It May Happen Here

Here's how it could go down.

Soon, Says the Whisper...

I'm aiming to be more cheerful this weekend, but for the moment I'll just leave this here. Not particularly original at the point, but what else is there to say?

Hat Check

For no good reason other than it's a dull Tuesday, let's look in on Sra. Peron as she picks a chapeau from her imposing collection.  The year is 1950, and Life is there, in the person of the excellent photographer Gisele Freund (whom I most know from her photographs of Virginia Woolf, which are disconcertingly in color - if only the same were true of these hats!).

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Flyin' High Now

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Ladies and gents - the Moranbong Band!

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Zarah with a Zee

To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" 

 It struck me this morning that it's been far too long since we spent a little time with that Nazilicious star of stage and screen, Miss Zarah Leander.

Trailer Trash: Doña Zarah

While we're in a '30s mood (not all that uncommon a phenomenon hereabouts, I know), let's stop for a moment and consider that Fab Fräulein, the lady who put the "Fasc[ism]" into Fascinating, the Prima Donna Assoluta of the Axis Screen, Swedish thrush Zarah Leander.  Z-Lo, as I've taken to thinking of her, may have been from Stockholm, but she made a string of pictures in Berlin right through '43, becoming in the process Goebbels's de facto replacement for the One That Got Away, Dietrich. 

This little epic, La Habanera, is from early in her UFA contract, but it's still very much a Nazi picture:  Nordic girl falls for shady Latin; repents in a Tropical Hell (and a helluva mantilla); Latin engineers epidemic, dies; Nordic girl skedaddles back home with heroic German doc's help, reassuringly blond son in tow.

It's all pretty incoherent actually, not least because it's set in Puerto Rico but filmed in the Canaries at the height of the Spanish Civil War, features not even a trace of a Spanish accent, and is graced with costumes the silliness of which would make Marion Davies blush.  Truth to tell, I've not seen the whole thing, but from the above, I think you could engineer a drinking game involving every time Zarah finds a new way to wear spit curls.

After the War, Leander spent the rest of her long career calling herself a "political idiot" who had had no idea what was going on while she filmed and filmed and filmed (and the Deutsche Marks, conveniently deposited directly into her Swedish account, kept rolling in).  Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?  One wonders what, as the years went by, she thought about, for example, the songwriter on this movie who would shortly disappear into the camps, or whether she ever cared that the little boy who Dickie Moored his way through Habanera playing her son died at 17 on the outskirts of Berlin, killed defending the capital that she fled only a year or so earlier (and, apparently, only because her villa got flattened - how inconvenient...).

Zarah's co-stars - Ferdinand Marian, Karl Martell, Julia Serda - may not be terribly familiar today, but one name that flashes by here certainly is.  That spielleitung may be credited to Detlef Sierck, but within a few years young Detlef transformed himself into Douglas Sirk, who applied the lessons he learned from Zarah into his direction of Hollywood ladies for the next thirty years or so, culminating in that greatest of all soap operas, Imitation of Life.  Which, come to think of it, could just as easily been the title for La Habanera...

Can't Help It

I finally got around this week to watching a Christmas gift - the 1993 documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.

The film is far more than the story of Hitler's favorite filmmaker, the woman whose rollercoaster career took her from silent stardom in the now unwatchable genre of German Mountain Epics to scubadiving at 90+ in the Indian Ocean - heights and depths, indeed. What it really is, I think, is an almost continually frustrated attempt to answer one question: "What was she thinking?"

For decades she maintained one obdurate story: she was an apolitical artist, one who got caught up, all unawares, in the frenzy surrounding the rise of Nazism and who just happened to create its most enduring visual records. She was, in fact, a victim - of Goebbels, who repeatedly frustrated her perfectionist vision; of her postwar critics, who saw in Triumph of the Will the potent danger of a genuinely gifted eye meeting a poisonous message; and even of later writers, like Susan Sontag, who looked at Riefenstahl's '60s work photographing African tribesmen and saw a continuation of her Nazi-era celebration of what we know think of as body Fascism.

In the movie, she hews to this line, a nonagenarian vision of raddled UFA glamour as she tells her well-worn tales, dimpling guilelessly at the camera like the old pro she truly was. She compares herself, repeatedly, to Dietrich, whom she admires, it seems, not for her boldly anti-Hitler stance, but simply for having escaped and endured. She notes that she needed the same kind of lighting Marlene required - a high single spot to create the legendary shadows - and makes the dubious claim that she had been in the running to be Von Sternberg's Lola Lola in The Blue Angel.

Only once does the mask drop. Reunited in the stadium of the 1936 Olympics with two of the cameramen she had schooled to realize her almost demented glorification of athletic perfection in Olympia, she sits, during a break, chatting with them, apparently unaware her mic is live. Suddenly, briefly, her days as the toast of Berlin come to life. The three dispassionately move from talking about apertures and exposures to chitchat about the more routine assignments of who filmed who - "Ah, ja, you went to Moscow with Ribbentrop, no?" and for just that moment, you realize what an abyss she is, a vacancy, not apolitical but amoral, genuinely unable to fathom the bizarre experiences she has been through.

