In his penultimate film with Marlene Dietrich, von Sternberg pulled out all the stops. The Scarlet Empress is not a typical biopic about the rise to power of Catherine the Great of Russia. It is an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek fantasia of a film. When von Sternberg said that “it is a relentless excursion into style," he was using extreme understatement, but even critics who complained about its excesses admitted that it was a work of art
Roger Ebert, in one of his Great Movie Essays, said that the “film was so crammed with style, so surrounded by it and weighted down with it, that the actors peer out from the display like children in a toy store. The film tells the story of Catherine the Great as a bizarre visual extravaganza, combining twisted sexuality and bold bawdy humor as if Mel Brooks had collaborated with the Marquis de Sade.”
Tighten your seatbelts and take a whirlwind ride through an alternative vision of Russian history.
Directed by Josef von Sternberg, 1934, United States, 110 min., b&w, Unrated)
For more information:
Saturday, January 21, 2017 at 2:30pm to 4:00pm
Central Library, Meyerhoff Children's Garden, Night Room
400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD 21201
free
No recent activity