Morocco

Morocco is a 1930 American pre-Code romantic drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, and Adolphe Menjou. Based on the novel Amy Jolly (the on-screen credits state: from the play 'Amy Jolly') by Benno Vigny and adapted by Jules Furthman, the film is about a cabaret singer and a Legionnaire who fall in love during the Rif War, and whose relationship is complicated by his womanizing and the appearance of a rich man who is also in love with her. The film is famous for a scene in which Dietrich performs a song dressed in a man's tailcoat and kisses another woman (to the embarrassment of the latter), both of which were rather scandalous for the period.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) A major key to the film's success is the film's exotic location and Foreign Legion adventure. Exotic adventures were nothing new with thought-provoking dramas like Sunrise and The Crowd that had dominated the industry a few years earlier, but by 1930, escapist fare held greater appeal to American audiences swept up in the social, political and cultural disturbance wrought by the October 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent onset of the Great Depression. With sound arriving 3 years earlier, things had changed.
 * 2) Initially, the addition of sound stifled the creative process as camera movement was restricted by the microphone’s fixed location in a soundproof booth. Consequently, pictures made during the first years of sound often feel stiff and stagey, flat, boring to look at, and difficult to understand clearly. This film was labeled as the first film to restore the fluidity and beauty of the late silents while simultaneously taking full advantage of the potential of sound. Minimal use of dialogue aided Dietrich by emphasizing her character’s mystery while minimizing her heavy German accent. The absence of excessive dialog also benefitted Dietrich’s co-star Gary Cooper as the womanizing Legionnaire Brown, and playing up the strong, silent type image he was cultivating.
 * 3) The film examines the "interchange of masculine and feminine characteristics" in a "genuine interplay between male and female".
 * 4) *Dietrich's "butch performance" dressed in "top hat, white tie and tails" includes a "mock seduction" of a pretty female cabaret patron, whom Dietrich "outrages with a kiss." Dietrich's costume simultaneously mocks the pretensions of one lover (Menjou's La Bessière) and serves as an invitation to a handsome soldier-of-fortune (Cooper's Tom Brown), the two men being presented by Sternberg as contrasting conceptions of masculinity." This famous sequence provides an insight into Dietrich's character, Amy Jolly, as well as the director himself: "Dietrich's impersonation is an adventure, an act of bravado that subtly alters her conception of herself as a woman, and what begins as self-expression ends in self-sacrifice, perhaps the path also of Sternberg as an artist."
 * 5) It's Josef von Sternberg's first American film to star Marlene Dietrich, and the director's use of delicate gestures are used to emphasize the fragility of the worldweary cabaret singer Amy Jolly: a languid gaze, a toss of a flower, an ironically coquettish display of a fan. Sternberg exercises his control by coaxing restrained performances from Dietrich and costar Gary Cooper.
 * 6) Modern audiences may find it difficult to embrace the artistry of a consummate film stylist like Josef von Sternberg, but it’s the director’s artistic vision that earned the film its classic status.
 * 7) Marlene Dietrich is amazing in her performance in the film, Gary Cooper costars as a foreign legionnaire who wins Dietrich's heart with an economy of dialogue, and Adolphe Menjou plays a wealthy rake who competes for her affection. The on-screen chemistry between Dietrich and Cooper (and purportedly off screen as well) adds yet another dimension to the film’s classic status.
 * 8) There are two very memorable scenes.
 * 9) One takes place in the nightclub where Amy Jolly is singing. Dietrich, dressed in top hat and tuxedo, takes a flower out of the hair of a woman in the audience and in exchange for the flower, kisses her on the lips, then tosses the flower to the admiring Legionnaire Brown. Much has been made of this display of sexual role reversal and its intended symbolism. Plus this was rather scandalous for the period.
 * 10) The second memorable scene is the film’s closing shot: Dietrich walks off into the dunes to join the camp followers trailing behind the Legionnaires. Charles Silver called it “one of the most supremely romantic gestures in film.”