Fun fact, My parents named me after Marlene Dietrich, so I always love watching her movies.
Anyways, onto Blonde Venus and a bit on the Hays Code.

I have had to study the Hays Code in depth while taking American Film History when I was studying abroad in Japan.  I’ve seen films that came right before and right after code was put in place.  I’ve always found it interesting to see how film directors, when film was a director’s art, got around the Hays Code by making nods to potentially inappropriate themes.  One of my favorite pre-Hays Code films about women entertainers is Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933).  That film, in terms of potentially scandalous on-screen acts and even on-screen costume changes, makes Blonde Venus out to be a pretty innocent film.  But what makes Blonde Venus‘s writing and cinematography so smart is that it implies all of those potentially scandalous bits while still being innocent.

In general, Blonde Venus sort of irked me.  Marlene Dietrich’s character as someone who was both faithful and unfaithful in different ways really just annoyed me.  I kind of wanted her to lose as the film progressed.  I have an issue with people (men and women) who are unfaithful lovers.  While she tried to portray herself as a faithful mother, as a faithful lover she failed as a character.  As a mother, she tried to do good.  But she was sort of destroying her son’s life at the same time and at some point it wasn’t even for the sake of being an independent woman.   It was difficult for me to sympathize with her character.

Was she supposed to be a good mother?  I couldn’t tell.  She was definitely an unfaithful wife and lover and kind of a cheat.  I couldn’t really tell what she wanted as a woman either.  She didn’t really seem like someone who was after respect and independence from men.  She didn’t seem like someone who was really capable to be a single mother, either.

What I found most interesting in the film though, was at the end, in Paris, Marlene’s character (I am really sorry, I forgot her name) was wearing a rather conservative dress-suit in her performance, as opposed to all the flashy dresses she wore in the cabarets in America.   The way I read that was that she had gotten so big on her own, that she didn’t need to sell her bodily appearance to be a successful performer.  In America, she kept using the help of men to gain more and more status.  But in Paris she was her own woman.  I would’ve liked to see the film end there because it would’ve amounted to some sort of growth in Marlene’s character.  But everything that happened afterwards just kind of ruined it for me.

Those are my thoughts on this film.  It’s a stark contrast to a film like Gold Diggers of 1933.  I felt the women in that film were much stronger and compelling than Marlene’s character.  I don’t know, maybe I just really like Gold Diggers of 1933.