Blonde Venus (1932). 93 minutes. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Starring Marlene Dietrich (as Helen Faraday), Herbert Marshall (as Ned Faraday), Cary Grant (as Nick Townsend), Dickie Moore (as Johnny Faraday), Gene Morgan (as Ben Smith), Rita La Roy (as Taxi Belle Hooper), Robert Emmett O’Connor (as Dan O’Connor), Sidney Toler (as Detective Wilson), and Hattie McDaniel (as Cora).
Blonde Venus is a pre-Code musical drama about a woman who starts out as a kind of fairy-tale nymph, becomes a wife and devoted mother, embarks on a career as a glamorous cabaret starlet, and ends up as a vagrant on the run from the law on the American highway. The film is a hodgepodge that mixes elements of devoted mother love with glitzy nightclub routines, a road story, and a sleazy tale of financial gain. But it primarily focuses on its protagonist Helen’s search for love and acceptance as an intense dreamer and escapist, both on- and offstage—especially offstage, for although timid Helen (who is portrayed by Marlene Dietrich) develops an alternate self onstage, it is the fantasy of her private life that truly nourishes her. This tendency to live through stories and make-believe fills Helen’s life with meaning throughout the film. In the end, Blonde Venus suggests that fantasy is not only a part of how we survive hard times but also a cherished part of being human—difficult to live without and essential for all varieties of love.
The movie begins in Germany where Ned, a chemistry student, discovers Helen bathing with her friends in a forest pond. He is captivated by the beautiful Helen, who he learns is employed as a performer. We then fast-forward into the future, where Helen has given up the stage, the two are married with a young son named Johnny, and all three are living in the U.S. As part of his scientific experiments, Ned has been exposed to radium, which has resulted in a dangerous illness, but the family lacks the funds to provide a life-saving treatment that is only available in Europe—that is, until Helen elects to return to the stage. Helen’s nightclub act becomes a phenomenon, and she engages in a romantic relationship with playboy Nick Townsend, who secretly funds Ned’s treatment in Europe. Nick also puts Helen and her son up in an expensive apartment. When Ned returns, he discovers Helen behavior and breaks off his relationship with her.
Helen takes their son and goes on the lam. Ned sends a detective to locate the two as they make their way south; eventually they are caught, and Helen is separated from Johnny. Distraught, she appears to contemplate suicide but instead decides to reenter the stage world in Paris. Her act there is a sensation, and she reconnects with her old beau Nick while in Europe. In spite of her glamorous success, Nick perceives her internal distress and brings her back to the States to reunite her with Ned and Johnny. The film ends with the reconciled Helen and Ned retelling the story of how they met while Johnny gazes at them from his crib.
Blonde Venus takes its name from Helen’s nightclub persona, The Blonde Venus (which is a nod to Josephine Baker’s Parisian stage persona, The Black Venus), and so in spite of the fact that much of the film takes place offstage or even on the road, Blonde Venus makes the case through its title that Helen’s reentry into the world of theatrical make-believe resides at the story’s core. Certainly, some of what we are here to watch in the nightclub is for entertainment purposes: Dietrich in all of her weirdo splendor, singing songs in her sometimes off-pitch alto voice and traipsing around in provocative costumes. The movie does not disappoint in this regard. But Helen’s performances onstage also establish the great theme of her life—her need to escape into alternate realities as a means of creativity and emotional survival. For through the glitter of the stage environment, mild mother and wife Helen does more than entertain her nightclub audience. Instead she transforms into an alternate self for the benefit of her adoring public and, just as importantly, for herself: her husband is sick, so she dresses up in sparkles and sings; she is separated from her son, so she dons white satin and struts around like a superstar.
But while Helen is escaping into the nighttime glamor of the club stage, she is also oddly escaping into the persona of the actress who portrays her, Marlene Dietrich. Consider the first of Helen’s musical numbers that we see, “Hot Voodoo.” Its lyrics are difficult to discern as a result of the placement of the microphone and the overpowering sounds of the drums and band, but once deciphered, they reveal the depth of the influence of Dietrich’s role in another Josef von Sternberg film:
Tom-tom’s put me under a sort of voodoo
And the whole night long I don’t know right from wrong…
Hot voodoo, dance of sin
Hot voodoo, worse than gin
I’d follow a cave man right into his cave.
That beat gives me a wicked sensation,
My conscience wants to take a vacation.
Hot voodoo, head to toes,
Hot voodoo, burn my clothes—
I want to start dancing, just wearing a smile.
