Blonde Venus

The fifth collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and star Marlene Dietrich, Blonde Venus is a film that’s been strangled at birth, hacked at, mutilated, and then dressed up nicely and put out there as if all was still well. It’s a strange and unsettling story, if you can pick its story out from what’s left after the censors got at it, of a woman whose husband needs a lot of money for a life-saving medical procedure and sells her body to raise it. The four-square Herbert Marshall plays the husband, a chemist who’s been hurt through exposure to radium and needs to leave the USA and go to Germany for an experimental … Read more