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DIETRICH
Temptation
without temperament
"The Kraut's the best that ever came into the ring," Ernest Hemingway once told Lillian Ross, and on another occasion he declared, "If she had nothing more than her voice, she could break your heart with it. But she also has that beautiful body and the timeless loveliness of her face."
Marlene Dietrich has become, in our time, the embodiment of a legend. It is a legend of longevity, of glamour retained against the enemy time. But that legend is only the successor to a previous one, which was as a latter-day vamp. Early in her American career C. H. Rand wrote, "Your Latin or Slav vamps of the Pola Negri type don't happen to interest me. 1 want beauty without bust-ups; temptation without temperament. I want a woman whose passion is not a blind rage of the body or soul, but a recognition of mutual attraction in which reason or humour will play their part, as far as love permits. ... I find all my requisites in the screen character of Marlene Dietrich."
Miss Dietrich dispensed with the edge of hysteria that was customary in the standard vamp performance and replaced it with a directness, an honesty in her approach to sex that was totally in keeping with the new American taste in these matters. She retained, however, an aura of what the popular press terms "mystery." Almost any actress who speaks from the American screen in a foreign accent will automatically be invested with this quality. Hers was perhaps more genuine than most. She combined, in appearance and in her oddly masculine voice, both command and invitation, and in this there was, indeed, an unsettling quality that, for want of a better term, could be called mystery.
There was nothing mysterious about Marlene Dietrich's past. She was the daughter of a German army officer and she went on the stage in Berlin shortly after the First World War. She played, for the most part, women of unconventional morality, and the famous legs were exploited almost from the start. She worked both in films and on the stage, in musicals
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