Morocco is a milestone in the history of LGBTQ+ representation in film. As in Der blaue Engel, Marlene Dietrich plays a nightclub singer. In a key scene, she wears a tuxedo and top hat and strolls through the club singing. She briefly flirts with a woman in the audience, grabs her under the chin and kisses her on the lips. It is the first lesbian kiss by a leading actress in a Hollywood film. Director von Sternberg had seen Dietrich in male drag at a Berlin revue and found her androgynous charisma particularly seductive. She also turned women’s heads with her salacious lesbian songs. Von Sternberg staged this challenging moment of lasciviousness for her first Hollywood appearance – the idea for the provocative kiss probably came from Dietrich herself.
She plays Amy Jolly, a woman caught between two men: the rich La Bessière (Adolphe Menjou), who wants to marry her, and the Foreign Legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). In the end, Amy decides in favour of love – with far-reaching consequences. Sternberg evokes an atmosphere of great passion and emotion in the film. It is based on the novel Amy Jolly, the Woman from Marrakech by Benno Vigny, which Dietrich recommended to her director. The real Amy Jolly, who ran a brothel in Marrakech, later sought contact with the actress, as an exchange of letters in her estate proves. Most of the film was shot in the studio and in the Los Angeles area, but some exterior shots were taken in Guadeloupe. The film earned Dietrich her first Oscar nomination and was nominated in a total of four categories. The press particularly praised the intensity of the visual language and Lee Garmes’s outstanding camerawork. Dietrich’s performance was celebrated as an event, as was her extraordinary personality, which oscillates between dominance and submission. Her performance is always an expression of self-determination and sovereignty, enhanced by a touch of irony.

Kristina Jaspers

Paramount delayed the u.s. Release of The blue angel – Sternberg’s only german film, where the unknown Marlene Dietrich overshadowed superstar Emil Jannings – until after Morocco to give its new star a properly ambiguous introduction – exotic, not necessarily german. Sternberg: “I had deliberately selected a theme that was visual and owed no allegiance to a cascade of words.” Dietrich’s accent was not the problem, he saw her face become distorted when she spoke english. Like the men in the foreign legion, Amy Jolly descends into this milieu by choice, where no questions will be asked and with a heart that cannot be touched. But her glittering, androgynous performances in a tawdry nightclub bring her to the equally impossibly desirable legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper), setting up one of sternberg’s sublime, doomed love triangles, as the director’s look-alike, the rich, permissive La bessière (Adolphe Menjou) watches. The finale moves the film’s anti-realism to another level entirely, the very definition of l’amour fou. Sternberg’s former mentor, director emile chautard, plays the french general.