NFR Project: 'Morocco' (1930)

 

NFR Project: ‘Morocco’

Dir: Josef von Sternberg

Scr: Jules Furthman

Pho: Lee Garmes

Ed: Sam Winston

Premiere: November 14, 1930

91 min.

The French call it amor fou, obsessive passion, mad love.

“There is a Foreign Legion of women, too. But we have no uniforms, no flags, and no medals. But we are brave. No wound stripes, but we are hurt.”

Love here is a delirious if unspoken ecstasy, a vehicle for suffering of the highest order. Romantic to a fault, this faux epic by the tempestuous von Sternberg is his second of seven pairings with Marlene Dietrich, and their first sojourn in English. This string of films established Dietrich as a film goddess, and von Sternberg as a master, if peculiar, stylist. (The film is viewable via the Internet Archive, here.)

Here la Dietrich is Amy Jolly, a woman on the down and out, a provocative entertainer with no better place to go. (In the original novel, she is a prostitute and drug addict.) She sails into Mogador at the same time as a pleasant, rich gentleman (Adolphe Menjou), and she is seeking a job.

Soon she is singing in a gay club in the native quarter, where sits the Legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). Jarringly for audiences of the time, she steps out onto the stage in a man’s tuxedo, and sings a song of love in French. She strolls through the audience, and picks out a sitting woman, asking for the flower in her hair and kissing her. This wild upending of traditional sexual roles was revolutionary for the time.

She then tosses the flower to Brown, who puts it behind his ear. The female acts male, the male acts female. Gender here is fluid, and anything could happen.

Their unrequited passion plays out against the landscape of exotic North Africa, a landscape entirely notional and created by the filmmakers. It’s not meant to depict a literal location – it’s a dreamscape, really. It is the romantic Otherworld, the place where forbidden dreams can come true. All bets are off in a society and setting such as this.

Unfortunately for Cooper, he has been making merry with his superior’s wife and is singled out for punishment and hazardous duty. He and Dietrich almost decide to run away together, but he decides she is better off with a rich husband. While he is gone, she accepts the advances of the noble Menjou, to the point that they are to be married.

Suddenly, word of Cooper being alive rivets Dietrich. She must find him. Immediately. Menjou obligingly (he is practically a saint in this film) drives her out into the desert, seeking him. He is found, and denies his love for her . . . but she finds that he has carved her name into a tabletop.

Cooper’s squad must move out again, and as they march off into the desert, a handful of women, camp followers, tags along behind. Dietrich bids Menjou farewell, and stumbles just as she is out into the sand, casting off her high-heeled shoes and following the trail of the regiment. The camera holds on her as she and the other women march out of sight, and the wind howls and the sand blurs the vision.

It's all so very implausible. But who cares? Von Sternberg had crafted a similar story of love and sacrifice in The Docks of New York (1928). The sharp visual sensibility he gave to realistic films grew exponentially when he was allowed to create an entirely imaginary universe on film. His Morocco of brigands, soldiers, lowlifes, and charlatans is a narcotizing construct that frees up the audience’s imagination. In this way, they can read between the enigmatic lines.

Furthman’s script is brisk and to the point. Von Sternberg is acutely aware of the sound plot of his film, and he uses sound effects sparingly and with assurance. When Dietrich learns that Cooper is alive, she starts suddenly, breaking a pearl necklace that clatters to the floor. The string breaks, and her contract with Menjou, who undoubtedly gave her the pearls, is broken also.

Her final strides into the distance don’t portend that she will successfully transform herself into a soldier’s woman. The odds are that she might turn, exhausted, back to the outpost. And Cooper might be over her sooner than later. But none of that matters. Morocco insists that the burning ecstasy of love overrides all other human needs, and that such love is worth suffering the torments of a barren desert hell.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: the Nicholas Brothers’ home movies.