Von Sternberg

The Lady with the Legs

The Lady with the Legs In my films, Marlene is not herself. I am Marlene. She knows that better than anyone. —Josef von Sternberg TO MAKE A SOUND film in Berlin in 1929 was anything but simple. Though Germany pioneered sound recording, as it had photography, and companies such as Tobis-Klangfilm controlled major patents, others were held by the U.S. General Electric Company, which forbade the use of its technology in German theaters. Not until June 1929 did a U.S. sound-on-film talkie, The Singing Fool, play to German audiences, and then only after legal wrangles had aborted earlier screenings. Up to the last minute, it wasn’t certain the film would open, and critics had to fight for tickets with members of the public. In September 1929, when UFA unveiled its Tonkreuz (Sound Cross) complex, with four giant soundstages radiating from a central hub, nobody was sure what films would be made there and whether they would be suitable for export to countries using General Electric equipment . With this doubt went a growing hostility in Germany toward Hollywood films, particularly if they featured local artists who had been lured away by high U.S. salaries. For an actor like Emil Jannings to return and make a talking film in Germany was an act of social, political, cultural, and financial significance. Earlier in 1929, UFA, gambling that sound films would always 94 The Lady with the Legs 95 need writing talent, hired Germany’s most commercially successful scenarist, Robert Liebmann. As the studio’s dramaturge—its resident screenwriter and adviser—he received 2,500 reichsmarks (US$500) a week, with an additional 10,000 reichsmarks (US$2,000) for five original screenplays. In May, popular playwright Carl Zuckmayer came on salary, with an agreement to provide three screenplays. Meanwhile, Erich Pommer had wormed his way back into UFA as an independent producer. While Jannings was still in the United States, the actor negotiated a new contract with UFA for his first sound film. It secured his services from November 1929 to February 1930 for $60,000. In a carefully timed arrival, Jannings returned to Berlin on May 15, the day before the Academy in Hollywood announced his Oscar win. At the same time, UFA revealed that he would make his sound debut at the end of the year in an original screenplay by Zuckmayer. On May 31 Jannings’s next-to-last Hollywood film, the disappointing Street of Sin, based on von Sternberg’s story, opened at one of Berlin’s most prestigious cinemas, the Palast am Zoo. Three weeks later, on June 21, Karl Vollmoeller returned to Berlin. The creative team was in place that would bring von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel to the screen—except that neither he nor that title had yet been mentioned. Instead, everyone favored a film about Rasputin, to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch. To maximize profits, it would be shot in both German and English. In choosing as their subject the illiterate Russian monk who bamboozled the czar and his family, only to be murdered by resentful courtiers, Pommer and his colleagues were conscious of UFA’s owner, the right-wing communications magnate Alfred Hugenberg. He had bought the bankrupt studio in 1927 and used it to produce cheerful musicals and stories of aristocratic heroism, suggesting a vision of what Germany had been before the onset of Weimar socialism. The royalist, conservative Rasputin looked certain to please him, since it would have followed a story line similar to that of Rasputin and the Empress, made by MGM in 1932. In that film, Rasputin is assassinated not for reasons of political expediency or court intrigue but because he raped Irina Yusupov , the wife of one of his killers. Vollmoeller agreed to work on Rasputin for 23,000 reichsmarks (US$4,600), plus an additional 3,000 reichsmarks (US$600) to lease, Von Sternberg 96 for six months, his favorite summer retreat—two floors of Ca’Vendramin Calergi, the palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal where Richard Wagner had lived and died. To direct the film, the unanimous choice was Lubitsch . Ernst Correll, Pommer’s replacement as production manager, was delegated to offer Lubitsch $60,000 to return to Berlin and be reunited with Jannings, whom he had directed in many of his early successes . But Lubitsch refused. Within the Paramount hierarchy, he was rising...