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The Scarlet Empress

Play trailer Poster for The Scarlet Empress Released Sep 15, 1934 1h 44m Biography Play Trailer Watchlist
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86% Tomatometer 29 Reviews 85% Popcornmeter 1,000+ Ratings
During the 18th century, German noblewoman Sophia Frederica (Marlene Dietrich), who would later become Catherine the Great, travels to Moscow to marry the dimwitted Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe), the heir to the Russian throne. Their arranged marriage proves to be loveless, and Catherine takes many lovers, including the handsome Count Alexei (John Lodge), and bears a son. When the unstable Peter eventually ascends to the throne, Catherine plots to oust him from power.
The Scarlet Empress

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Critics Consensus

Complex, visually stunning, and breathtakingly intense, The Scarlet Empress overpowers its flaws with a confident vigor befitting its legendary subject.

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Critics Reviews

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Richard Brody The New Yorker Josef von Sternberg makes the cruelty the point in his lurid and macabre spectacle about the rise to absolute power of Catherine the Great, of Russia, who's played with an arachnid subtlety by Marlene Dietrich. Nov 21, 2020 Full Review John Gillett Sight & Sound Dietrich's sweetly accented delivery makes the most of both good and bad lines. Mar 17, 2020 Full Review Dave Kehr Chicago Reader Josef von Sternberg's 1934 film turns the legend of Catherine the Great into a study of sexuality sadistically repressed and reborn as politics, thus anticipating Bertolucci by three decades. Aug 20, 2014 Full Review Eve Tushnet Patheos ...it looks amazing, it is probably blasphemous, it’s in keeping with the movie’s overall fantasy of Savage Russia... Aug 15, 2023 Full Review Matt Brunson Film Frenzy How best to describe The Scarlet Empress? Delirious? Demented? Diabolical? This historical epic is perhaps the best of the Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations, so naturally it was a commercial disaster. Rated: 3.5/4 Jun 16, 2021 Full Review Paul Rotha Cinema Quarterly This glamorous, sadistic fabrication appears one long procession of derivative ideas. Feb 3, 2021 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

