"Edward G. Robinson and George Raft are inseparable friends who fall in love with Marlene Dietrich. A perfect script and wonderful performances. At night, the men repair electric wires and Marlene plays the hostess in dark bars. A brilliant love triangle."

"I can’t help but include this book on any list I’d ever make of books I love. It is bewitching, playful, poetic, and really beautiful. Ingrid Caven looks like Marlene Dietrich and sings like Lotte Lenya. She was Fassbinder’s muse on film and Schuhl’s in life, and the book creates a fictive plane of reality in between all four, plus postwar German history, plus the 1970s."

"I sometimes hear films described as “Lynchian,” which, I take it, means that they deal with a certain space between light and darkness (or perhaps it’s just a more sophisticated way of saying that something is flat-out creepy). The Scarlet Empress is David Lynch for 1934 . . . and by that I mean that the lighting design is crucial. I love the scene where the freaky Grand Duke Peter (whom I recognized as the crotchety book salesman from my childhood favorite—the ever-so-slightly psychedelically tinged—Bedknobs and Broomsticks) emerges from the shadows to meet his new bride, the Princess Sophia Frederica (played by Marlene Dietrich) for the first time"

"Scarlet Empress, with Marlene Dietrich, directed by Josef von Sternberg. That’s also pre-Code, just barely, I think, and it’s the greatest of their collaborations. Morocco is amazing, too, and I love Blue Angel. Morocco has that incredible ending where she can’t resist but follows him off, and you hear the wind sound and all that. Anyway, Scarlet Empress is so singular; there’s nothing like it. It’s almost like a new cinema is being created; he’s creating a new language for cinema. Not just the way that it looks, but the light, the use of light, and the use of production design becomes, almost, a sensory part of the experience and informs her character. It’s all about her character’s sensuality, and he uses all these other elements beyond just herself to sell that. The way the film looks, the way the film feels, and it’s where the style completely informs her identity, which is an amazing idea."

"Why, of all the Godards? Well, in part because we all know already that Breathless is one of the most important debuts in the history of cinema, that Band of Outsiders is one hell of a good time, and so on and so forth. And I might have pled the case for another favorite of mine, Alphaville. But, besides all its widescreen majesty, Contempt offers a unique hook for me. From McGilligan’s Lang biography: “At one point Michel Piccoli’s character remarks to Lang how much he and his wife enjoyed watching Rancho Notorious, with Marlene Dietrich, on the television one night. The director forthrightly replies that he himself prefers M. This was also Godard’s joke on himself. Not only did the Cahiers du cinéma crowd champion his Hollywood films above the Berlin ones, but Godard had actually written that M was ‘the least good film of Lang’s.’ ” . . . The world of cinema will forever be indebted to Godard for this Fritz Lang swan song. One elegiac image—just a few moments really, sans dialogue—speaks volumes: The director is seen lighting up a cigarette after others have exited the scene; the camera tracks beside the elder statesman of film as he walks slowly along a street alone, apparently lost in thought. Godard’s camera watches him contemplatively while, in the background, George Delerue’s eloquent score rises on a gorgeous note."