Lewes Live Literature Festival - The Cabaret

The theme of the first night of entertainment in the Lewes Live Literature Festival is ‘cabaret’ and the evening ends with a screening of the 1929 classic ‘The Blue Angel’, Marlene Dietrich’s first talkie, and the movie that propelled her to stardom. In its time the movie, directed by Josef von Sternberg, was seen as being a vehicle for the more famous Emil Jannings, who plays a stodgy high school professor who goes to a nightclub in order to confront students he suspects of haunting the place, and falls under the spell of the club’s chanteuse, played by Dietrich.

There are two versions of ‘Blue Angel’, one in English, which ends on a high note, with Dietrich singing on stage. The Live Lit lot, naturally, have chosen the director’s original cut, in German, which ends with the twisted and pathetic demise of the character played by Jannings, as he clings to a table, wondering how it all went wrong. Sternberg will always remain famous as the ‘man who discovered Dietrich’ and this film as the movie which made her name: the film still stands up as an interesting slice of culture, beautifully shot and featuring a number of real performers from the Berlin cabaret of the time. The moment you will inevitably be waiting for, however, is the moment Dietrich launches into the song which has become stored in everybody’s internal iPod ‘Falling in Love Again,’ or, in this German version, the rather less romantic-sounding ‘Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt’.