At the end of the film, she tries one last justification, another repetition of her tropes - I was not a party member, I never said anything anti-semitic, people lie so terribly about me, I was (looking very much intact) "shattered" to learn of all the atrocities, what could I have done ... and it occurred to me. Leni, in the end, really is a Lola Lola, a woman who, for film as the original was for sex, is so wholly self-absorbed, "von Kopf bis Fuß " made for nothing else, that she just ... can't help it.

For Marlene, Lola was just a role, the one that finally set her on the road to real stardom and out of the black orbit of National Socialism. Leni, though, was the real deal, Dietrich's dark shadow. It's a paradox, then, that she enjoyed a long, vigorous old age and, finally, a measure of renown apart from her vilification, even as her braver, more clear-eyed coeval languished in a geriatric haze of liquor and self-pity in Paris. Good choices don't always make for happy endings, but even so, while both women may have had "wonderful, horrible" lives, I have to think Dietrich's was the better path.

"Bombs Falling from the Skies Again..."

This disturbing little fever dream - Fred and Ginger seen through a funhouse mirror - is actually fairly innocuous - until you discover that it was filmed in 1944. In Berlin. Yes, it's "Ich Warte Auf Dich," the glam finale from Die Frau meiner Träume, the second-to-last film ever released in Nazi Germany's very own camp film technology, Agfacolor.

And the star? She's none other than the Brownshirts' Betty Grable, Marika Rökk. A Hungarian born in Cairo, she survived the war, as did her career, particularly in operetta. She's not bad, I suppose, but the whole thing can't escape seeming macabre. Ratchet it up one notch, and you've got pure Mel Brooks, really.

At least it appears she never met Leo Lerman.

The Heavens Over Berlin...

...were once full of stars. Some were born there, some passed through; some lingered long, some burned out young or moved too close to black holes artistic or political. You still feel them, at times, in the streets here, in the makeup of old women and the attitudes of young girls...

Pola, once a serious artist before becoming a Hollywood vamp...

Louise, who arrived something of a Hollywood lightweight and left, although she didn't know it for two decades, a sublime artist - and a has-been...

Miss Dietrich, of whom no more need be said than that she did quite all right for herself...

Anna May, who was here a bigger star than ever she managed to be again...

And the ineffable Lil Dagover, for a while the biggest lady of all of these...

Not to mention the problematic Fraulein Riefenstahl, long-lived - but not enough to live it down...

A trouble shared, to some extent, by the far less villainous (and infinitely more camp) Miss Zarah Leander.

I think I saw at least three of them at yesterday's parade...

What a Bright Shining Star...

Let's just keep the drag-theme running and spend some time with the immortal Miss Zarah Leander. Oh, yes, I know, Z-Lo was an actual girl, more or less, but, come on - has there ever been a more mannish vibe (at least from any entertainer this side of Rose Marie)?

Here she regales a 1972 television audience with a staple of her concert repertoire, Mr. Porter's "Wunderbar" (which she interprets, as always, as "Wunderbarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"). It's about the only thing I can think of that makes me think kindly of Kathryn Grayson, although even my cold heart can't resist the chorus boys.

Zarah Leander's later career answers the unasked question: What would Marlene Dietrich have been like if (a) she never left Germany and (b) she had had not one iota of taste? Now's your chance to find out.

(Not) at the Movies

Our little capital's dilatory film calendar means we've not yet had the pleasure of not seeing Valkyrie, which despite its less-horrendous-than-expected reviews still seems like a must-miss to me. It does present the opportunity, though, to make a wholehearted book recommendation.

If you want to find out how the von Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler was experienced by those involved - if, in fact, you want a matchless account from within of life as a foreigner trapped in Nazi Berlin - you can do no better than read Berlin Diaries, the extraordinary memoirs of Princess Marie Vassiltchikov.

She was a semi-impoverished White Russian who found herself stuck in Germany when the start of the Second War cut her off from her family and forced her to find work in the Nazi capital. The book starts just as things are getting under way, with a glimpse into the increasingly surreal life of a circle of friends trying to preserve some shreds of normality.


It ends with the War, in 1945, with the Princess reduced to stumbling in rags across a half-bombed trainyard en route to finding whomever of her family she thinks may have survived. In between, one experiences everything along with the enormously appealing writer, from the excitement of an unexected package of food to horror at the destruction of familiar landmarks (she heads out one fine day to lunch at the posh Hotel Adlon only to find it in flames).

She worked with and came to admire enormously a number of the July 20 plotters, and she was involved in a series of daring attempts to get information on their whereabouts and even provide some comfort to them before most were executed.

Why they haven't made a movie of this book I can't say, except that it really wouldn't have room for Culty McCult and would have to feature a range of smart, funny, tough women characters.

9 out of 10 Disembodied Heads Agree...

I don't know about you, but pretty much my first thought whenever I think about the legendary Zarah Leander is "Yes, Sir!"

"I am Big!"

Actually, the biggest thing about Zarah Leander was her hands - she had mitts like a truckdriver. And, late in life, a voice rather like one.

Here, for no particular reason, she strikes a starry pose, with sunglasses adding a piquant note to her de rigueur uniform of evening gown and furs. I bet this is what she wore to go grab the paper most mornings. In many ways, when it comes to stardom, Sunset Boulevard was a documentary.