Marlene Dietrich's singularity, her legend, had its origins in the films made by Josef von Sternberg. Their first worldwide success was MOROCCO in 1930, and their collaboration ended with THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN in 1935. In the seven films they made together, Sternberg created that figure from which all later films and performances by Marlene Dietrich derived. These films relied on recurrent narrative and aesthetic moments, which von Sternberg varied these quite individualistically to achieve an individual look.
The film figure which Sternberg's creation represents is – in particular for Americans - from a foreign and exotic world: she's from Germany or Austria in DISHONORED (1931), BLONDE VENUS (1932), and the SCARLET EMPRESS (1934); from Spain in THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN; and from distant shores in SHANGHAI EXPRESS (1931) and MOROCCO. At the beginning of these Sternberg films, Marlene Dietrich is shown as a woman of experience, with a past that gives her a certain mellowness; she has no illusions. She enters worlds in which she is initially foreign – the court of the Russian czar, Morocco, China –, to become entangled in a web of espionage or involved in local night life. The past has inflicted wounds and brought experience, it has made her strong for the life she is now leading. This woman has no need for origins or a home – she knows her way round the world. She moves self-confidently, her left hand often pressed against her hip in a gesture of strength, her other hand in her jacket pocket, giving her gait a kind of sway, and the possibility of elegantly dodging any kind of interference. She does not merely walk but saunters toward her destination. All her movements and composure are accompanied by a relaxed attentiveness.

Just as mysterious as her past is the vagueness of her identity. Helen Faraday turns into Helen Jones or the blond Venus, and Rosa Fröhlich becomes Lola Lola. "I prefer not to give my name", the woman says in DISHONORED, before she becomes X-27. And Shanghai Lily explains: "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." In SHANGHAI EXPRESS, her real name is Magdalen.
Where death reveals itself, name and descentmoral decay are meaningless. "Do you know who that woman is?", La BessiËre asks the captain in MOROCCO. "We call them suicide passengers", was the answer. In DISHONORED, a corpse is carried out of a house. "They all end up that way", a neighbor comments. "No, they do not. Marlene, an Austrian prostitute answers, and then remarks: "I am not afraid of life", and after a short pause, she adds: "Although not of death either." In blonde venus, her husband is suffering from a fatal disease, and the scarlet empress is completely suffused with the topic of death. But death is unable to affect her, for even when she dies, as in dishonored, she triumphs: "I think of death as a charming young woman", her antagonist Victor McLaglen remarks in the role of Colonel Kranau just seconds before her death. And to illuminate the situation in Russia, Sternberg shows scenes of torture in the scarlet empress. These end with pictures of a prisoner who, misused as a bell clapper, dies. Sternberg fades from this image to a scene in a garden where young Katharina swings, wild and unruly. And it is precisely this scene which Sternberg takes up again in the final sequence: Katharina hangs onto a bell rope and rings in her victory. In Sternberg's films, death is never far from the figures embodied by Marlene Dietrich; death is almost an incidental accessory that does not affect her and which she can nonchalantly ignore. "Can I become a hangman someday?" the childlike Katharina asks. Sternberg enacts death as a component of the erotic game.

Marlene Dietrich flirts with the role of the vamp, yet at critical moments retains an almost lofty readiness to sacrifice herself. She gives herself up to the man she loves so as to save him – from prison, torture, death. But she plays down her behavior: "I would have done that for anybody", she explains to Donald Harvey in SHANGHAI EXPRESS. And she needs no help: "Every time a man has helped me there has been a price." Within her value system, this price is higher than death.
Her face, still lit to look flat and even in MOROCCO, becomes ever more mysterious as her collaboration with Sternberg progresses. It is hidden below a helmet in the carnival sequences in dishonored, and beneath hats and behind veils, fans and masks in the SCARLET EMPRESS, BLONDE VENUS and THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN. In SHANGHAI EXPRESS and DISHONORED, in the interaction of light and shadow, her faces changes not expression but planes of projection for new, still undiscovered territory.

Costumes are not disguises but part of Marlene Dietrich's nature and roles. In MOROCCO, Gary Cooper dons her top hat, but he merely cuts a comical figure - like almost all men in Sternberg's films: with tails and top hats, they become desexualized beings, while Marlene Dietrich is the absolute prototype of an androgynous, bisexual being. In SHANGHAI EXPRESS she lures Donald Harvey, played by Clive Brook, into kissing her; she then immediately puts on his military cap – as a sign of her power and his lack of it. And of course she looks just as splendid as a trooper as she does as a coast guard. In contrast to the men in her films, she is equally good in all her roles, freeing herself from the rigid grid of masculinity and femininity; she is the one who sets the rules, rendering her partners ineffective. Sternberg's Marlene figure cannot be typecast in advance to notions like character or development, profession or career, and not even to notions like age or marital status. She is beyond such standards and plausible even in her inconsistencies.

Sternberg presents his figure as if she were a Venus just stepping out of the water, although this does not always occur as obviously as in blonde venus, where she first appears as a bathing nymph. In DISHONORED she is a prostitute working in the rain, in MOROCCO she arrives by water. Critical situations from which Marlene emerges like a supernatural apparition are, moreover, acoustically generated in DISHONORED by the beat of the raindrops and the drumming of the garrison at her execution by a firing squad as well as in the scarlet empress by the pounding of the hooves of horses.

"What do those bells mean?" the feebleminded Czar asks when he hears the bells that Marlene/Katharina has had rung. They signify his death as well as the death of Professor Unrat, and they are the sound which fills space preceding the SHANGHAI EXPRESS. Bells ring in the last hour, accompany and resolve crises, and on the acoustical level herald a determinist world view such as characteristic of the first films by Sternberg and Dietrich.

"I changed my mind." This is the message written on the mirror by Gary Cooper in the role of Tom Brown in Marlene Dietrich's first American film MOROCCO. Brown will not wait for her; he does not want to desert and join her in her wanderings. In THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN, these same words are Marlene's very last: an explanation that explains nothing but merely articulates the adventure which change entails.
"Marlene, that's me", Sternberg once said with reason. By idealizing her in his films, he incessantly declared his love for her. After six years and seven films together, they separated. SHANGHAI EXPRESS was their biggest hit, the public's interest in the films that came afterwards declined steadily. Audiences could and would no longer follow Sternberg's tireless fantasy which tended toward the surreal. Marlene Dietrich had become an artificial being, a star, totally self-reflexive, an empty costume, without a body. THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN was the duo's last ingenious attempt, and it was a grandiose flop at the box office.
Sternberg and Dietrich each took a break from Hollywood. He left for a trip around the world, misunderstood and hurt, a dreamer who had his head in the clouds but was banished to earth. She departed for Europe, to Austria and France, those homelands she had chosen for herself. In the autumn of 1936, Marlene received a letter from Josef von Sternberg:"i am tired and find little enjoyment – and so i thought i would take a look at our small planet earth – i am doing so now – and it makes me happy – i have been everywhere in japan, korea, manchuria and china which is where i still am – tomorrow i will leave for canton and macao – everywhere people have been so touching and often strangers shed tears of joy or because i leave after a few hours – i see a world which i had envisioned exactly as it is – so far nothing astonishes me for it is as if everything had been staged by me (when my thoughts are undisturbed) – you can probably imagine that i have thought of you often – to say nothing of how people here love you greatly – i also took the shanghai express from peking to shanghai – and shanghai lily was often there sitting next to me – i hope you are fine – (...) do good work give me that pleasure and when you think of me often i feel it and the place where i have hid you in my heart glows - Jo."

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