Blonde Venus (1932)

A cabaret singer takes up with a millionaire to pay for her gravely ill husband's operation.

Director:

Josef von Sternberg

Writers:

Jules Furthman (by), S.K. Lauren (by)

Stars:

Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Herbert Marshall

Cast

Complete credited cast:
Marlene Dietrich	...	Helen Faraday, aka Helen Jones
Herbert Marshall	...	Edward 'Ned' Faraday
Cary Grant	...	Nick Townsend
Dickie Moore	...	Johnny Faraday
Gene Morgan	...	Ben Smith
Rita La Roy	...	Taxi Belle Hooper
Robert Emmett O'Connor	...	Dan O'Connor
Sidney Toler	...	Detective Wilson
Morgan Wallace	...	Dr. Pierce

Storyline

American chemist Ned Faraday marries a German entertainer and starts a family. However, he becomes poisoned with Radium and needs an expensive treatment in Germany to have any chance at being cured. Wife Helen returns to night club work to attempt to raise the money and becomes popular as the Blonde Venus. In an effort to get enough money sooner, she prostitutes herself to millionaire Nick Townsend. While Ned is away in Europe, she continues with Nick but when Ned returns cured, he discovers her infidelity. Now Ned despises Helen but she grabs son Johnny and lives on the run, just one step ahead of the Missing Persons Bureau. When they do finally catch her, she loses her son to Ned. Once again she returns to entertaining, this time in Paris, and her fame once again brings her and Townsend together. Helen and Nick return to America engaged, but she is irresistibly drawn back to her son and Ned. In which life does she truly belong?

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Plot Keywords:

gorilla costume | cabaret singer | radiation poisoning | ill husband | dysfunctional marriage | 

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Taglines:

ONLY DIETRICH WOULD DARE PLAY THIS ROLE! Only Dietrich Could Play It! (Print Ad- Albany Times-Union, ((Albany NY)) 21 September 1932)

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Genres:

Drama

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English German French

Release Date:

28 October 1932 (Hungary)

Also Known As:

Indiscretion

Filming Locations:

Paramount Ranch - 2813 Cornell Road, Agoura, California, USA

Company Credits

Production Co:

Paramount Pictures

Technical Specs

Runtime:

93 min 85 min (video: cut)

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Noiseless Recording)

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The scene with Marlene Dietrich making her first appearance as the Blonde Venus, the gorilla striptease, was given an homage in the movie Batman & Robin (1997) when Uma Thurman makes a similar scene dressed as a gorilla. In fact, the gorilla's fantasies are pretty similar too.

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Quotes

Helen Faraday, aka Helen Jones: I'm not going to stay in this dump anymore. I'm going to find myself a better bed. Don't you think I can? Just watch.

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Crazy Credits

Opening credits are shown with a background of water reflected at a swimming hole. As the credits end, we see women swimming in the swimming hole.

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Alternate Versions

The original German release and some television prints of "Blonde Venus" exclude the opening scene, where Herbert Marshall encounters Marlene Dietrich and friends "skinny-dipping" in a lake.

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Connections

Featured in The Love Goddesses (1965)

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Soundtracks

Treue Liebe Nur du allein
(uncredited)
Music by Friedrich Silcher
Played during opening credits and as background music several times

User Reviews

fun part of the series

This is the 5th of the 7 legendary collaborations between Dietrich and von Sternberg, and the only one set in the U.S. (the other 6 are set in Germany, Morocco, Europe, China, Russia, and Spain). All of the principals, including the director, were born in Europe. For some reason it is my personal favorite, and the only one I enjoy watching repeatedly. Probably this is for the outrageous musical numbers, which display Dietrich's incredibly self-assured command of her environment (what can top "Hot Voodoo", but I really really love the glittering white top-hat and tails number particularly). This would have been the only time during filming that von Sternberg could not totally exercise his robotic direction of her; she gets to be more "herself" as a real performer, and her energy-level comes way up. Also I'd venture that since the story is set in the U.S. it makes it more challenging to present her as "exotic" (as opposed to, say, China). I love how von Sternberg plays her character's flight South, into increasingly lurid, run-down, and crude environments. The technical side of movie-making had made huge strides; film-stock was becoming much more uniform and high-contrast, and sound-recording had improved greatly in just a few years; von Sternberg was able to make full use of this. The film feels snappy and tightly-paced, and has mostly abandoned silent-film mannerisms.

In comparison to their next 2 films, this one feels quite grounded. The subsequent "Scarlett Empress" and "Devil is a Woman" would be increasingly baroque and outrageous excursions into fantastic style, excess, and European decadence, which kind of left their American audiences in the dust - and helped Dietrich land on the infamous "box-office poison" list.

This is a pre-Code film, and it routinely tweaks conventional morals. The nightclub in which Dietrich goes to work is clearly a high-class "speakeasy"; Prohibition was still in effect at the time. Also, its always a bit confusing for modern audiences when dollar-amounts are mentioned in old films. The personal check which Dietrich receives from Cary Grant is for $200 as I recall; in current dollars that would be something more like $2,500 and was an amount which would have set Depression-era audiences reeling with its clear implication of what Grant had received in return!

This is the first chance Cary Grant had to do a major co-starring role, and its the earliest of his films available on video. Another IMDb "comment" mentions Dietrich and Mae West supposedly "falling in love" with him, which is a laugh! Dietrich (in her daughter's bio) referred to him as the "shirt-seller" (Grant was selling men's shirts at the studio, as a sideline to make extra money); West preferred, to put it delicately, men who were a little more red meat (I think that Grant was already living with Randolph Scott at the time of filming; they used to attend Hollywood A-list parties as a couple, which Scott could get away with partially because of his very blue-blood East Coast family connections).

Originally available on LaserDisc (as a 2-disc set with "Shanghai Express").