The lyrics of “Hot Voodoo” stress the singer’s sexual avarice: an absent conscience, a desire for nudity, and a whiff of prehistoric erotic pursuit. This is pre-Code verbal content at its finest, but it also alludes to Dietrich’s screen persona, especially her role as the man-eater cabaret star Lola in von Sternberg’s international phenomenon The Blue Angel (1930). Indeed, when Helen sings “Those drums bring up the heaven inside me, / I need some great big angel to guide me,” that former movie’s title pulsates: Helen’s naughty stage persona The Blonde Venus is asking for divine guidance to save herself from sin in this moment, but Helen is literally seeking the “big angel” from Dietrich’s past to guide her stage career as well.
We see Helen’s flirtation with Dietrich’s screen persona become even more explicit in Paris when she performs “I Couldn’t Be Annoyed” (sung by her in French and English). Here she transforms into a satin-clad, debonair Parisian male, dressed in a sparkling white tuxedo, complete with top hat. As showgirls file by her when she enters the stage, she touches the costume of one flirtatiously, gazing down at others like a showman who has his pick of the litter. In other words, although before Paris she was a man-eater onstage, here she has become, in the flash of a moment, a kind of womanizer. The flirtation with masculinity, however, is not merely an escape into a male self; it is also an intensification of the affiliation with Dietrich, for whereas in “Hot Voodoo,” Helen winked at The Blue Angel, in “I Couldn’t Be Annoyed,” singing and wearing her top hat, Helen quotes Dietrich’s iconic performance in The Blue Angel more directly, aligning Helen more closely with Lola. The result is a self-referential sequence in which the specter of Lola and her cruel sadism hovers uneasily on the periphery.
It is hard not to read Lola into the performance of “I Couldn’t Be Annoyed”: after all, we are looking at Dietrich singing in a top hat onstage at this moment in Blonde Venus, a von Sternberg film, and that is exactly what the whole world saw in The Blue Angel, an earlier von Sternberg film. Helen, however, is not like Lola—or is she? We know that Helen is grieving for the loss of her marriage and son; perhaps through Lola she inflicts her sadism not upon the audience, or anyone backstage, but only upon herself. Because Helen never discusses her stage self with anyone in the film, we never hear her thoughts on what the Dietrich persona does for her—how it feeds her soul or prolongs her anguish.
But we can discern one thing: when Helen embarks on her refreshed stage career in order to earn the money it will take to save her husband’s life, Blonde Venus essentially becomes a movie about the lure of fantasy (be it related to Dietrich or otherwise) for personal fulfillment and the need to nourish the soul with the right fantasy. This Dietrich-related self, although it is glamorous and captivating, nevertheless pales in comparison with the alternate selves that Helen creates for herself in her private life. And importantly, as Helen moves ever nearer to becoming a performer in the style of Dietrich, the movie may become more self-referential, but Helen seems to grow increasingly lost—as if becoming enveloped in the on-screen persona of the very person who is playing her on film is causing her to become more miserable. The Dietrich persona may win out onstage, but its triumph is directly connected to Helen’s unhappiness: her separation from her son and husband, the emptiness she feels offstage, and the sense that even a perfect version of slick, professional fantasy—the ultimate version of Dietrich because Helen is portrayed by Dietrich herself—does not equal the private fantasies that we create with the ones we love.
This is important to acknowledge because fundamentally Blonde Venus tells the story of people who, in spite of the time many of them spend outside of the world of show business, are nevertheless no strangers to escapism, and who, for example, are deeply enmeshed in the language and romance of fairy stories. From the film’s romantic beginning, when Ned and his friends discover Helen and her friends bathing nude like sprites in a vine-cloaked pool within the German forest (with Ned’s seven friends counting off to pair themselves with the women as if they were dwarfs in the Snow White story), to Helen promising to grant Ned one wish if he will leave her and her swimming friends alone, to the way that Helen and Ned tell and retell the story of how they met to their young son Johnny as a bedtime story replete with a dragon and princesses—the couple’s love appears to have been created in and enhanced by classic fairy tale elements. But it is not merely their love story that gets this treatment. Consider Ned’s illness and the need to send him to a mysterious German clinic for treatment, for a sum of money beyond the couple’s means, for which Helen will have to implement her own kind of magic and transform late at night into a club singer to raise funds. Or think of Ned’s final telegram from Germany—saying the cure “worked beyond [our] wildest dreams.”
When Helen leaves Ned, she attempts to keep her fantasy life alive with her son and has some measure of success. At one point we see Helen and Johnny riding through the country, hidden in an immaculate bale of hay as Helen sings a German song and dangles a piece of straw over his head; it is like a snapshot from another world, or at least another century. Although she is pursued by the law, Helen maintains a benign world of childlike play for Johnny, in which he is seen amusing himself while wearing a mask, reading comics, drawing letters in a book, and sucking on a lollipop. In one scene as she attempts to order a babysitter for him, she provides her room number to the front desk, but he shouts an alternate number each time she attempts to provide it clearly (“You bad boy,” she says, smiling).
