Review: Rouben Mamoulian’s The Song of Songs on Kino Lorber Blu-ray

In his 2018 Film Comment article about Marlene Dietrich titled “Self-Made Woman,” critic Teo Bugbee writes that “Dietrich wanted to be seen, but rejected all attempts to be pinned down and understood.” Her elusiveness, not to mention her aloofness, played a large role in the persona she constructed and toyed with throughout her iconic collaborations with director Josef von Sternberg. But this ongoing project continued unabated in Rouben Mamoulian’s The Song of Songs, a film that’s quite literally about the construction of the actress’s ideal image, in the form of a sculpture, and her struggle to self-actualize while remaining a reluctant pawn to the men who harness the power of her image.

The film opens with Dietrich’s Lily, a naïve and innocent German peasant, visiting her recently deceased father’s grave before heading off to Berlin to live with her strict, amusingly brusque aunt, Mrs. Rasmussen (Alison Skipworth). In one scene, after Lily removes the many layers of her clothes, her aunt remarks, “I’ve never seen a girl unpeel herself like an onion before.” It’s a funny retort that also foreshadows how Lily is reduced to a lust object when she becomes a model for the sculptor across the way, Richard (Richard Waldow). In fact, not long after being wooed by the artist, she sheds all her clothes, a moment revealed indirectly with a beautiful cutaway showing light slowly landing on a pair of mannequin legs, and allows herself to be drawn. “It’s me as I dream to be,” Lily says upon seeing the sketch of her nude body, but she’ll quickly learn that women’s dreams can easily become fodder for wealthy men.

After being swept off her feet by Richard, Lily grows more coquettish, but her vision of love—as evidenced by her quoting from the Bible’s Song of Songs—remains as romanticized as the sculpture Richard makes of her. Though she becomes more sexually aware, Lily still assumes that Richard will marry her and provide her with a family simply because he deflowered her, while Richard is a free-spirited bohemian to his core, interested only in the sensual and material rather than the tenets of bourgeois society. In a particularly canny scene, Richard smooths out clay on the sculpture’s shoulder, slower and slower until the action becomes highly eroticized. He eventually grasps the arms of his creation, as one would a lover, before walking over to Lily to plant his kiss on her. But where she takes this as the ultimate sign of his love for her, it only solidifies her position as a fetish object for men.

Upon seeing this sculpture, Richard’s patron, Baron von Merzbach (Lionel Atwill), convinces Richard to give Lily up, and later pays the young woman’s aunt off, effectively transforming Lily from a willing model into an unwilling prostitute. In one unsettling exchange, the baron tells Richard that he wants to make Lily his masterpiece—turning her into a woman of culture by having various tutors teach her French, ballroom dancing, and how to play the piano—just as the artist used her to create his own masterpiece. For many actresses under less discerning directors, this martyrdom would serve only to elicit sympathy and tears, but on screen or off, Marlene Dietrich never wanted anyone’s pity. And what follows in The Song of Songs is a remarkable transformation that sees Lily evolve into the savage seductress we associate with Dietrich in such films as Blonde Venus and The Scarlet Empress.

This new Lily, essentially a reincarnation of the traditional Dietrich persona, is revealed in a stunning crane shot that arcs over a dance floor full of couples waltzing before descending and settling on the woman’s luxurious feathered hat. When Lily whips her head around toward the camera, and blows out a big puff of smoke, it’s as shocking a revelation as Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde in Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Lily’s innocence and guilelessness is completely gone now, as she coolly rises up to sing her show-stopping number, “Johnny”: “Jonny, we’ll disconnect the phone/And when we’re all alone, we’ll have a lot to do.”

But while her words and sly movements express a newfound freedom and fully unleashed desires, Lily’s final act of rebellion, in which she smashes Richard’s sculpture of her with a sledgehammer, allows her finally to fully convey her autonomy in a gesture of victory over
the men who tried to, literally and figuratively, shape her. In The Song of Songs, a star is made of marble before being reborn in the flesh, and only a star as magnificent as Marlene Dietrich could make the act of becoming oneself so thrilling and seductive.

Image/Sound

Kino’s HD transfer boasts a consistently sharp image that’s almost entirely free of signs of debris or damage. The contrast is quite strong, not only in its replicating of true deep blacks, but also in the luminescent whites that, thanks to Victor Milner’s cinematography, reflect magnificently off of Marlene Dietrich’s famously well-chiseled face. There’s an impressive amount of detail throughout the image, though your eyes are likely to never veer from Dietrich whenever she’s on screen. The nice, even distribution of grain adds a pleasing softness to the picture that prevents the film from looking overly tweaked. The audio is also crisp and clean throughout, and particularly robust during Dietrich’s rendition of “Johnny.”

Extras

The lone extra here is an entertaining and informative audio commentary by film historian David Del Valle. An unapologetic fan of Marlene Dietrich, Del Valle rarely hesitates to lavish praise on the legend. But alongside discussion of Dietrich’s star power, her carefully constructed persona, and the great lengths to which she went to ensure she looked exactly how she wanted to look on camera, the historian also touches on various films within Rouben Mamoulian’s filmography and makes an extensive case for The Song of Songs being of the same caliber as many of the films Josef von Sternberg made with Dietrich. His analysis veers into a number of fascinating avenues as well, including the virtues and advantages of the pre-code era, Dietrich’s personal and professional relationship with von Sternberg, and her renouncing of her German citizenship.

Overall

Kino Lorber gives one of the naughtiest and most erotic pre-Code films a sparkling new transfer and an erudite, engaging commentary track.