Rent Morocco (1930)

Top Hat, Hot Mess - Morocco review by griggs

Some films grab you with plot; this one grabs you because Marlene Dietrich strolls on in top hat and tails, kisses a woman, and wanders off like she’s just ordered a drink. For a pre-Code Hollywood romance, that cabaret scene is audacious – the sort of thing the Hays Office would swat down a few years later. To modern eyes it’s less scandal and more gloriously blatant queer coding, but the jolt is still there. The singing’s ropey; the vibe is immaculate. That one sequence pretty much earns Morocco its place in film history.

Once the music stops, things get shakier. Gary Cooper’s Legionnaire is meant to be the love of her life, but he mostly drifts about looking handsome and mildly annoyed. The middle chunk leans on loaded silences and slack scenes where not much happens beyond von Sternberg mooning over Dietrich with the camera.

Then the ending lands. Dietrich kicking off her heels in the sand and trudging after the legion wives in an evening gown is pure, ridiculous, glorious cinema. Morocco is uneven, slow in spots and basically a 90-minute mood piece, but as a shrine to star power and bad decisions in great outfits, it absolutely delivers

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

With the revolution of the the arrival of sound, Morocco- like many early talkies- imparts a sensation of a medium in shock. The performers speak slowly, leaving 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 the dialogue.

This feels slow and soporific; an aesthetic imposed by the limits of technology. But in films about exotic escapism, this actually works. The studio built Morocco of von Sternberg's film allied to the strange pacing, elaborate shadows and fanciful, expensive decorations create an opiated trance to which the languorous, woozy characters plausibly belong.

Gary Cooper is too prosaic an American to assimilate into this curious dreamworld. But Marlene Dietrich- in her American debut- is ideal. Partly this is because she is young and still so beautiful. There's her exotic accent, and her background in cabaret. 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 is possible. It is flawed; the plot is perfunctory and the comedy is misfires. 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.