MOVIE REVIEW : SCHELL’S TRIUMPHANT ‘MARLENE’

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that if Marlene Dietrich had nothing more than her voice, she could break your heart with it.

For his witty, tough-minded, imaginative and finally deeply appreciative “Marlene” (opening Friday at the Cineplex), Maximilian Schell was allowed only the voice, for Dietrich, who turns 85 on Dec. 27, forbade him to photograph her during the 12 hours he interviewed her (over six days) in the Paris apartment in which she has secluded herself for nearly a decade. Yes, with that voice she can still break your heart--and make you laugh and think and feel as well.

In “Marlene,” just voted best documentary of 1986 by the New York Film Critics Circle, Schell turns this severe restriction into a triumph by incorporating into the film the very challenge of its making. This in turn gives him the kind of distance that invites us to speculate on the nature of movie stardom--and even the illusive/elusive nature of truth itself. He counterpoints his conversations with Dietrich with clips from her films and from newsreels, with probings around a set representing her living room, with bits and pieces of staged business and with glimpses of the film-making process.

Schell succeeds in the difficult task of separating the legend and the woman, without destroying either, and suggesting those moments when they are one and the same, when a bit of film dialogue or a gesture seems a genuine extension of her personality. On a more poignant level, “Marlene” inevitably juxtaposes the eternal image of glamour and allure and the very real mortality of the individual who created it.

At first, the sound of Dietrich’s voice shocks. It is clearly that of an old woman and not that of the seemingly ageless cabaret star who left the concert stage after a series of bad falls from which she is said never to have fully recovered. (She herself speaks frankly of all the bones she’s broken.) Speaking half the time in English and half in German, she sometimes wavers and sounds slurred. At other times, her speech is very strong and distinct.

She is at all times proud and most often feisty, absolutely determined that we not feel sorry for her. As never before, we experience her as the disciplined, well-born German she always has been, scorning sentimentality, dismissing her career--”I was an actress, I made films and that was that.” Yet, as Schell leads her on, she seems to remember every detail of every important picture she ever made and revels in the candor that age permits.

“I always thought (Emil) Jannings was such a ham,” she says1 of her co-star in ‘The Blue Angel,’ the film that brought her to Hollywood and international renown.

As for her directors, she remembers Fritz Lang as “an absolute terror”--never mind that the feeling was pretty much mutual--but says of Orson Welles that “people should cross themselves before they speak his name.” As for her great mentor Josef von Sternberg, she refuses to speak unkindly of him, although he was outspoken about her. She insists that she and Hemingway loved without being lovers, but that Jean Gabin, often described as the love of her life, was “simple and pigheaded--and I mean pigheaded !”

As for Schell, her “Judgment at Nuremburg” co-star, she fluctuates between admiration and anger, exclaiming at one point, “You should go back to Mama Schell and learn some manners!” To his credit, Schell, who laughs out loud at her more outrageous remarks, contradictions and downright lies, pays Dietrich the compliment of sparring with her rather than merely flattering her.

Schell inevitably--but never tritely--includes many of the famous moments of her films--the plump, tarty Marlene singing “Falling in Love Again” in “The Blue Angel” and the scrappy saloon girl of “Destry Rides Again.”

But one believes he has captured the essential Marlene Dietrich in her enduring strength and gallantry as she sings old Berlin songs while a camera pans over the World War II ruins of the city which to this day holds a surprisingly intense love-hate attitude toward its most famous daughter. More than anything else, “Marlene” (Times-rated: Mature because of little interest to small children) leaves us feeling that Dietrich represents a precious link with the world of sophistication and culture that flowered during the Weimar Republic only to be smashed by Hitler.

‘MARLENE’

An Alive Films release of a Zev Braun, Karel Dirka presentation of an Oko-Film production. Director Maximilian Schell. Writers Meir Dohnal, Schell. Camera Ivan Slapeta. Costumes Heinz Eickmeier. Film editors Heidi Genee, Dagmar Hirtz.

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.