With or without Ned, Helen is constantly spinning up tales, inventing personae, and distracting us from reality—whether she is retelling the fairy story that defines her relationship with her husband, performing onstage, telling lies about herself through omission backstage, ordering from a diner as if she has money to pay when in reality she does not, or pretending to go on a date with the detective who is searching for her but does not realize that she, his target, is sitting across the table from him, sipping beer. But it is all a distraction, used as a means of survival. Helen’s performative, chameleon-like nature is a crutch, at times an act of desperation, and a tool for escaping the sorrows of her life on- and offstage.
Her need to tell stories comes to a head when she is at her lowest. To give you a sense of how deeply ingrained Helen’s need for performance is, consider the scene after Helen loses Johnny, where she breaks down in a women’s hostel. In her most desperate hour, one in which she has clearly turned to drink for comfort, what she says to account for herself and to give a window into her state of mind is only a repeat of others’ accounts of themselves. An unnamed woman in the hostel proclaims that she is going to commit suicide. In response, Helen states that she (Helen) is going to commit suicide. When the unnamed woman explains that she is going to kill herself because she has no money, Helen hands her an envelope with $1,500 that Ned has given her, repeating his words to Helen from an earlier scene exactly: “In this envelope are fifteen hundred dollars. It represents my life’s work. Had I had time to exploit it properly, I could have made a fortune.” In other words, when Helen is at her lowest and under the influence of alcohol (i.e., when we think she might let her guard down and give us a glimpse of her genuine feelings), she continues to put on an act—in this case, through the words of the suicidal woman and the words of Ned.
I wish to point out that just because Blonde Venus presents us with the inscrutable Helen does not mean that it provides us with a weak and superficial character. Consider all of the information that is present on screen during Helen’s scenes. Blonde Venus presents us with set after set that is densely packed with objects and activity, rich in significance and atmosphere in scenes where little is being said directly. Take one balmy southern location, for example—a bar area overlooking the street, consisting of semi-enclosed spaces for sitting and drinking that are separated by wooden doors with tattered blinds, and dripping with palm fronds; Helen’s room nearby is similarly divided up with partitions, with chickens roosting on nearly every surface, even on her shoulder at one point. It is not clear what is inside and what is outside—everything is spilling into everything else, and this is where Ned’s campaign to track down Helen and Johnny spills irreparably into Helen’s life. Consider also Helen’s dressing room in Paris, with basket upon basket of flowers sent from male admirers and mirrored surfaces on which someone (Helen?) has written philosophical statements about traveling alone through life. There is so much to consider here; the flowers may offer deluxe adornment, but we know that Helen is privately morose, longing for her son and husband. Helen’s spaces are filled with stuff that is superficially beautiful but that we have to cut through to find her—it is as if her practice of spinning up narratives that smother the truth has come to be adopted by her settings. The result is that both she and her environs disguise her true feelings, until they cannot be contained any longer.
Blonde Venus is thus about a richly defined character who reaches a crisis point in her fantasy life, and it may also be a warning to all of us to watch out for what happens when you take away fantasies, especially archetypal fantasies, from people who need them. We might wonder at the beginning of the film whether Ned and Helen should obsessively return to their love origins every night when they are putting their son to bed and whether those origins should be the focal point of their love. Perhaps it is unhealthy to fixate on them as a defining feature, but then again, isn’t their love story a thing of beauty? Don’t we miss it when it goes away, destroyed by her lies and betrayal, and by his hatred for what she has done? Don’t we yearn for it passionately when its restoration dangles tantalizingly before us in the final scene? If the movie works, our hearts are melting when Johnny’s music box tinkles out its bittersweet notes after the couple revisits the story of the princesses in front of their son. The restoration of the couple’s fantasy life was my chief desire in that moment, and it is in many ways the movie’s main objective—beyond curing Ned, beyond tracking down Johnny as he wanders along the road with Helen, and beyond catapulting Helen to international stardom.
Far from destroying Helen’s fantasy life, the movie rekindles it as the music box chimes on, suggesting that the little fictions she has created with her husband are not only desirable but necessary. She may have chosen to forgo her stage career, but she has not chosen to forgo the element that chiefly defines her. Moreover, her husband acknowledges his need for that element, too. A movie that puts our need for the protection of a love mythology ahead of everything else, even of fully comprehending its main character’s thoughts and motivations, may indulge in a certain amount of mystery, but it also understands something very real about the powers of escape that the greatest love affords its practitioners.