The Devil Is A Woman

During the Spanish Carnival, handsome young blade Antonio makes an assignation with a mysterious and alluring woman, Concha. But that night, he runs into an older friend Pasqual, who warns him of her devilish charms: Pasqual had fallen in love with Concha and been treated as a (wealthy) plaything before being discarded. When Antonio meets with her his resolution to resist is eroded, until Pasqual bursts in, still in love, and enraged at Antonio’s ignoring his advice. Happiness does not ensue.

Over the course of five features with Marlene Dietrich, Sternberg molded her into a ravishing, perfect star. Increasingly stylized photography and production design took precedence over sense and plot as he boiled everything down to pure aesthetics, whilst building the Dietrich persona from saucy beer-hall girl to irresistible goddess. The creative marriage was perfected – with all the bitterness in which Sternberg perpetually reveled – in their final collaboration, The Devil is a Woman. The story was adapted by John dos Passos from the Pierre Louÿs novel La femme et le pantin (also used by Buñuel for That Obscure Object of Desire). Pantin is "puppet", and the femme is this Spanish Concha, a great beauty, of cruel and inescapable charms, whose means of subsistence is men, wielding her power over them with something like a compulsion of delight

This is Sternberg’s hymn to Dietrich, and a lament for their relationship, already souring – it’s no accident that Lionel Atwill is mustachioed as a dead ringer for the director. Realism is out the window; this is a fevered poem to the exquisite emotional anguish of the cast-off lover. Sternberg and Atwill make Pasqual a perfect embodiment of noble bearing brought to ignoble humiliation, the still-burning flame of desire unconquered by even the most flagrant cruelties. Whatever the specific circumstances of Sternberg’s and Dietrich’s parting of ways, the heart-wrenching realization that a relationship can no longer be, the bitter satisfaction of that realization, and the act of defying one’s own plain common sense, are transferred to the screen straight from his heart: the exquisite masochism of the cuckold. So there’s a certain amount of indulgence in the emotional line of the film, but it’s not a patch on the visual. For much of the flashback structure, Sternberg takes us to a port town where he can sling the fishing nets wherever he likes, and he conjures two wonderful fairytale woodland scenes. But the present tense opens the film, during the bacchanalian Carnival, crazy with streamers and ribbons, thin white rope, somewhat grotesquely, a suggestion bolstered by the preponderance of pendulous, long-nosed masks. What to make of the film’s hero covered in these ejaculative strings? Nothing specific to sexual preference, but rather an indication that sex and desire will engulf everything.


Jaunty Rimsky-Korsakov themes constantly encourage us not to take anything too seriously; Concha’s mother supplies rather grating comic support; Edward Everett Horton is the buffoonish (but not entirely) town mayor; and the Republicanism subplot is consistently dismissed as unimportant. The frivolity may be a carnival mask for Sternberg’s emotional pain (and vanity, of which Concha pointedly accuses Pasqual of confusing with love) but it is a sumptuous one and, as photographed by Sternberg himself, is inescapably, personally bound up with it. No-one could photograph (or light) like Sternberg, and here finally he gets to let his aestheticism run rampant without anything so troublesome as a plot to get in the way. Emotion is conjured through light and shade, and the screen is filled with extras and production design, perfect, suggestive objects and décor that overleap realism to conjure a physical poem of reality.

Most hyper-real of all is Dietrich’s Concha, as presented by Pasqual, an all-too believable incarnation of a fickle, playful Senora Satan. In the extreme stylization of her character, Sternberg and Dietrich create an ideal. She embodies not only a certain ideal of sexual womanhood, but is a personification sex itself; her every look, her every gesture is suffused with sexuality as though she has nothing else on her mind: no-one can glance approvingly at a strong hand laid on her shoulder like Dietrich can. Much of this is used merely to inflame, and so the film is drenched in the non-rational, febrile state of mind of the aroused lover, of crazed, unfulfilled desire wherein sensual gratification becomes of primary importance. The reliability of Pasqual’s narrative is less in question than his motives in telling it (and he claims he doesn’t like to speak of himself!) but if he has exaggerated his tale, that’s all to the good, allowing Sternberg to dispense with mundanities.


Returned, to the present tense Concha starts to seem a little more human, with possibly even a little weakness for handsome young César Romero. And who can blame her? For with those cheekbones and that curiously sculpted, subtly muscled mouth Romero is something of an ideal himself. This makes the ending a rather half-hearted vanity on Sternberg’s part, but the shape of the story is not the point – the point is Dietrich, and her spell. Even dressed in a sack (or a gorilla suit..) she could be the most bewitching woman imaginable, a goddess who never lost entirely the earthy lusts of the peasant girl. And oh, that wardrobe! Each scene brings a newly jaw-dropping ensemble, with outrageous jewelry and a series of increasingly fantastical headpieces. Sternberg’s films with Dietrich are almost as much about her clothes as they are the people, but of course she could carry them off with effortless insouciance, her characters therefore the sort of women who can do likewise.

For all the excess of production design, these elements are still in service of character, setting and emotional atmosphere; this is why Sternberg can never be written off as merely a self-indulgent aesthetician, because the clothes, the jewels, the décor, the nets, the lace, the shadows, the rain, all work with a dream-like relevance to character and situation, and aspire to induce a heady, Stendahlian state where the feverish emotions of his stories most properly belong.

d/p Josef von Sternberg sc John dos Passos ph Josef von Sternberg, Lucien Ballard ed Sam Winston ad Hans Dreier, Josef von Sternberg m John Liepold, Heinz Roemheld cast Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Atwill, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, Alison Skipworth, Don Alvarado, Edwin Maxwell
(1935, USA, 75m, b/w)