She walked up to me and she asked me to dance, / I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said…

A great Monday night movie – in fact, a great movie by any definition – gets past the defenses and finds a home under the skin. These movies do much more than entertain. They take up residence somewhere at the back of the brain and drops time bombs in the days that follow. Experiences like this storm past the traditional meaning of movies; they might be better described as dreams organized and manufactured by committees. I’m learning that a lot of old movies are good that way.

Take Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) (1930). The Blue Angel is a movie that I had never heard of before compiling my Monday list. In fact, the only blue angel I was familiar with before Monday was the one that involved drunken university students, some light flatulence and a Bic lighter. (There’s a world between, let me tell you.) This Blue Angel is actually an early German talkie (subtitled for those of us that don’t sprechen sie Deutsch) about an upstanding and strict university professor who falls in with and then falls in love with an exotic dancer named Lola Lola. (Mind you, that’s not just one Lola; a temptress this bad has to wear the name twice.) What follows, and I don’t think this will give much away, is his downfall. What I won’t spoil here, and what they certainly don’t advertise on the VHS case, is that the professor’s ensuing descent into madness is as primal and shocking as any old monster movie, made worse because we haven’t been anesthetized by decades of familiarity. No, I think it’s safe to say that I was chilled somewhere under my daytime conscience by this film.

Speaking of scary, this was also the most frustrating presentation to show up in the Monday night line-up so far. I’ve begun to take DVD’s for granted. The Blue Angel was only available to me on a crummy library-copy VHS tape, and it was easily the scratchiest and most antique thing I’ve ever seen. Between the jumpy, washed out images and the thick muffled audio, the experience was a little like watching the white ghostly projection of a story broadcast from another dimension. And while this sensation certainly extended the dream-like quality of the film, I could never completely trust the aspect ratio of the picture, which cut off heads and subtitles at random. This is one that I’d love to revisit as a crisp, polished DVD transfer (John Ford’s Stagecoach is another.)

One thing that I will come back to again and again when I’m watching these old movies is the awesome economy of storytelling. The brevity of information on-screen (and the presumed intelligence of the audience on the part of the filmmakers) is marvelous. Vast sections of the film pass with little or no dialogue, letting the actions and looks of the characters fill in the details of the story. Considering the age of the film, this might well have been a consequence of restrictions imposed by the new sound technology being used, but the ultimate effect on both the narrative and the mood of the film is breathtaking. [I should also point out that big chunks of the German dialogue were simply not subtitled on my VHS copy, meaning that there were a few points where I had to draw my own conclusions about what was being said. These sections didn’t fall during any of the key turning points of the film, but they did remind me I was watching a foreign movie from time to time.]

The Blue Angel shares a curious connection with the theatre. It’s no secret that screen acting (and in many cases, the stories themselves) came from the vaudeville tradition, but what’s fascinating about these early movies is that the connection is still so strong. A lot of the actors in these films came up on the stage or in the circus-like environment of the vaudeville houses. As a result, The Blue Angel is at its best when it’s in this environment. Much of the film unfolds backstage and on the road, and between the clowns, the bears and the overall circus environment, the film seems like a credible witness of that sort of life-style. In fact, the movie delivers some pretty racy material (relatively speaking), including a couple of sequences with Marlene Dietrich stripping down or wearing only her briefs.

And on that note, let’s talk about Marlene Dietrich for a moment. Looking back (and I’ve already told you that I had not heard of this movie before), I imagine that she was the primary reason why this movie found its way onto my Monday list. Dietrich is one of those old, old, old-school actresses whose name is more famous than her face. I’ve never seen her before and I doubt most of my generation has either. She was, if the film books and the Internet are to be believed, a model of the style and fashions of her time. The highest paid actress in the industry. Enormously popular on both sides of the ocean. A 1930’s sexpot. The whole package. OK, that’s all fine. But reporting back from the 21st Century, I’m afraid she was also a little manly. In fact, startlingly so. And not altogether the best actor on the screen in this movie.

I want to give that title to Emil Jannings, who played the central role of Professor Immanuel Rath. Jannings delighted me throughout the film, giving a subtle and surprising performance that never seemed to go where I was expecting. In fact, his performance was so believable and human that I think it’s the very thing that grounded the film for me (particularly in that rocky opening, as I struggled to get past the VHS flaws and into the movie.) His transformation is equally spectacular; I revisited a couple of early scenes in the film before returning the movie and marveled that the same actor played the professor at the start and end of the film. [Spoiler ahead, my mates. One thing is certain: I won’t be able to look at the sad face of a circus clown again, without flashing back to the final scenes of the movie.]

Now despite the fact that I’ve already spilled that one small spoiler, I want to write about that ending without speaking further spoilers. It has been promised to some that I will try keep these reviews as clear of spoilers as possible. While I can’t imagine anyone reading this will be lining up to watch an old German film anytime soon, I won’t spills the details of the conclusion. Mostly because the finals scenes are remarkable, and I think everyone should see them. Suffice to say that the final minutes of the movie were strong enough to propel the movie from being a curious museum piece to a deeply troubling, nightmare-painted, piece of scar tissue. The movie ends (mostly) in the theatre house where much of the story takes place, but the greatest miracle is how the final act elevates the action from burlesque side-show to Pagliacci-ish Grand Opera. The melodrama is off the planet.

And that, my friends, is what sticks with you in the days that follow.