The Blue Angel: Remastered Standard Edition [Blu-ray]

Kino's 2-disc DVD version
Relative newcomer Marlene Dietrich's electrifying performance in the 1930 sound film THE BLUE ANGEL overshadows the perhaps even greater performance by Emil Jannings as a sexually-repressed professor. Her screen presence also more than overcomes Josef von Sternberg's rather static direction that was typical of early sound films, elevating this romantic melodrama into its classic status.

Kino's region-free DVD contains both the German and the English versions of the film, each on a separate disc. Both versions look very clean for a 71-year-old film, although just a tad less sharp than I would have liked. The English version looks a bit cleaner still. The supplements include a side-by-side comparison of the two versions (with the German version shown on the left), and the English version indeed looks better. The German version is supported by optional, white-on-black-bar English subtitles. The black bars, of course, cover up part of the picture. I would suggest Kino use...

A classic of world cinema
A German cinema classic from the late Weimar-era, and the film debut of super-sexy Marlene Dietrich, who is stunning in her role as a flirtatious, heartless cabaret singer whose carnal wiles bring an infatuated school teacher to ruin. But then, what is *really* responsible for his downfall? Dietrich as the temptress, his own repressed sexuality and concurrent fetishization of her beauty, or the close-mindedness of the society around them? As with much of the art of this era (in Germany and without), this film depicts the clash of the old world and the new -- the modern, open, crass, liberating and chaotic world of the individual against the older, stable, stifling, communal and "moral" world of the village and church. At any rate, the transformation of actor Emil Jannings from a fusty old humbug into a degraded shell of a man is a dramatic triumph, and the direction, by Josef von Sternberg, is flawless -- filled with darkness, closeness and brooding claustrophia. The new DVD...

A True Classic
The film that turned the head of Adolf Hitler and sky-rocketed Marlena Dietrich to international stardom is as fresh and orginal today as it was when it first hit theaters in Germany 70 years ago.

With the aid of english subtitles, we are introduced to Dr. Immanuel Rath, an esteemed professor of an upper-class German prep school. A stern and authoritative man, his feathers are ruffled severely when he learns some of his students have been neglecting their studies in favor of visiting a night club, the Blue Angel, on the more sordid side of town to hear a beautiful singer named Lola Lola.

When Rath confronts Lola, he becomes smitten with her. An infatuation which will eventually lead to his own professional and personal downfall.

Emil Jannings (the first person ever to win a Best Actor Oscar) is marvelous as the stuffy and destructive Rath, and his ham-handed pirouette into complete emotional and physical breakdown is mesmerizing. Dietrich is equally fundamental in her...

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