Angel Sings the Blues: Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel in Context

Abstract

This essay reconsiders The Blue Angel (1930) not only in light of its 2001 restoration, but also in light of the following: the careers of Josef von Sternberg, Emil Jannings, and Marlene Dietrich; the 1905 novel by Heinrich Mann from which The Blue Angel was adapted; early sound cinema; and the cultural-historical circumstances out of which the film arose. In The Blue Angel, Dietrich, in particular, found the vehicle by which she could achieve global stardom, and Sternberg—a volatile man of mystery and contradiction, stubbornness and secretiveness, pride and even arrogance—for the first time found a subject on which he could focus his prodigious talent.