DVD details for
Morocco (1930) More at IMDbPro »

Five films on 2 discs starring the exotic blonde beauty Marlene Dietrich. Josef von Sternberg, who directed Dietrich in The Blue Angel in Germany, brought her back to Hollywood for her American debut opposite Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930), casting her as the sultry cabaret singer in the French Foreign Legion melodrama and giving her the final shot as she trudges through the desert after the departing soldier. Dietrich gets top billing in the perfectly titled Blonde Venus (1932), playing a nightclub entertainer who returns to the stage when her scientist husband (Herbert Marshall) contracts radium poisoning and winds up in a custody battle over their child when he mistakes her career choices for an affair. Sternberg gives Dietrich an unforgettable stage entrance in a gorilla suit and fills the film with his trademark webs of veils, nets, shutters and screens, setting her off like a jewel. Their final collaboration The Devil is a Woman (1935), with Dietrich as a calculatingly disdainful lady of Spain pursued by competing suitors Lionel Atwill and Cesar Romero, pushes the limits of style as substance, a story maddeningly uninvolving on a narrative level yet composed of images so ethereal you can float away on them. René Clair directs The Flame of New Orleans (1941), with Dietrich as a French beauty passing herself off as a wealthy noblewoman to woo an American millionaire, and Mitchell Leisen directs Golden Earrings (1947), a pre-WWII espionage adventure staring Dietrich as a gypsy woman who hides English spy Ray Milland from the Nazis.