Screen Mirror (January 1931)

Screen Mirror • For January 5 Photo by Paramount pie I meet, away from the studios, appear to be on display. It is not their fault. Rather it is the fault of the attitude held toward Hollywood. I have the feeling that the peo- ple of Hollywood themselves, within them- selves, resent the glass-house atmosphere of the place. Goldfish must despise their bowl.” Marlene Dietrich revealed herself to Hol- lywood when she went on location for film- ing of certain scenes in “Morocco,” her first American picture. The company went to Guadalupe, California—a bleak, wind-swept stretch of coastal desert where the constant chilly gale from the sea has piled up huge dunes of fine, white sand. It is a region dodged by settlers. Nothing will grow there. Even small animals and the ordinary desert reptiles avoid it. The days are cold, even in summer time, and the nights are colder. The wind is relentless. Yet Marlene Dietrich loved the place; loved the feeling of combat with nature that it inspired in her; was reluctant to leave it when the scenes were completed and she and Gary Cooper, with their company of workers and players, were forced to return. Hollywood cannot understand anyone who likes to go out on location. Generally such trips are looked upon as the last word • Mysterious Marlene Dietrich who makes her first American appearance in “Mor- occo,” josef Von Sternberg’s gripping pic- turization of a woman’s all consuming love for the man of her choice. Miss Dietrich is said to be the most interesting personality ever imported by the motion picture indus- try—and stardom seems inevitable. in hardship. But Marlene Dietrich, the stranger, was happier there than she is in her Beverly Hills home. Perhaps it was the novelty of the desert that intrigued her. As a reigning favorite of the European stage, with audiences ac- claiming her in Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, everywhere she appeared with the Rein- hardt company, she knew the cities only. Such holidays as she had were brief weeks snatched at some fashionable watering place, or days spent in some Alpine resort. She loved it, for she saw not desolation, not wastes of sand, not jagged expanses of vol- canic rock, but the beauty of nature un- adorned, primitive and cruel. Marlene Dietrich’s attitude toward Hol- lywood is far from being her attitude to- ward its work. She has a tremendous inter- est in all phases of motion picture making. This interest takes her beyond the artistic side and into the technical details. great complication of She has far more than a layman's knowl- edge of the camera, of studio lighting, of set design, and story construction. She is one of those extraordinary women who have almost a masculine bent for acquiring facts about all phases of the mechanics that enter into work in which she is concerned. Studio workmen recall one instance when von Sternberg was called from the set dur- ing filming of "Dishonored,” her second picture following "Morocco.” Von Stern- berg, as he left for the short time his busi- ness would take to transact, instructed Miss Dietrich to supervise rehearsal of the scene that was being prepared. When von Stern- berg returned the cameras, players, and lights were all ready for the action to be photographed and recorded. Each phase of the rehearsal had been carried out to per- fection under Miss Dietrich’s expert guid- ance. This remarkable woman is really remark- able only before the cameras. Away from them she is so quiet, so unassuming, so ex- quisitely dressed in modest good taste, that she would go unnoticed except for the very definite magnetism of her personality and her calm, alluring beauty. Her clothes-choice has made her the envy of every woman in Hollywood. She designs and superintends the making of every piece of her private wardrobe and her suggestions are respected in the design of her clothes for her pictures. Simplicity is their keynote. Dark colors are her passion, particularly black. Her humanness is strikingly revealed by her collection of good luck dolls — strange little cloth things with shoe-button eyes, dangling arms and legs, and golliwog an- cestry. She has had this collection of dollls ever since she started her professional career, and has added to it gradually. She wastes no af- fection on them. She just keeps them; some in her home, some in her dressing room at the studios, and occasionally some with her on the set, where they are in full view of the cameras. The favorite dolls have been photographed with Marlene Dietrich in some one or more scenes of every motion picture she has ever made. She will continue to have them ap- pear with her, she says. To forget them would be to invite all sorts of misfortunes. And she smiles that enigmatic smile; the smile that Hollywood fails to understand. Here is a woman who has caught Holly- wood’s fancy, piqued its curiosity, aroused its interest, stirred its imagination, filled to the brim its Pandora’s box of the strange and the new. The syllogism follows: that Hollywood, the world’s most difficult prov- ing ground for tests of this sort, proves by its unprecedented interest in this stranger in its midst that she will literally take the outer world by storm. If Hollywood turns its head as Marlene Dietrich passes by, the country at large will fairly stand agape in her fascinating pres- ence.