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Jacob B The film that a love child of Fellini and John Waters would’ve made. Bizarre and stylized and campy as hell ! Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/03/25 Full Review Alec B Historical accuracy be damned. The surreal imagery, camp performances, weird little comedic bits, and Dietrich are the reasons to see this. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/09/24 Full Review Matthew B In The Scarlet Empress, the story of the rise to power of Catherine the Great, Josef von Sternberg's film deviates so far from history that it is not such a biopic as a fantasy about the life of the Russian Empress. I doubt many viewers emerge from a viewing of The Scarlet Empress with any detailed understanding of the events that took place in Russia during those years, and nor should they. The film marked the high point of the collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and his leading actress (and lover), Marlene Dietrich. In another sense it was a low point. The relationship between von Sternberg and Dietrich was beginning to crack, and The Scarlet Empress, the sixth film that they had made together, was an expensive box office flop. If public tastes were changing, this was not because the films of von Sternberg and Dietrich were becoming stale. On the contrary, The Scarlet Empress is perhaps the most inventive of the seven films that Dietrich made with von Sternberg. It may not be great history, but it is a camp and kitsch classic, played with an emphasis on sly humour and cynical fun. It may be style over substance (von Sternberg called it "a relentless excursion into style"), but with style like this, who needs substance? There is indeed an excess of style in The Scarlet Empress, and perhaps the relentless imagery may have some viewers screaming for mercy by the end. To compensate for small sets, von Sternberg crowds the scenes with furniture, décor and camera trickery. The camera work and editing is fluid, and includes careful use of montage, superimposition, aerial angles, long tracking shots and a meticulous attention to detail (to give two examples, there are the dogs that start up and run away when the dinner guests smash their glasses on the floor, and there is the diner who bites off the nose of a pig's head). Of course the real Russia of this period was not nearly as backward as von Sternberg portrays it. Why does von Sternberg wish us to form the view that Russia was a brutal and primitive country? The answer, I suspect, is Communism. While the Cold War had not yet begun, the West was already afraid of this new Bolshevik state. Von Sternberg had portrayed Russia in a negative light in an earlier film, The Last Command. Here a corrupt and oppressive Czarist regime gives way to the savagery of mob rule as the Communists seize power. The Scarlet Empress paints a similar picture of a country in which violence is commonplace. In an early montage, von Sternberg shows a wide range of atrocities committed by earlier leaders, including torture, rape, whipping, burning people alive, and using one man as the clapper in a bell. There are many scenes of bells ringing in the film, perhaps intended to remind us of this early scene, and to ensure that we associate Russia with this kind of cruelty. Also of interest are the brief glimpses of bare-breasted women that von Sternberg somehow got past the censors. Von Sternberg places an intense focus is on Marlene Dietrich. He has little interest in crowd scenes or other actors, and saves his best compositions for her. The camera makes love to Dietrich. Her face is always well-lit, and von Sternberg offers plenty of flattering close-ups. Sometimes her face is viewed through a veil. Is there a symbolic point here? I suspect not. I imagine that von Sternberg simply thought that she looked fetching while wearing a veil. Nonetheless there is always a sense of utter absurdity running through the film, and von Sternberg does not spare Dietrich from this. Her clothes are a bizarre mass of furs, feather and jewellery, and each outfit becomes more ridiculous than the last one. Von Sternberg has fun with one of Dietrich's outfits. When Catherine wishes to hide a pendant from sight, she finds she is struggling to do so because her elaborate outfit has no pockets. Of course the actors in general are dressed in bizarre clothing. Thick layers of clothing cover them. Tall men stalk the set wearing oversized hats. Somehow the actors in the film are always buried under their clothes, or dwarfed by the large and overcrowded sets. The palace doors are huge, impractical edifices that require two men, or six struggling women, to open and close them. As for the sets employed by Josef von Sternberg, has there ever been anything this outrageous on our screens before or since? Everywhere there are candle-holders in the shape of contorted gargoyles that look as if they are being tortured, and each gargoyle holds just one candle. A skeleton hangs over the banquet table, and the chairs of the council room are adorned with images of giant figures holding their heads in their hands. At the heart of this peculiar imagery is the Queen of Kitsch herself, Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich fully relishes the sexually suggestive dialogue and perverse antics of her character. While Peter enjoys playing with his toy soldiers, Catherine prefers to play with actual soldiers. When Catherine takes time to inspect her troops, it is not their weaponry, deportment or discipline that interests her. Meeting the night guard, she slinkily suggests, "It must be cold at night… sometimes". As Catherine remarks, "I think I have weapons far more powerful than any Russian state machine." I am not entirely sure how von