Best movie of this year hands down!

The Worst Film Ever

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Von Sternberg must have been railing lines of coke when he came up with this soapy drivel. Look, you've got Marlene under your thrall. Put her in some movies where she can sing a bit, show her legs a bit. Can't be that hard. What you don't have to do is create a movie with more plot points than an entire season of Breaking Bad. I mean, one minute she's crawling through a Mississippi flop house, the next scene she's in a white tux singing French to the French. On the other hand it is beautifully photographed. Marlene, well, even when she's on the lam, staying in a rooming house with chickens, she's the hottest thing in movies. I mean, holy smokes, look at the way she brushes the pigeon off her shoulder. I had trouble deciding which male lead I wanted to punch in the face harder: the sap Faraday (Marshall) or the obnoxious Townsend (Grant). I can't see how Dietrich's character could have spent more than 10 minutes with either of them. Dietrich deserved better writers.

Oh dear, only a couple of years on from the brilliance of The Blue Angel, Sternberg is back in the US and all the innocence has gone. All that beauty and charm, the wondrous and sexy costumes, the natural movement and the free actions, the whole 'I can't help it', has gone. Dietrich is all spruced up and got to act all 'mummy'. Needless to say there would have been problems with the Code but if the lovely, seeming, naked bathing at the start were allowed, surely there was no need to pile on the sentimentality so crudely. I guess it is clear she sleeps with Grant for money at the start and has to be seen to 'pay for it' but then why oh why have her go back to playing 'mummy' at the end? Very sad. The film itself as melodrama is okay, I suppose, but it could and should have been much more.

Josef Von Sternberg really went over the top with this outrageous pre-code melodrama starring Marlene Dietrich about a devoted wife and mother (first seen as a single German girl swimming naked in a lake in her homeland) who becomes a kept woman in order to financially help her husband be cured of uranium poison. She later runs off with her son when he comes back and discovers her affair with Cary Grant, becoming a prostitute and later basically homeless in order to keep their whereabouts secret. She is forced to give him up, and is basically destitute when her fortunes turn and she becomes the singing toast of Paris. Von Sternberg lets Dietrich utilize every single emotion possible, running all over the world in every style, yet barely shedding a tear over all of heartache.Herbert Marshall is the unfortunate husband and Dickie Moore the toted kid. Grant's suave lover keeps getting the shaft as it is obvious where Dietrich's heart really is. She is the whole show, even performing in a gorilla suit she strips out of to sing "Hot Voodoo". Movie stills make this appear to be better than it is, its deliberate camp so obvious that you may laugh at it, not with it.Then, there is the editing, taking Dietrich down, down, down, ending up in a woman's shelter (15 cents a night) where she drunkenly stumbles in, tells off a bunch of old hags and stumbles right back out, and where do we see her next with no explanation of how she got there? Glamorously dressed to kill in Paris, of course, as famous as Josephine Baker. Only Von Sternberg and Dietrich could get away with this, style without substance and glamour without grace. The result is as phony as the curly blonde wig with arrows in it that she wears after stripping out of her gorilla fur.

Blonde Venus unfortunately turned out to be the one and only collaboration of Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. Sad to say though, Grant was not the lead here, just the other man who comes between Marlene and husband Herbert Marshall. There's no real chemistry in this one between any of the principal players and the best scenes are with Marlene and little Dickie Moore playing her son with Marshall.The best thing about Blonde Venus are Marlene's musical numbers and they're memorable because of the inimitable way she puts over a song. All Dietrich fans should treasure her Hot Voodoo number where Marlene has a gorilla suit on and does a sexy strip out of that costume and gives us a look at voodoo can do to us.But when its not showing Dietrich's legs off and her husky singing, the film is the story of a woman in love with two men. Husband Herbert Marshall is a research scientist who contracts 'radium poisoning' and needs money to go to Europe for a cure. Dietrich gets the money by doing some entertaining in a seedy dive where she comes to the attention of wealthy playboy Cary Grant. From there the plot progresses to the inevitable Hollywood conclusion with a script that was written by Joseph Von Sternberg who directed the film as well.Paramount was taking a shot in the dark here with radium poisoning gambit. The plain truth is they didn't know a whole lot about radioactivity then. The discoverer of radium Marie Curie did in fact die of cancer contracted from too much exposure to it. But one didn't just go somewhere for a miracle cure for that sort of thing.Herbert Marshall was always playing the injured party it seems in a whole lot of his films. He's well remembered for being Bette Davis's husband in The Little Foxes, a much better film than Blonde Venus. I also remember him in When Ladies Meet where he was cheating on Greer Garson with Joan Crawford and he went through the film with an air of innocence that you would think he was the party offended. Marshall had these roles down pat, but he had more to him in his acting repertoire.Even before The Code was put in place Paramount had a lot of trouble with the Hays Office in getting this one exhibited. Some changes were made that no doubt weakened the plot and the story. Marlene is basically in love with two guys at the same time and that was a no go back in the day.Blonde Venus didn't do that well at the box office, it was quite a let down from her previous film Shanghai Express. After this one she and Joseph Von Sternberg were separated and she did her next film, Song of Songs with Rouben Mamoulian.Blonde Venus is great Dietrich who's asked to carry a weak story.