everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Best movie ever!

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Well now this is just very silly. As others have pointed out, Victor McLaglen acts his best but is fatally miscast - too rigid, charmless, snide and creepy in a role that is crying out for a Clark Gable or Cary Grant. On the other hand Dietrich was never more beautiful, and you can feel Sternberg's worshipping of her through the camera lens. The photography is luscious and the BluRay restoration a joy. Warner Oland has a small role as something other than Charlie Chan, which is very odd to see.The story, dialogue and characters are thoroughly unbelievable at every turn, and the whole thing, really, is just a delirious but delightful mess, a stilted, fevered, nonsensical fairytale dream about spies, but no less likeable for all that. Accept it and love it for what it is, because it isn't like anything else.

one of old fashion films who, using the story only as pretext, gives magnificent cinematography. a war story, remembering Mata Hari biography, it is the scene for brilliant, fascinating, ambiguous, charming performance of Marlene Dietrich. not a real surprise. only delight. because each word, each gesture, each dialogue becomes a Persian carpet of details. the clothes, the music, the piano, the cat, the attitude of a woman who covers her patriotic feelings in a refined form of hedonism, her forbidden love story who has the only sin to not give to her the right partner to be easily credible, the last scene who gives to death new nuances are the ingredients of great example of high cinematography. and that does Dishonored memorable.

This was made as a response to Greta Garbo's Mata Hari from the previous year about the exotic dancer turned WWI spy. Dietrich's film is also about a woman turned spy, it involves deceit and sexual danger, a woman acting, an intoxicating performance, all these things that Dietrich naturally breathed by simply being herself; but it also had what the other film didn't, von Sternberg directing, here in the space that would later come to characterize the best of Hitchcock.We know that it was Sternberg who seduced the persona of the femme fatale out of Dietrich, later claiming he had discovered her. Seduced what he wanted to be seduced by, no doubt. So it is only natural that we should expect an excellent film here, about Dietrich seducing an audience of eager men. The effort is not for realism, never was with these two. It was always about staging the circumstances that would enable us to dream this woman. It was so in Der Blaue Engel. So it makes a lot of sense that the actual films would exude the scent of movie fantasy, for example here the pure gaudiness of the ball masque with seduction behind masks, or that Dietrich would be allowed a piano in a wartime prison cell. She is playing for us of course, because she and Sternberg knew we wanted to see.Why this isn't then up to par compared to earlier Sternberg, has a lot to do I think with the film lacking a more carefully woven self-reference; what made The Last Command such a breathtaking venture in the space between staged image and tortured heart. There is some that I find tantalizing, namely two consecutive scenes in the end where Dietrich bares her soul from behind long eye-lashes before a military court and soon after before a firing squad. Two audiences where every member would rather hold her in his arms than do what he has to do.The rest is too overt. The message against war is noble but trite, a forced humanism that is not among the rest of the film's agenda. And Victor McLaglen gives one of the weirdest performances I've seen, a leering that borders on perverse. It was originally intended for Gary Cooper, but it's perhaps better that we have it as it is; it adds to the feverish sexual brew.Still, this being Sternberg's temple of worship, we get to dream about this woman. She only concedes to touch the world by playing the piano, this is proper I think. We get to fall madly in love, an instrument at her fingers, herself an instrument for music and the fates.

Marlene Dietrich plays Marie, the widow of a decorated Austrian WW I soldier down on her luck, recruited for the secret service by a dour secret service chief (Gustav von Seyffertitz) to become spy X-27. Her first assignment is to trap a mole for the Russians (Warner Oland, playing the first non-pseudo-oriental role I've seen him in), which she does with ease. Her next adversary is the wily Russian spy Colonel Kranau (Victor McLaglen), and the two of them keep stalemating each other. Ultimately, her gesture acknowledging love though she doesn't say it aloud, she allows him to escape the Austrians who have captured him, and she is tried and executed for treason. In this movie, von Sternberg makes the most of Dietrich's enigmatic bearing—she's not much interested in living, and not much afraid of dying, so she might as well die for her country. No reproach for her country's neglect of the widow of a hero. Von Sternberg also gives plenty of examples of his famous eponymous lighting, making Dietrich look even more alluring, jaded, insouciant, and enigmatic than ever. McLaglen is an odd choice for a romantic hero. Most of his parts emphasize bluff, even cynical good humour or vicious toughness. Here he smiles knowingly and moves with ease in uniform. Perhaps he grins too much, but the balance of his joviality with Dietrich's pallor is intriguing.