The Devil Is a Woman

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georgan g 11/29/2021 If women had control over men shown in this film, the world would be a better place. Marlene Dietrich seems to play the ultimate femme fatale! See more 02/22/2021 Its a little shocking something so deliciously amoral was released in 1935. It is kind of the perfect final film for Sternberg and Dietrich as it lacks any subplots and simply focuses on Dietrich ruining the lives of pathetic men. See more 02/12/2021 The Devil Is a Woman has the wicked distinction of being both directed and photographed by von Sternberg. The result is a mise-en-scéne so dense in its fetish for detail, the story is all but suffocated. By this point it's obvious that von Sternberg never saw a large wicker cage that he didn't position in the foreground in one of his exotic locales. Not to mention the ubiquitous sheer curtains, plaster textures, and in party scenes, streamers, streamers, streamers... Streamers choking whatever oxygen remained in the frame right out. And yet, somehow, it's exhilarating. To think that von Sternberg was single-handedly pulling the strings on productions such as this, at this time in Hollywood, is staggering. See more david f @dfulmer 01/12/2021 Dietrich and Von Sternberg's final pairing is a bold, sensuous, Hollywood spectacle. See more @TMProofreader 01/31/2019 The best romance movie ever made! See more 06/04/2014 An excellent way to part company, after six film together, for director Josef von Sternberg and superstar Marlene Dietrich. Odd that it flopped at the time--perhaps there was too much of a sameness in the femme fatale type of character she was consistently portraying, and thus needed a different directorial perspective, one that wasn't so obviously entranced by her. Very few aesthetic delights of the post-Code era tantalize and linger long afterwards in the mind as much as films from the Marlene Dietrich/Josef Von Sternberg partnership, and this, thankfully kept in Dietrich's vault as it was the favourite of her films, is no exception. Though anyone who knows me will readily recall I prefer the twice-Oscar nominated (for 'Morocco' and 'Shanghai Express'), Viennese expert craftsman's silent pictures to those made with the sexpot, this saga of vengeance is also superlative and well worth both purchasing and re-watching. Paramount caved in to pressure by the Spanish government, who hated the way Pierre Louÿs' novel portrayed the Spanish police, and actually destroyed the original print. Thankfully Dietrich's fear that her favourite film would otherwise be lost meant it was extremely well-preserved, and I saw my copy as part of a superlative DVD boxed set of six of her films that I've had for a few years now. See more Read all reviews

The Devil Is a Woman

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