Film Review: Blonde Venus (1932)
History can play cruel tricks on certain films; they are elevated to cult status not for their artistic merits but for their unintended campiness, becoming curious artefacts rather than celebrated works of talented artists who should have known better. One such example is Blonde Venus, the 1932 melodrama directed by Josef von Sternberg. While part of the legendary director-star collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, this film survives in popular memory largely for a single, baffling musical number, its reputation as a “pre-Code” curio overshadowing its significant flaws as a coherent drama. It is a peculiar testament to how style, when utterly divorced from substance, can birth an iconography so strange it becomes immortalised for all the wrong reasons.
The film’s convoluted origins perhaps foreshadowed its troubled final form. The original idea is sometimes credited to the film’s star and Sternberg’s famous muse, Marlene Dietrich herself, who reportedly wrote a basic outline titled “Mother Love.” This was adapted into a script by Jules Furthman and S. K. Lauren, yet the core narrative that emerged is a haphazard saga of maternal sacrifice and moral compromise. Dietrich plays Helen Faraday, the German wife of American chemist Ned Faraday (Herbert Marshall). Their meet-cute, recounted to their young son Johnny (Dickie Moore), involves Ned stumbling upon Helen and other actresses skinny-dipping in the Black Forest—a scene rendered with suggestive, bleached-out cinematography by Bert Glennon that hints at nudity. Six years into a seemingly happy marriage, crisis strikes when Ned contracts radium poisoning. Told an experimental therapy in Dresden could save him but lacking the funds, Helen returns to the stage as the “Blonde Venus.” Her success attracts wealthy politician Nick Townsend (a young Cary Grant), who, unaware of her marital status, bankrolls Ned’s treatment in exchange for her companionship.
What follows is a sprawling, episodic descent. When Ned returns cured unexpectedly, he discovers the affair, demands custody of Johnny, and casts Helen out. Her subsequent flight with her son leads her through a montage of destitution, hinted-at prostitution, and menial jobs before she surrenders the child. Her redemption arc, involving a triumphant return to the stage in Paris and a rekindled engagement to Nick, concludes with a rushed, sentimental reconciliation with Ned. The plot is pure melodramatic contrivance that feels both overstretched and mechanically thin.
The film’s enduring notoriety, however, rests almost entirely on the iconic “Hot Voodoo” number. Here, Dietrich emerges on a nightclub stage dressed in a full gorilla costume, surrounded by showgirls in egregious blackface, and slowly sheds the ape suit to reveal a sequinned gown before launching into song.To modern viewers, the sequence is racially insensitive and profoundly “icky.” Yet even by the standards of 1932, it reads as spectacularly camp, a bizarre spectacle where von Sternberg’s baroque visual style reaches its most outlandish apex. Critics note this sequence represents where “style both displaces and transcends characterization,” a fitting summary for the entire film. It is a memorable moment, but one that highlights the surrounding emptiness.
Indeed, this bizarre highlight inadvertently exposes the film’s core weaknesses. Everything that precedes and follows it feels comparatively bland and mechanically plotted. Sternberg demonstrates palpable problems with pacing and motivation; Helen’s decisions to abandon her child and later resurrect her career lack emotional weight and feel arbitrary. The characterisation is wafer-thin. Even the star power fizzles: Dietrich, often a captivating screen presence, fails to establish any compelling chemistry with the fledgling Cary Grant, who appears more as a calculating plot device than a charming seducer.
The film is not without its salvageable moments, primarily owing to its production date—two years before the strict enforcement of the Hays Production Code. The opening skinny-dipping scene and a later moment where Helen feigns being a prostitute to mislead a detective (Sydney Toller) carry a risqué implication that would soon be purged from American cinema. These “pre-Code” elements provide a tantalising glimpse of a freer cinematic language, yet they remain remarkably tame and implicit. Their primary interest is historical, showcasing what was permissible in a brief window of Hollywood’s history. The film has been described as “an insane film, a great film, one which could not exist in any year past 1932,” but this assessment confuses historical uniqueness with quality. Its audacity is often merely awkward.
At the end of the day, while Josef von Sternberg is rightly celebrated as a visual stylist and his collaborations with Dietrich are legendary, Blonde Venus is, at best, an interesting failure.It is a glittering spectacle built on a foundation of narrative sand, a film where directorial apogee stylistically cannot mask a muddled and hapless core narrative. It endures not as a masterpiece but as a camp relic, remembered for a gorilla suit and blackface rather than its dramatic power. The cruel trick history has played on Blonde Venus is to preserve it for its most sensational and problematic minutes, allowing its considerable flaws as a story of “motherly devotion” to be overshadowed by its sheer, unintended weirdness. It is a fascinating artifact of its time and the Sternberg-Dietrich partnership, but as a coherent cinematic work, it remains deeply flawed.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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