Joseph von Sternberg’s dazzling masterpiece that marks the breakthrough performance of Marlene Dietrich returns to the big screen
Eureka Entertainment has announced that Joseph von Sternberg’s 1930 movie The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich in her breakthrough role, will be re-released in select UK & Ireland cinemas from the 31st of May 2019. The timing of the release is to coincide with the centenary of the Weimar Republic and the BFI Southbank’s major two-month season Beyond Your Wildest Dreams: Weimar Cinema 1919-1933.
The Blue Angel [Der blaue Engel] is one of the first German language sound films, and the picture that represents the initial collaboration between Josef von Sternberg and his immortal muse, Marlene Dietrich.
Following up his role in von Sternberg’s great silent The Last Command, Emil Jannings portrays a schoolteacher named Immanuel Rath, whose fateful expedition to catch his students frequenting the cabaret known as “The Blue Angel” leads to his own rapture with the establishment’s main attraction Lola (Dietrich) — and, as a result, triggers the downward spiral of his life and fortune. Directed by von Sternberg while on loan from America to the pioneering German producer Erich Pommer, The Blue Angel is, The Blue Angel is at once captivating, devastating, and powerfully erotic, laced-through with Sternberg’s masterful cinematography.
After this film, the director and Dietrich would go on to make six more films together in the span of five
BFI Southbank’s two-month season Beyond Your Wildest Dreams: Weimar Cinema will celebrate one of the most innovative and ground-breaking chapters in the history of cinema, featuring the work of filmmakers such as Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Josef von Sternberg, Leontine Sagan, Lotte Reiniger, Robert Siodmak and more.
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