Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) poster & wallpaper

Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich, Kurt Gerron

Immanuel Rath, an old bachelor, is a professor at the town's university. When he discovers that some of his pupils often go into a speakeasy, The Blue Angel, to visit a dancer, Lola Lola, he comes the...( read more  read more... )re to confront them. But he is attracted to Lola. The next night he comes again--and does not sleep at home. This causes trouble at work and his life takes a downward spiral.

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32 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 46 min.

Directed by: Josef von Sternberg

Release Date: April 1, 1930

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DVD Release Date: November 13, 2001

Stats: 232 reviews

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Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola Jannings and Dietrich Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola
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Flixster Reviews (232)

  • hypathio7
    September 8, 2009
    hypathio7
    My first experience watching a film on The Auteurs site. The quality was great. The subtitles were mixed up only a couple times.

    I loved it!! The German style cinematography and art decoration. The style that would be lost in Germany and taken to Hollywood when Hitler came t...( read more)o power. This movie takes place from 1925 to 1929 before the Nazis took over. It is a closer to real life look at the same time and culture that Cabaret portrays.

    Emil Jannings was the first actor honored with the best actor Academy Award. I have only seen one other performance of his. But it was impressive and so was this role. Dietrich is seductive and husky voiced as Lola, but younger and not as husky voiced as she was in Witness for the Prosecution. The staff at the burlesque club Der Blaue Engel is like a family. Jannings is a professor at a local University and the dynamics of his classroom show that nothing much has changed. Three of his students are regulars at The Blue Angel. Professor Immanuel Rath is the picture of repression and routine. He tries so hard to keep the young men in his class in line and goes himself to the club to kick them out. He is so out of his element at the club and interacting with Lola. These early scenes have a lot of humor. Through chance circumstances he must return to the club and he ends up acting the part of a knight coming to the rescue of the lady's honor, at least the honor he imagines Lola has. Ultimately it is a tragic story, as Rath never finds his backbone and loves/trusts Lola too innocently. He falls into the "family" business, at first selling pinup postcards of his new wife, then inheriting the degrading clown assistant position for the magician/manager.

    The dialog as translated in the subtitles surprised me with its natural flow and sophistication. The dialog strongly reveals the attitude of the culture before restrictions, whether from Germany or Hollywood, limited how sexuality particularly could be shown or mentioned in the movies.
  • doboy1
    June 24, 2007
    doboy1
    I was chanel surfing and this movie popped up and hit me broadside. Marlene is steamy, sultry, and would be 106 years old now.
  • webalina
    May 2, 2007
    webalina
    The devastating effects of a man letting his heart override his brain. One of Marlene Dietrich's first films.
  • SarahG1988
    August 30, 2006
    SarahG1988
    Pretty decent German film.
  • threefolddado
    March 22, 2008
    threefolddado
    Influenced many films that followed.
  • ElCochran90
    October 17, 2009
    ElCochran90
    "You must drink. I'm not paying for your art."

    DER BLAUE ENGEL (1930)


    Director: Josev von Sternberg
    Country: Germany
    Genre: Drama / Musical
    Length: 124 minutes

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    Der Blaue Engel is, perhaps, one of the most dramatically influential movies of all time. It is certainly not universally acclaimed as the best film ever made, but it is, in my honest opinion, an extraordinary achievement of classic cinema. Der Blaue Engel was the immediate ticket of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich to Hollywood stardom. Josef von Sternberg would be afterwards nominated for two Academy Awards for Best Director for his films Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932), precisely starring Marlene Dietrich. Der Blaue Engel and Blackmail (1929), by Alfred Hitchcock, introduced the use of sound for talking pictures in European cinema, just like The Jazz Singer (1927) did for American classic cinema. Despite it is not one of the most thought-provoking and complex films directed by a giant of cinema, it is a wonderful feature film that appealed audiences will find hard to forget considering the honesty with which it is portrayed and the brilliant psychological analysis it represents.

    Der Blaue Engel tells the heartbreaking story of Immanuel Roth, a university professor who finds out that his pupils tend to frequently go into a speakeasy called "The Blue Angel" after class every night in order to see a singer named Lola Lola to perform. After deciding to confront his pupils one night searching for the speakeasy, he inevitably falls in love with Lola. Once that he is submitted to the power of attraction, his personal and working life begins to descend into a catastrophic turmoil of depression and a weak emotional dependence.

