The Great Movies III

Dietrich exists surrounded but untouched by this madness, as a locus of carnal insinuations. She rarely engages the other actors physically; von Sternberg likes to isolate her in fetishistic compositions of lace, feathers, fur, and fire (notice the shot in which she gazes steadily at Alexei from behind her veil; the candle flame a few inches from her mouth trembles as she begins to breathe more heavily). One dress seems made of black-tipped white fur spikes, which undulate when she moves, like a dreamy underwater porcupine. There is something both contented and demented in her narcissism; perfectly made up and exquisitely lighted, she poses for us in von Sternberg's closeups, regarding us with contemptuous passivity while we commit sins of thought by contemplating sins of deed.

Some of her erotic moments are more than passing strange. She and Alexei find themselves in a stable, where she plunges into the hay, then rights herself, and puts a straw in her mouth sideways. He takes it away. She puts another straw in her mouth sideways. He also takes that away. She goes through five sideways straws and five Alexei removals. I have no idea what obscure communication is taking place here, but there's a payoff later in the film when, to taunt him, she boldly inserts a straw in her mouth not sideways but stem first, and twirls it with her tongue. Yowza!

As drama, The Scarlet Empress makes no sense, nor does it attempt to. This is not a resource for history class. Its primary subject is von Sternberg's erotic obsession with Dietrich, whom he objectified in a series of movies (The BlueAngel, Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil Is a Woman) that made her face one of the immortal icons of the cinema. Whether she could act was beside the point for him; it would have been a distraction.

Von Sternberg has a slapdash way with some scenes, as if impatient when his attention is called away from Dietrich. Notice his several crowd scenes, in which peasants materialize on demand, mill about in frenzied turmoil, and are then forgotten. 'here is almost no sense of a real society outside the palace walls, and little enough within, where some of the arrangements would be at home in a Marx Brothers movie. For the long winter journey to the palace, for example, Count Alexei supplies piles of furs for Catherine, and then dismisses her mother with a hot-water bottle.

When Dietrich is onscreen, however, nothing is too good for her; not only do von Sternberg's lighting and cinematography make her the center and subject of every scene, but he devises extraordinary moments for her, as when, clad in a fur uniform and cape, with an improbable sable military hat, she mounts a horse and leads a cavalry charge up the grand staircase. "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily," she says in Shanghai Express, but it only took von Sternberg to make her Marlene Dietrich.

oo much attention is paid to Mike Leigh's famous method for "devising" his screenplays. It is well known that he imagines characters and a situation, casts actors to play the characters, joins with them in workshops where the dialogue and the plot take shape, and only then writes the screenplay. Quite true, but that doesn't mean he's winging it; his Secrets & Lies (1996) reveals a filmmaker who works with the most delicate precision to achieve exactly what he desires. The payoff for his method comes in scenes like the film's two very long and unbroken takes, when he calls on his actors to use the disciplines of the stage as well as the screen.

Leigh, born 1943, made his first feature, Bleak Moments, in 1971. He made his second, High Hopes, in 1988. In between, he worked constantly for television and the theater but couldn't get a film financed because the backers wanted to see a script, and of course he didn't have one. When I saw Bleak Moments, I knew I was watching a masterpiece by a great director and wrote a long review for the Sun-Times. This turned out to be the film's first review; Leigh had been ignored at home in England. In the seventeen years between features, he perfected what he instinctively began with: tragicomic portraits of discontented people in trying circumstances, and an embarrassment in social situations that borders on pathology.

Although he makes some characters into caricatures, there is a compassion in his work that acts like a safety net. Characters who seem over the top in one scene have a way of rounding out later in a film. That's true of Brenda Blethyn's performance in Secrets & Lies as Cynthia Purley, a factory worker who rattles discontentedly around the little rowhouse she was born in and regards Roxanne, her twenty-year-old daughter, with despair. Cynthia seems an anthology of raw sadness and worry, but she will be transformed when her worst nightmare comes true.