The greatest movie ever made..!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Blonde Venus (1932) *** (out of 4) Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) learns that her husband Edward (Herbert Marshall) is dying of radiation poison but there's a doctor who might be able to save him. The only problem is that they don't have the money so she goes back to working as a cabaret singer where she meets millionaire Nick Townsend (Cary Grant). At first Helen is just after the money to save her husband but soon her and Nick fall in love.Dietrich and director Joseph von Sternberg once again create a winning film that manages to be highly entertaining even though some pretty big flaws. Even though the film does have some flaws there's no question that the cast is terrific and once again the director offers up a beautiful looking film to say the least.The biggest problem with the movie is how melodramatic it gets in the middle. There's a long subplot dealing with the husband snapping after he learns of the affair and Dietrich takes off with the kid. This is where we see her struggling to do anything good for the kid as she has to keep avoiding detectives and others who are looking for her. I found all of this stuff to be rather silly because it makes the husband out to be an incredible villain and for the life of me it just didn't make too much sense.It didn't make too much sense in many reasons because this was a Pre-code and it did feature a woman cheating on her husband with several men and she was made for the viewer to root for. A lot of credit has to go to Dietrich because she's extremely strong here. She's given a couple musical numbers that she nails just fine but I was really impressed with her dramatic work and especially her love for her son. Marshall is great playing the bad guy and Grant is wonderfully charming in his part. The early romance scenes between he and Dietrich are certainly the highlight of the film. Dickie Moore is also good in his role as the son.BLONDE VENUS isn't a masterpiece but it's certainly an entertaining film. Yes it has some major plot flaws but there's no doubt that fans of Dietrich and Grant will enjoy it.

This film being 2 years after The Blue Angel did not get Dietrich the credit she deserves for this one. It is a solid film. Marlena is pretty appealing here. Cary Grant is in support cast here as playboy Townsend, one of his smaller roles. There is a lot to like about this one including the child actor. Hattie McDaniel shows up unmistakably as a maid in New Orleans. In fact I think some of the same New Orleans sets are used about 10 years later in Ingrid Bergman's Saratoga Trunk.While the film has some script flaws the direction is solid as I suspect most of the crew also worked on Blue Angel including the same director. While Grant has not arrived as a star here,Dietrich definitely has. She gets to model some really elegant clothes and even in black and white she looks stacked.

This is perhaps the slightest (and least engaging) of the Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich collaborations – being a mother love tale that, frankly, were a dime a dozen around this period! Still, the director's pictorial sense (best served by the décor, ranging from lab equipment in the early scenes to an expressively-lit bamboo hut for the star's refuge in her downtrodden phase) and flair for the outré (notably the opening skinny-dipping sequence, a pure pre-Code moment, and the celebrated "Hot Voodoo" number where a gorilla performer does a striptease to reveal the star underneath!) make all the difference! Unfortunately, co-star Cary Grant made his sole film with either in his 'baptism of fire' year and, consequently, his acting here is rather stiff…not that the nominal male lead – dullish, middle-aged Herbert Marshall (already on his way to becoming a character actor) – is any better, however! Dietrich herself tries, but she is decidedly too glamorous to be convincing in this type of soggy stuff. The protagonist is a German cabaret artist whom scientist Marshall meets and marries while doing research in her country; cut to a few years later, they are now living in America with a child in tow for whom, of course, she has given up her career. Still, this talent comes in handy once again when it transpires that Marshall has contracted radium poisoning and rapidly requires a sizeable sum in order to undergo treatment abroad. Begrudgingly, he acquiesces to Dietrich resuming her stage-act but, having now made a name for herself under the titular billing, she also attracts the attention of millionaire playboy Grant; the woman willingly gives in to him (having grown fond of the limelight and the high life that comes with it) but, when the fully-recovered Marshall arrives home ahead of schedule, all hell breaks loose. He files for divorce and also requests custody of the boy but, instead of handing him over, she decides to take it on the lam with the kid! Living precariously for a while, she is eventually tracked down by a private investigator and, managing then to land another singing job, inevitably runs into Grant one more time; however, upon playing her American hometown, she decides to pay Marshall a visit – with the younger man finally realizing that she belongs with her husband after all and graciously opting to step out of the picture. Incidentally, just as her eternal rival Greta Garbo was ideal for a particular type of film (and retired when audiences would not accept her in any other genre), Dietrich here treads largely unsuitable ground – though, as I said, Sternberg was too much of an auteur to allow the melodrama inherent in the plot to cramp (for long) the overt stylishness he consummately brought to whatever material came his way. That said, Dietrich took a necessary breather from his Svengali-like hold (not least in view of the disappointing box-office returns of both this one and DISHONORED {1931}) – only to subsequently re-emerge with their most grandiose (if, commercially, no more successful) effort yet i.e. THE SCARLET EMPRESS (1934)... P.S. For some reason, I never caught BLONDE VENUS on Italian TV (unlike the rest of the Sternberg-Dietrich series), so that I first got to watch this on local TV in the mid-1990s via an infrequent prime-time broadcast; then, in 2000, I acquired an original PAL VHS of it – which was eventually rendered obsolete when the upgrade to the R1 DVD (as part of the 5-film 2-disc MARLENE DIETRICH: THE GLAMOUR COLLECTION set) was made.

German cabaret girl marries a commercial chemist and moves with him to New York City; five years later, with a child to care for, the couple finds themselves in dire straits once the husband is forced to leave his job due to radium poisoning. She earns the money for his trip to Europe to seek medical treatments in only one night, by hitting the stage and getting hit-on by a millionaire politician (he's turned on by her emergence from a gorilla costume--don't ask). Despite a broad and at times uneven direction by Josef von Sternberg, this outrageous story provides the perfect role for Marlene Dietrich, whose character is introduced swimming naked with a group of showgirls. The camera catches the actress posing too often, and her song numbers date the picture more than anything else, but she's wonderful caring for husband Herbert Marshall and son Dickie Moore (both excellent). Cary Grant's role as the wealthy playboy is hardly convincing, and we're never told where his steady stream of cash is coming from, but when Marshall finds out about him and threatens to take the kid away, Dietrich and Moore take it on the lam. This part of the movie could have easily slipped into self-parody (and nearly does), yet the star works her way through it with the utmost seriousness. She's marvelous, even when the script struggles to meet her halfway. *** from ****