Angel (1937)

What a waste of my time!!!

just watch it!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

"Angel" is an Ernst Lubitsch film with three top actors, Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall and Melvyn Douglas. Yet, despite this, the story is amazingly flat and unappealing. It's not a bad film...more one that leaves you expecting so much more. After all, Lubitsch is practically legendary as are his movies.When the story begins, Anthony (Melvyn Douglas) meets Lady Barker (Marlene Dietrich) in Paris and arranges to meet her for dinner. During the dinner, Anthony is totally smitten by her and the night seems magical. However, the woman never tells him who she is and he gives her the nickname 'Angel'. When the evening is over, he has no idea who she was nor how to get in touch with her.Sometime later, Anthony meets an old friend, Sir Barker (Herbert Marshall). The evening goes fine...until Sir Barker's wife arrives and Anthony sees that it's Angel. What next? See the film.Making a romantic film that involves adultery is a major uphill battle. Adultery isn't a romantic thing and despite the Lubitsch touch, it all seems a tad tawdry. Tawdrier still, if you read between the lines you realize that the place Anthony and Angel met is essentially a high-priced brothel...though it's certainly NOT obvious when you watch the film. In addition to this big problem, the film simply is too talky and too flat....which is so surprising. I can see clearly why this is not among Lubitsch's more famous films.

"Angel" from 1937 is a Dietrich-Lubitsch collaboration that didn't come off - in fact, this was the last film Dietrich made for Paramount, after which she was labeled box-office poison. You can see why this film didn't help, though she is photographed like a dream and dressed divinely by Travis Banton.Based on a play, this is a rather dull story. The neglected, bored wife, Maria (Dietrich) of a very busy diplomat (Herbert Marshall) flies to Paris and goes to a salon run by a countess (Laura Hope Crews) who is an old friend of hers. It's apparently a high-class brothel. While waiting to see her, she meets Tony Halton (Melvyn Douglas), looking for a delightful evening. She agrees to meet him for dinner. The affair isn't shown, but one assumes they consummated their relationship. She disappears without telling him her name or her knowing his.Later on, he runs into an old friend, who is Maria's husband. Maria and Tony meet again - under awkward circumstances.This isn't a comedy, and it really isn't much of a drama either, with dull spots enlivened by the supporting cast - Crews, Edward Everett Horton, and Ernest Cossart, who plays the butler. (He tells his fiancée over the phone, "If you don't tell me where you learned to rumba, we're through.")Directed with the usual Lubitsch subtlety, this is just okay, lacking the bubbly champagne touch that made Lubitsch's work in films like "The Shop Around the Corner," "Ninotchka," "To Be or Not to Be" and so many other great films of his.

This is a Dietrich film, her last starring role at her home studio, Paramount. She is supported by 2 of the top Hollywood leading men - Douglas and Marshall - and dressed sumptuously by Travis Banton. The film should have been a money-maker for its studio, but apparently it was too sophisticated for the small-town public and she became 'Box Office Poison' after its release. Variety, in its disparaging but humorous review, said that you could hang coats from Dietrich's eyelashes. I attentively kept an eye on those eyelashes and have to admit that they ARE long, but not long enough to hang a coat on.I liked this film. I especially liked Dietrich's aristocrat diplomat husband - Marshall - devoted to duty to fend off WW2. And I liked Dietrich. She has servants who attend to all personal and household tasks and therefore she has nothing to do. She is bored. She flies to Paris and has a romantic evening with a stranger - Douglas - a piano playing playboy who is infatuated with her. In the end she chooses the man who is the only one who can give her the happiness she craves. Females can learn a trick or 2 or more re how to attract and keep a man from closely observing Dietrich in this film. In what was once common terminology, she is a "man's woman." How times and the culture have changed.BTW, 'Angel', although it has bits of comedy supplied by the servants, is not a comedy, but is instead a light-hearted, sophisticated marital drama.

Given the talent involved -- Dietrich at the height of her allure, Melvyn Douglas (who proved such a wonderful foil to Garbo just two years later in "Ninotchka"), support from such able troupers as Edward Everett Horton and Laura Hope Crews, and above all the famed "touch" of Lubitsch -- "Angel" should be a sparkling romp, a melancholy romance of renunuciation, a worldly social comedy, or better yet, all three.Instead it's a mostly tiresome slog through familiar territory, as if all involved were inspired not by Dietrich or Lubitsch but by the stolid Herbert Marshall as Marlene's aristo-Brit husband.While several recent writers on both Dietrich and Lubitsch have tried to tout this as an undeservingly overlooked film, it's really most worth watching for Crew's pre-Pittypat turn as a Russian emigre-turned-nightclub-hostess, and her few brief scenes can hardly save the picture.Dietrich fans are better off hunting up stills -- she does look terrific in the wardrobe of English Gentlewoman tweeds and furs, and her legendary collection of emeralds were rarely shown to better advantage.