A cabaret singer arrives in Morocco concurrently with a Foreign Legion soldier. The two fall in love with each other. A rich middle-aged painter also falls for the singer.
Exquisite melodrama, with an incalculably superb performance by Dietrich. Plot and mise-en-scene wonderfully fit each other. The ending is really disturbing. The only things that seem subject to debate are (1) the choice of musical number which seems strangely at odds with the remainder of the film (perhaps they were trying to cash in on the memory of The Blue Angel, a totally different film) and (2) an occasional tendency to excessive stylization which renders some close-up scenes of the heroine longer and more static than the diegesis would demand.
Rating: 80 (one of my 1930 favorites, ranked number 3)
This is the beginning of a project of mine, which will attempt to view all the films I haven't seen (and see again some that I have) from the Top Ten lists of critic Dale Thomajan. This is his number 1 for 1930.
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