Movies - Der blaue Engel

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	Movies - Der blaue Engel

Der blaue Engel is a 1930 pre-Code film based on Heinrich Mann's novel Professor Unrat (1905). It was directed by Josef von Sternberg, and released in both German and English (as The Blue Angel).

In addition to being the first European-continental talkie (the first European being Hitchcock's Blackmail), Der Blaue Engel launched the career of Marlene Dietrich and introduced the popular song Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt ("From head to toe I am focused on love").

The film tells the story of Immanuel Rath (played by Emil Jannings), a stern and humourless professor at a German Gymnasium (college preparatory high school). Professor Rath is openly despised by his pupils, who nickname him Unrath ("rubbish"). Discovering that some of his pupils are secretly visiting the sleazy nightclub The Blue Angel, Rath goes to see for himself, and falls for the sexy cabaret singer Lola Lola (Dietrich). After convincing Lola to marry him, Rath leaves his position at the school to accompany Lola's traveling cabaret troupe, eventually joining the act as a clown and sliding further and further down a slope of degradation. When the show returns to his home town, he reluctantly appears on stage as the butt of a slapstick act and is totally humiliated. Off-stage, he discovers Lola having an affair with the show's acrobat. He runs off into the night and is later discovered in his former school classroom, having apparently committed suicide.

Lola Lola's nightclub act has been parodied on film by Danny Kaye (in drag) as Fraulein Lilli in On the Double and Madeline Kahn as Lili von Schtupp in Blazing Saddles
.

Trivia

In the movie Aliens
, actress Cynthia Dale Scott, who plays Corporal Dietrich (as in Marlene Dietrich) has the words "BLUE ANGEL" written on the back of her helmet.

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