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jmanuelsl
Reviews
Morocco (1930)
Best film by Dietrich-Sternberg team.
A classic. One of those magic films in which everything works. The casting is a miracle: Dietrich and Cooper, the hottest couple in film history. Marlene never was better than in this film (well, in Shangay express perhaps), even if she looks too big (anyway not as much as in Der blaue engel). It retains the atmospheric brilliance and fascination of that famous (and overrated) first collaboration. Improuvements since that film: much better rhythm (the main problem with Der Blaue Engel, which at times looks completely dead), it gives more importance on gestures, faces and PEOPLE (not just icons or characters). One wonderful song and one of the best love scenes in all history (the one in the bedroom with Cooper playing with a fan and Dietrich showing her legs, neither of them were ever better than in here). The ending is appropriate, and you feel that after all that beauty and magical scenes, in that one hour and a half three people have changed, they just have a different attitude in life and a better understanding of what they need and what they look for). From my point of view the other masterpiece by Sternberg-Dietrich is Shangai Express.
Ménilmontant (1926)
Very good images but uninteresting plot
Very good, if little known, film from the last years of silent cinema. The beginning is as powerful as anything in the classic Russians but in a very new wave way; the acting is great from Sibirskaia who looks really as Gish, even she acts sometimes as if she were a Griffith heroine (in the worst sense), but most of the time she is wonderful and amazingly beautiful. She has two or three awful scenes as a 10 years old girl, as bad as anything in Griffith but don't let them spoil the whole film. The best thing about this film are the images, so much filled with small and precious details (which have nothing to do with the plot) as a poem by Verlaine. A must. There is a scene in a park with old man and baby that for me didn't work, mainly because at that point I wasn't thinking in the plot or characters anymore (nor the director, I think, till that very moment, and it's just too late). You can't spend half an hour in details (however wonderful they are) and then make an emotional scene.