    The movie is well-filmed, making it seem very simple. Der Blaue Engel is the most personally powerful film I have ever laid my eyes on, since it touched and broke my heart like no other, thoroughly identifying myself with the main character. These aspects turn this film into one of the most beautiful ones I know, considering the fact that the term "beauty" is alarmingly subjective and can be appreciated and interpreted in various forms. I suddenly felt I could see myself on screen, not necessarily because the character is found in a situation where he falls in love of a considerably younger singer in a speakeasy, but because of the most identifiable characteristics and human flaws of his personality. This is, arguably, the best character analysis ever directed in cinema history along with the German silent classic Der Letzte Mann (1924). The movie had several remakes. Besides having an alternative American (English-language) version also directed by Sternberg in the same year, it had another American remake directed by Edward Dmytryk in the year of 1959 that was highly inferior to the original.

    Emil Jannings, who actually also was the main protagonist in Der Letzte Mann (1924), portrays the professor Immanuel Roth, one of the most human and well-interpreted characters that ever graced the screen. Jannings literally redefines the meaning of the term "acting". The character starts to develop an overwhelming emptiness in his soul which possibly was caused by an illusion of something missing in his life. He may live alone and may also lack of a dreamed life, but he is one of the most honest and graphical representations of the consequences an individual must face when the feelings are allowed to govern over reason. Roth apparently looks for an exit that seems the easiest one possible for him: love. Evidently, love was not the need nor impulse that made him pay a visit to "The Blue Angel" club, but something more... perhaps the lack of feeling of authority over his pupils and the difficulty that involved facing the emptiness of his existence which was tragically introduced with the death of his bird, symbolizing the beginning of the loss of hope and utter disillusion. This is the instinct that urges him to defy a nonexistent paternity between him and the only people that seem to be close to him: his class students, who pay no respect to Roth, and a passionate feeling towards the symbol of beauty and seduction was the drop of water that overflowed the glass.

    Very much to his surprise, he finally metes Lola, a highly, yet intentionally stereotyped female character, and inevitably beautiful. Lola is the living illustration of the fact that a person, who is initially external to our lives, can make us become irrationally and emotionally blind beings, provoking us to fall into the most degrading humiliations. Unfortunately, people tend to be like that, making Immanuel Roth a very complete character from which numerous conclusions that will aid us to reflect over our own personality and to take precautions against our own emotional dependencies can be obtained. Lola, on the other hand, finds only one single useful usage for a person that even she considers pathetic an inferior: to make him be part of an act for attracting people. The illusion of being with Lola is utterly destroyed and, perhaps, forgotten. The tremendous whirlpool of negative emotions and the resulting low self-esteem pushes Roth to his limits.

    Despite its modest and complicated use of sound and its overall visual quality, Der Blaue Engel tops the genre with some other universal masterpieces and can be considered as a totally brilliant and heartbreaking requiem for the soul. The screenplay based on Heinrich Mann's novel leaves a lot of room not only for knowing the character's true motivations, but perhaps of the director as well. The musical numbers presented throughout are a small, contrasting previous psychological preparation aimed towards the audience for the personal chaos that is about to be witnessed, having its major opera number during the last ten minutes of the film. Sternberg achieved to gain fame, but also to give to the world a wonderful and reflexive drama to humanity where the birth of stereotypes first happened in a fashioned, yet masterful way. With one of the best performances of cinema, a gorgeous starring girl, a gripping story, heartbreaking and shocking sequences and a well-written script, Der Blaue Engel has become an immortal German treasure.

    100/100
  • HuskersNC949597
    September 10, 2009
    HuskersNC949597
    I had a difficult time giving a crap about Emil Jannings rather poor judgment. Until that last shot.
  • oreomoviejunkie
    July 23, 2009
    oreomoviejunkie
    Even the most squared and moralist men can fall for a pretty blonde. Dietrich sang it so.
  • Soundsofmadness
    January 10, 2009
    Soundsofmadness
    No thankyou - Not interested.
  • malacaynomuerto
    December 3, 2008
    malacaynomuerto
    Mi primer película de la hermosa Marlene.

    Lola es el pecado hecho mujer

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Critic Reviews

October 8, 2001
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Intriguing for its glimpses of backstage life in shabby German postwar vaudeville, and for Dietrich's performance. full review

View more Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

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