Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Blue Angel, has remained one of the best sound films ever made in
Germany. He was to go on to direct several of the most visuallyelegant
and imaginative movies in cinema history – Shanghai Express,
The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil Is a Woman.
One of the most impressive things about Morocco relates to its
context within the transition between silent film and the talkies. In
its final days, the silent picture had attained a near-perfection in such
masterpieces as Murnau’s Sunrise, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc,
and Vidor’s The Crowd. All the grace and eloquence of this period
was immediately lost in the inarticulate babble of the early talkies.
Although many directors – Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Vidor among others
– contributed to meeting the challenge of the new medium, Morocco
was the first film to restore the fluidity and beauty of the late silents,
while simultaneously taking full advantage of the potential of sound.
Sternberg succeeded, in part, by allowing for long stretches of the
film to be without dialogue, relying on dazzling camera movement,
delicately-textured effects of light and shadow, expressive décor, and
precise gesture on the part of his high-powered cast. This was often
accompanied by creative use of evocative music and sound effects.
All of the elements came together in the director’s brilliant
conjuration of a sultry, crackling ambience in which his actors obsess
over their sexual desires.
Adolphe Menjou recreates the suave man-of-the-world persona he
originated in Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris and embodied throughout
the 1920’s in films directed by Lubitsch and his imitators. The object
of Menjou’s civilized longing is Marlene Dietrich, who, with the
release of Morocco, became an international star of immense
proportions. Gary Cooper, too, as Legionnaire Tom Brown, bursts
into stardom to become one of the most attractive and versatile
leading men of his generation.
Josef von Sternberg was the screen’s greatest romantic artist, a true
successor to the tradition of William Blake, Sir Walter Scott,
Charlotte Bronte, and Gustave Flaubert. Morocco is the most
sublimely delirious of Sternberg’s meditations on romantic obsession,
and it ranks with Chaplin’s City Lights, Renoir’s A Day in the Country,
Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and Dreyer’s Gertrud as an expression of this
sensibility. All of these films challenge our expectations of the
cinema’s innate tendency toward realism, and they all, to some
degree, ask us to suspend our belief in the mundane real world to
fully savor the poignancy of their endings.
As he explains in his autobiography, Sternberg chose to make a film
from Benno Vigny’s novel, “Amy Jolly”, because “I had deliberately
selected a theme that was visual and owed no allegiance to a cascade
of words.” The other reason he cites for his choice was that it
occurred to him “that there was a foreign legion of women, so to
speak, who also chose to hide their wounds behind an incognito.”
Marlene Dietrich expounds on Sternberg’s “foreign legion of women”
51 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001
Pour l’auteur, spécialiste du cinéma
classique américain, Morocco de Josef von
Sternberg “fut le premier film parlant à
retrouver la beauté et la fluidité des œuvres
de la fin du muet, tout en faisant pleinement
usage des possibilités du son”. Le film de von
Sternberg est essentiellement une œuvre
romantique, bâtie autour de la rencontre de
deux grands acteurs (Marlene Dietrich et
Gary Cooper) et il ne faut pas y chercher
une description très fouillée de la société
marocaine. Si on peut considérer que
Morocco fait largement usage des
stéréotypes et puise dans l’imaginaire
exotique et colonial, il n’en demeure pas
moins que le film laisse entendre qu’il existe
un point de vue autre qu’occidental sur les
choses et un système de valeurs autre que
celui proposé par les puissances coloniales.