Morocco (1930)

Morocco exists at an intersection between legacies. Made in 1930 it was the first American film for Marlene Dietrich and her second picture with director Joseph Von Sternberg. Von Sternberg was already a much admired maker of silent films, having developed a distinct visual style influenced by the symbolism of Germans like Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau but with a gauzy opulence of his own.

The twenty-eight year old Dietrich was already a screen veteran who had even gone in and out of retirement once by 1929. She'd worked with screen impresarios G.W. Pabst (who would make a star of Louise Brooks) and Alexander Korda (one of the true ring masters of cinema's golden age) but had not yet become a star attraction outside Germany. As she was apt to point out, her persona, the Dietrich personality, was not hers until she met and worked with Joseph Von Sternberg.

In 1929 they simultaneously filmed German and English language versions of their first collaboration The Blue Angel, for German film company UFA and before its release Von Sternberg sent a rough cut of the film to his American studio, Paramount. The Blue Angel was picked up by Paramount for U.S. release and Dietrich was immediately cast in Morocco with Sternberg to direct. The Blue Angel and Morocco debuted nearly simultaneously in America in 1930 and the team of Dietrich and Von Sternberg was an overnight smash.

To current eyes the films of this period can seem ponderous and slow to develop; small, somehow reduced and quiet. They are artifacts of another time, built on different assumptions and techniques. A film like Morocco was made with the visual grammar of silent cinema not only dominant in the minds of the industry's most talented professionals but still the bedrock of a normal viewer's assumptions.

"Will it play in Peoria?"
Keep in mind, people still mourn Valentino and The Tramp has still never spoken, so when a slow tracking shot of arriving soldiers unfolds essentially speechless, opening the film by establishing an exotic local of wordless bustle and strange people, faces are meant to carry resonance, persons are significant and when the camera comes to rest on a sultry woman leaning suggestively against a post with a skull on top, it's not a throw-away gesture. That image tells you everything about the place that you need to know to establish drama.

And this logic certainly continues throughout the film. The high points of Morocco are the choreographed moments of wordless reaction; Dietrich doing a butch vamp around the cantina in drag, culminating in the famous and playfully suggestive same sex kiss, or revealing her character's personality to an intimate degree in the slow and cynical way she tears up a piece of paper, Gary Cooper and Marlene tentatively falling in love in her room...when Morocco hits its stride the words become extraneous.

There are long drab sections where nothing much happens. And while Von Sternberg revels in an opulent set, the wealthy suitor's mansion for instance, his rhythm as a storyteller is log-jammed between the visual fluency of silents and the novelty of sound. When it's one or two characters in a plain room...if there's not sexual tension there's not much to see.

The ability to enjoy a film like Morocco relies on a willingness to be hypnotized on a much slower wave length than we are used to. But if you can lose your self-consciousness and sink into the gauzy close-ups, begin to grasp the emotional resonance of faces and symbols (a broken string of pearls, for instance) and sensuous halos of cigarette smoke then by the time the masterfully absurd conclusion arrives you might be willing to follow that caravan into the dessert your self.