For close to 50 years she blew smoke. Marlene Dietrich stretched those long legs and whispered her sultry come-hithers in a voice that mesmerized men and women from vaudeville to U.S. Army stages and those smoky cinematic “mises-en-scene” that still define an era. And now Berlin, the city that shunned Marlene Dietrich as a traitor, has issued a formal apology on the 100th anniversary of her birth, accepting, even admiring, her wartime refusal to grace the screen for the Nazis. Years after her death, Marlene Dietrich remains hot. Film students study her, festivals celebrate her. Cigarette smoke from those first talking movies still hangs in the stage light, her electric cloud.
Guests:
Klaus Eder, film critic for the German daily Handelsblatt and for German public radio
Mary Desjardins, Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Dartmouth College and organizer of “Marlene at 100: An International Conference”
and Patrice Petro, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and author of “Aftershocks of the New.”