‘The Song of Songs’ or — Dietrich’s Best?
It might not be generally regarded as a masterpiece but Rouben Mamoulian’s ‘The Song of Songs’ (1933) is a film that fanatical devotees of the director can thrust in the faces of bemused neophytes and ecstatically declare “This! This is what all the fuss is about! See it and believe!”
It tells the story of an innocent country girl, Lily (Marlene Dietrich), who, after the death of her father, comes to Berlin to live with her aunt only to become the muse and model for the young, handsome sculptor, Richard (Brian Aherne), who lives across the street. However, any potential romance between subject and creator is quickly destroyed when the artist’s benefactor, the lascivious Baron von Merzbach (Lionel Atwell), after seeing Richard’s statue of the naked Lily, decides he must have the real thing for himself. If it sounds old fashioned and melodramatic that’s because it is, but it only sounds old fashioned and melodramatic because in its execution it’s handled with an astonishing lightness of touch that could blow Lubitsch out the water.
This visual dexterity hits us from its deliberately deceptive beginning with the film opening on a shot of a resolute, austere looking bearded man standing in a graveyard and scanning the sky with a crucifix behind him. Uh-oh, is this going to be a dour slice of Dreyer-esque solemnity? We then immediately cut to Dietrich kneeling at her father’s grave where she turns to face the camera and flashes us the most dazzling pair of wide, innocent eyes outside those of Jerry Mouse’s cousin, Nibbles. She then leaves the forlorn cemetery and in the same shot, and in only a couple of steps, is suddenly walking through trees blooming with cherry blossom as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony bursts into life. It’s an extreme change of contrasting moods and atmosphere transitioned into so fast you’d have to look at the realm of animation for a nearest equivalent, and from here on out the film never lets up.
It’s not long until Lily is in Berlin and undressing before Richard (for artistic purposes, you understand) and in a sequence of shots where marble surrogates represent Dietrich’s naked flesh Mamoulian delivers a scene that’s as erotically charged and sensually tactile as anything you can imagine (possibly because that’s exactly what you’re doing), and all without showing a single thing.
Soon it’s Lily’s innocence that is being shed as the Baron begins his aggressive courtship of her, his manipulations and power plays gradually eroding her romantic naivety down to world-weary cynicism (the parallels of the Baron moulding Lily into his personal vision with von Sternberg “creating” Dietrich are impossible to miss). Mamoulian then re-introduces us to this now sardonic, jaded Lily with another stroke of genius, his camera swooping down from the heights of a bustling nightclub to a crowded table before cutting to a close up of a feathered hat of excessive splendour that suddenly spins round to reveal the face not of a wide-eyed innocent country girl but that of a vamp with a piercing gaze, her mouth emitting a blast of smoke into our stunned faces to punctuate the effect, and that effect is exhilarating.
Then again, the entire film is exhilarating and stimulating on every available level. Visually it’s a shimmering stream of constant invention (how much did Welles owe Mamoulian?) that moves like quicksilver and this sensation of ecstatic bliss is augmented by the fact that the film is also hysterically funny (they might be a couple of horrendous nasties but the Baron and Lily’s aunt’s scheming is hilarious, especially concerning the romantic uses of rum).
The films Dietrich made with von Sternberg are, rightly, regarded as masterpieces, yet whilst ‘The Song of Songs’ might not be a masterpiece it just might, in my opinion, be the better movie. So yeah, if you’ve ever wondered why some people utterly adore Mamoulian (and trust me, we most certainly do) then it’s here. It’s all here.
