Josef von Sternberg always had a materialistic streak — it was a necessity to produce the kind of effects he was chasing. He never embraced it as excessively as he did with The Scarlet Empress, the penultimate entry in his seven-film cycle with Marlene Dietrich, and the one that signaled to the Paramount producers that the end was near when it turned into a hugely expensive box office flop. (It was also the point at which their deeply intimate love-hate relationship started to hit the skids, with grand finale The Devil is a Woman turning into something like von Sternberg’s self-portrait.) One can see all the money on the screen, but it’s not the kind of expensive movie that would have appealed much to Depression-era audiences. There’s silent-era intertitles about five years later than you’d expect, and an infamous early montage that imagines Ivan the Terrible as a bedtime story got through just before the Hays Code would have rendered it unfeasible. Suggesting the spirit — if not the letter — of Sergei Eisenstein’s subsequent approach to Ivan, it features exposed breasts on a Catherine Wheel and a man being used as a bell-toller that dissolves into an innocent girl’s hoop skirt on a swing. When making a tragedy about overreach and the excesses of sex and power, why not embrace it formally?
Dietrich was always the most carnal of the Old Hollywood legends, and as the woman who became Catherine the Great after starting as Princess Sophie, it’s a wonder the film came out in the last minutes before Catherine’s lustiness became undepictable in movies. It’d be easy for audiences to see the arrival of a smolderingly handsome John Lodge as Count Alexey and assume this is a film about their torrid romance, even when he says he has been sent on behalf of Empress Elizabeth to marry her supposedly handsome nephew Peter III for the sake of producing an heir to the throne. Peter III turns out to be Sam Jaffe making his film debut, carrying the same smile as the titular character in The Man Who Laughs without any of the intelligence behind his eyes. The subsequent wedding finds von Sternberg at his most unreal: a series of closeups of Dietrich and Lodge looking at each other, trapped in a private world where they have to convey their feelings about this betrayal exclusively through their eyes, with a flickering candle to convey the turbulence before one final punchline cut to Peter III snaps us out of the rhythms of the trance.
Von Sternberg’s closeups are as potent a demonstration of his mastery of chiaroscuro as anything, but a first-time viewer might leave The Scarlet Empress primarily awed by his sense of interior decoration. As a filmmaker who conjured up his unreal worlds via mise en scène and lighting, the extraordinary specificity of Elizabeth’s court turns it into an unusually gargoyle-like locale even by the standards of German Expressionism-influenced productions. Seemingly every chair resembles a nasty sort of throne shaped like a cruel bird of prey or a haunted man, as if it had assembled its shape as a result of the spirit of the person sitting in it. When Catherine winds up being bullied by Elizabeth into spying on Alexey serving Empress Elizabeth’s own needs in the middle of the night, she’s unintentionally been given the key to unlock herself from these deadly halls and the power games being played in her humiliation, and it lies between her legs. For a film about Russia, the excesses of sex, power, and gaudy decor nonetheless feel awfully American.
Whether the scene of Dietrich being forced to see her feelings thrown in her face was a metaphor for how von Sternberg felt about her other lovers will likely forever remain a mystery — it’s been often speculated but never confirmed that they shared a certain intimacy that went beyond the films, and Dietrich’s daughter claimed that von Sternberg was in love with her mother for his entire life. On the actual sets, the direction she received was mechanical and consisted of performing basic functions, like counting to six while looking unmovingly at a lamp, in lieu of proper acting. (This was so she wouldn’t mess up the lighting — she could have had an alternate career as the prototype for a Bresson model if her director hadn’t been so opulent.) The punchline to the humiliation scene is that it’s what results in Catherine finding a new lover that gives her an heir and the ability to get her own revenge on Alexi — she’s become part of this dynasty’s games of sex and power in her own right, another von Sternberg hero whose lusts and loves take them to a higher plane.
Dietrich becoming part of the dynasty of Hollywood while her lover-director remained on the outskirts would sum up the subsequent years after they parted ways from each other, with von Sternberg not getting the best material for his skillset until he clawed back complete control one last time for Anatahan in 1953. There’s an urban legend that Ernst Lubitsch saw The Scarlet Empress in his brief stint as the Paramount production manager, and subsequently chided von Sternberg for being so wasteful and excessive without noticing that von Sternberg had reused a scene for his now-lost silent film The Patriot to cut costs. (How the two legendary directors both tackled aristocratic lusts in their own ways is a subject for its own piece.) The Scarlet Empress being a hugely costly and expensive production while also featuring recycled footage and old-fashioned intertitles sums up what makes it such an oddity even now: a mix of still-modern and incredibly old-fashioned, right down to one of the most abrupt endings ever filmed. Perhaps this strange melding of forms was what made von Sternberg such catnip to the campier side of the American avant-garde of the 1960s, with the work of Jack Smith in particular being unimaginable without Smith’s worship of von Sternberg’s cinematic spaces and how often he undercut them by treating plot as a joke. (For a particularly provocative suggestion of what comes after Catherine’s ascendancy, throw Flaming Creatures on immediately after The Scarlet Empress ends.) Cinematic history is written by the victors, and The Scarlet Empress achieved one of the most Pyrrhic of them all.
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