Sternberg managed to get away with putting so many perverse and blatantly sexual scenes in a film that was close on the time when the Hays Code was seeking to remove immoral content from cinema. I am only glad that he did. The Scarlet Empress is a deliriously cheeky slab of pseudo-history, and more fun than 50 conventional biopics put together. I wrote a longer appreciation of The Scarlet Empress on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2021/10/22/the-scarlet-empress-1934/ Rated 5 out of 5 stars 09/18/23 Full Review Audience Member By all accounts Catherine the Great was one remarkable woman. The Queen Consort of Czar Peter III of Russia, she got the throne from him in a palace coup d'etat and ruled for 33 years. She was also a woman of some lusty sexual appetites just like the woman who portrays her in The Scarlet Empress. It's what distinguishes The Scarlet Empress from the Alexander Korda production of Catherine The Great that starred Elizabeth Bergner and came out the same time. Both tell the same story from young Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst chosen as a bride for the Russian Tsarevitch. But Bergner plays her almost as an innocent though you see traces of the lusty woman Catherine became. Marlene Dietrich loses her innocence and you see a woman who used sex to get her way whether it was political gain or sexual satisfaction that she wasn't getting from the imbecile who was her husband. As for Czar Peter, though Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. gives a fine performance, we see a psychotic Czar in him. Sam Jaffe is far closer to the truth, the childlike imbecile who was overwhelmed he didn't measure up in the bedroom or the throne room. This film was Jaffe's screen debut, a far cry from Dr. Reifenschneider in The Asphalt Jungle or the High Lama of Shangri-La, all three very different parts. In fact historians and scholars debate to this day whether Paul who succeeded his mother was Peter's child or was sired by one of Catherine's many lovers. Gavin Gordon and John Davis Lodge play two of her lovers. Lodge was a man like Ronald Reagan who made it big in two different careers. A member of THE Lodge family of Massachusetts, the younger brother of Henry Cabot Lodge, Ike's UN Ambassador, this Lodge left the law for acting and then after Navy service in World War II became a Congressman, Governor of Connecticut, and Ambassador to Spain. To me it's tossup between Flora Robson in Catherine the Great and Louise Dresser as to who the better Empress Elizabeth. Elizabeth was the daughter of Peter the Great, aunt of Sam Jaffe. Her appetites were as big as Catherine's, but her ruthlessness somewhat less. Like Elizabeth I of England, she never married and produced an heir to the throne, but also no one bothered to keep up any fiction about the Russian Elizabeth being a virgin. With some footage from Ernst Lubitsch's silent classic The Patriot, Joseph Von Sternberg crafted one of the better efforts from his collaboration with Marlene Dietrich. He also drove the Paramount Pictures bean counters absolutely crazy by going over budget. The Scarlet Empress was expensive and looks expensive. Von Sternberg spent Paramount's money in a way they could only justify with Cecil B. DeMille. Von Sterberg made good use of music to cover many stretches of no dialog. And after seven years of talking pictures, he also used title cards and effectively when 99% of films had dropped them for good. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/08/23 Full Review Audience Member In von Sternberg's Russia, no individual of focus isn't foregrounded by a flag, or some mesh, or part of a strange statue, or Rublev-esque religious illustrations, or just good old fashioned poles or candle sticks. This is so often the case in all of these films, but this time... it's nothing short of breathtaking. And also, in its stoney splendor, exhausting. Completely palace-bound, there's a righteously suffocating sensation about The Scarlet Empress. The wardrobe is elaborate to the hilt, right on up to the impeccably fuzzy hats. (Travis Banton again, unleashed). There are at least too many people by one-third in at any given royal gathering scene, ornately jamming the frame from all sides with their fancy hair, their hoop dresses, their military accoutrements, their precision placements, the decor and the decorum. This is the filmmaker at the height of his powers, truly cut loose and untethered from the reality of the story he's chosen to depict and any studio-mandated boundaries. May horses clop over those things, twice each day and once again on Sunday!! Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 02/27/23 Full Review william d Excellent historical drama, lavishly produced and wonderfully directed. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews
The Scarlet Empress

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Movie Info

Synopsis During the 18th century, German noblewoman Sophia Frederica (Marlene Dietrich), who would later become Catherine the Great, travels to Moscow to marry the dimwitted Grand Duke Peter (Sam Jaffe), the heir to the Russian throne. Their arranged marriage proves to be loveless, and Catherine takes many lovers, including the handsome Count Alexei (John Lodge), and bears a son. When the unstable Peter eventually ascends to the throne, Catherine plots to oust him from power.
Director
Josef von Sternberg
Producer
Josef von Sternberg
Screenwriter
Manuel Komroff, Eleanor McGeary
Distributor
Paramount Pictures, Criterion Collection, Film Classics Inc.
Production Co
Paramount Pictures
Genre
Biography
Original Language
English
Release Date (Theaters)
Sep 15, 1934, Original
Release Date (DVD)
May 8, 2001
Runtime
1h 44m
Sound Mix
Mono
Aspect Ratio
Flat (1.37:1)