Product Review

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE: BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

WINNER: BEST DOCUMENTARY - National Society of Film Critics

WINNER: BEST DOCUMENTARY - New York Film Critics

An Oscar nominee for Best Documentary and winner of the 1986 New York Film Critic s Circle non-fiction film prize, Marlene is a portrait of a remarkably strong-willed woman, stage-managing her career right up to the bitter end and brilliantly lifts the veil on a movie star of the brightest magnitude as she is fading into twilight. In September of 1982, Oscar winning actor and director Maximilian Schell (Julia, The Man in the Glass Booth) arrived in Paris for a series of on-camera interviews with Marlene Dietrich intended for a documentary film on the screen icon s life and work. Despite having agreed to participate, the near-recluse Dietrich withdrew permission for her Judgment at Nuremburg co-star to film in her flat. Instead, in over 40 hours of audio-taped interviews, the 81 year-old screen legend provoked a battle royale of conversational mind games leading to unforgettably raw and truthful emotional revelations. Using Dietrich s candid, bruising, infuriating, and occasionally touching off-camera musings on childhood, marriage, sex, love, collaborators, co-stars, life, death, and the Holocaust, Schell sets her words, like a score, to the stunning film images of the young Marlene. The hypnotic final result buoyed by self-reflexive making-of footage, and an impressionistic re-creation of the sunless Paris flat where star and filmmaker fenced, fought, and ultimately connected is the (Sunset Boulevard of documentaries - Washington Post).

1984 Germany 91 min. B&W/Color In German and English with Optional English Subtitles