Marlene sings the Blue

No, they certainly do not make them like this anymore, nor like Her.

A very willkommen benefit of the two--month season of cinema  marking the centenary of the Weimar Republic at the BFI Southbank in London is a re-issue of the legendary musical tragedy Der Blaue Engel , not only as a lovingly-restored DVD from the inestimable Eureka Entertainment but actually screened in selected cinemas across the United Kingdom and Eire, from St Leonard's On Sea to Crewe and Dublin.

Many timeless silent classics were produced from 1919 toi 1933 in the mammoth Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam, close to Berlin, and this famous adaptation of heinrich Mann's 1905  novel showing the fatal infatuation of the fastidious Professor Unrath for the insouciant cabaret singer Lola Lola was not only the first all-talkie made in Germany (filmed in both German- and English-language versions, more or less side by side- though the originalfassung is infinitely preferable and the sub-titled original is the one falling on to our  cinema screens again this summer), but it marked the first collaboration of the stylish sensualist Josef von Sternberg and the bit-player, chubby chanteuse and haufraulein he transformed into the icon known and loved around the world as Marlene Dietrich, took to Hollywood and immortalised in a further half-dozen exotic and erotic movies.

Phillip Bergson