Jannings returns to his breakfast, but between the camera (now further from him) and his head a hanging lamp covers his face, obscuring it and pushing him back. His landlady comes in, takes the dead bird, and saying "no more singing" throws it into a Franklin stove whose open door reveals a brilliant light within. His head fills half the frame the cage, the other half. While cracking an egg he whistles to his canary hearing no answer, he rises and goes to the cage. When he sits down to eat, however, the camera a few feet above his head seems to lock him into his chair, between the curved table-top before him and the gleaming surface of a globe behind. The room where he EATS breakfast is deep and flooded with light. The first scene establishes the peaceful, orderly life of Jannings in his apartment. But the weight of this material, the subject of the film, should not obscure our view of Sternberg's treatment of that material, for it's his treatment that is crucial to the film's meaning, especially for Jannings and Dietrich. Thus the German myth's appearance in Blue Angel makes it seem an Expressionist film. It is true that Blue Angel is his most German work so Scarlet Empress is similarly his most Russian and Morocco his most Arabic. No wonder they include they include Josef von Sternberg's first sound film with the works of Lang, Murnau, and others.īut despite his name, Sternberg, born in New York, had directed his nine previous films in America and after 1930 made thirteen more with which Blue Angel is completely consistent. The economic theme in this plot, closely related to the real and feared decline of the German middle classes in the 20's, satisfyingly gives American film critics one of the few social facts in their consciousness. The allure of a cabaret singer (Marlene Dietrich) leads Professor Rat (Emil Jannings) from the comfortable, orderly existence and, to complete the Expressionist myth as practiced in German movies, subverts his normal conduct until he becomes an object of the townpeople's scorn. They see it as a masterpiece of German Expressionism, detailing the complete degradation and ultimate death of a bourgeois hero through his descent into the sex-and-violence filled world of the lower classes. CRITICS AGREE that The Blue Angel (1930) is a classic, but usually for misleading reasons.
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