The Blue Angel: the life and films of Marlene Dietrich

This new autobiography of Marlene Dietrich succeeds in bringing all the threads together that made up such a variegated life.

You travel in time from a Germany that was emerging from the settled feudal order of medieval times into the mechanised horrors of modern war.

Then on to the glamor and glitz of Hollywood between the wars.

For after surviving the great inflation of the early 20s in Berlin, Marlene learned her trade well, as the woman with a fascination that provoked a response. A mystery. A conundrum that demanded to be solved.

Playing the Blue Angel she had in reality to only play herself. She had learnt how to survive on the 'anything goes' streets of Jazz Age Berlin.

The lessons she learned she put into excellent effect when she arrived in Hollywood and a similar desolation overtook the country in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Her greatest films offered escape. Escape from the dreary reality of life in a depression, to the furtive and secret engagements of love and attraction, compulsion and exoticism, eroticism
and fatal flaws of human character.

She knew all about them, and portrayed them to the letter.

Author David Stuart Ryan used informants as varied as Billy Wilder (another refugee from Jazz Age Berlin) to her personal assistant in her later years, to Burt Bacharach, another fervent admirer, to create this unforgettable portrait of a screen legend.

The expertly detailed description of how her masterpiece, The Blue Angel, was actually made will make you realise just how closely it mirrored her life and times.

The curtain is about to be drawn back, as you meet the real Marlene.

Dettagli