberg was fascinated with the actress and this shows with the lighting and camerawork when she's on screen. There is a line in the film when she says to Gary Cooper, pertaining to her question did he join the foreign Legion to forget the past, when she replies that there is a french foreign Legion for women too, but we don't have the uniform or medals. Arriving in Morocco via ship, we know nothing of her past except for the Legion quote we hear later, that gives us a clue to her fragility.

There she takes a job as a cabaret singer. She is awesome in these set pieces, smouldering and seductive in her top hat and tails. This is where she meets Gary Cooper and an on off romance ensues. Dietrich is simultaneously the seductress and a vulnerable woman in this film, which is why it's so great.

The ending is just so beautifully shot and moving, framed by the entrance gates , which reminded me of similar framing by John Ford in the Searchers. Great movie.

Melodramatic Exotica (spoiler). - Morocco review by Steve

The arrival of sound was a revolution and like many early talkies, Morocco imparts a sensation of a medium in shock. The performers are speaking slowly, and leave pauses between lines. There is no music. Other than the lighting and smoking of cigarettes the impassive actors do nothing while they talk. The imperative is to speak clearly so the microphone picks up their dialogue.

Without music on the soundtrack, this feels slow and soporific. It creates an aesthetic through necessity, but in films about exotic escapism, it actually works. The studio built Morocco of von Sternberg's film allied to the strange pacing, elaborate shadows and fanciful, expensive decorations creates an opiated trance to which the languorous, woozy characters plausibly belong.

Gary Cooper is too literal an American to assimilate into this curious dreamworld. But Marlene Dietrich in her American debut is perfect. Partly this is because she is young and so alluringly beautiful. And there's her accent, and her background in cabaret. She actually plays a showgirl, and sings. Famously she performs in male drag and kisses a girl in the audience, a legendary moment of screen sexual ambiguity.

The film conveys the fascination of pre-censorship values in a medium which hasn't quite worked out what it is going to be. The ending when Marlene follows Cooper into the desert, while she's still in her heels, is really eccentric. The film is flawed; the plot is perfunctory and the broad comedy is jarring. Dietrich hasn't quite arrived as the ultimate glamour star of early sound but it is mainly she who makes Morocco a place still worth visiting.

“Don’t send her any more flowers in pots! She threw the last one at me.” - Morocco review by LJ

Uninteresting and unconvincing romantic drama since the great romance is based on two brief evenings together.