Were this not made by Rouben Mamoulian and were it not to star Marlene Dietrich this picture would be rubbish but it is made by Rouben Mamoulian and it does star Marlene Dietrich and consequently it's fabulous.
Marlene Dietrich gives an outstanding performance. Her portrayal of an innocent naïve country girl becoming an unhappy woman of the world is both exaggerated to near-melodramatic levels yet is also completely credible and convincing. It's not a happy transition and you personally feel a stab of pain as you sense each subtle change in her personality. You want her to stay that simple, naive sweet girl but realise, as you grow to think you know her, that nobody's forcing her down these paths. Everything which happens to her, she does it to herself. She's a wonderfully flawed cleverly written character.
Even for a 'pre-code' film, the exploration of sexual desire is unusually and overtly erotic. Dietrich's convent-girl character Lily, excited by finding herself in the big city becomes a nude model for a local sculptor and that inevitably leads to a sexual awakening in both herself and the sculptor. As I said, such a load of nonsense, clearly written by a frustrated spotty teenager would need Paramount's A Team to make this turkey float - but they did it in spades and peppered it with some surprisingly sophisticated sexual humour.
Sometimes Mamoulian is less than subtle such as when he has the sculptor caressing the breasts of his life size statue whilst watching the shadow of his muse undress. It's 1933 yet incredibly this is still one the most powerfully erotic yet beautifully sensitive scenes in cinema. That naked, put white statue features throughout the film; it's her Dorian Grey, it retains that Garden of Eden innocent beauty whist the real Lily is gilded with the world.
Another earlier scene which is pivotal to Lily's evolution is when she's first asked to take her clothes off. Just using her eyes, you can see Dietrich has just discovered the immense power over men her naked body has. It's a surprisingly honest depiction of sexuality, identity, obsession but above all: whatever love is. Stevie Nicks wrote that love's a state of mind and this film shows what love means to the minds of all its different characters. It can be creative, destructive, enriching and vindictive but for Lilly it will never be as she dreams it could be as in Solomon's Song of Songs.
