Sternberg called it Agent x27, paramount changed the title. Ado Kyrou: “with such a woman, events cannot follow their normal course, the strange, the surreal accompanies her. If Marlene is a spy, she betrays her country to remain faithful to her lover. ” jacques lourcelles: “the third of Sternberg’s seven films with Marlene Dietrich, it is the most beautiful after Morocco. The myth of marlene is enriched by definitive characteristics: absolute pride in passion and in defeat; a gift of dissimulation used with great spareness; physical charm blending fascination with morbidity. Marlene becomes an angel of death leading the men who approach her to ruin in the course of an itinerary in which she herself is destroyed. Sternberg’s style plays on the contrast between the baroque madness of ideas, inventions (like the piano score marlene plays to reconstruct a secret message) and the glacial classicism of decor and découpage. Only the nuances of light return inspiration to its baroque origin. The last sequence is unforgettable: marlene, before being shot, looks at herself in the gleaming metal of a s word held out to her by a young officer, head of the firing squad. She dries his tears, he breaks down and refuses to give the order to fire. He is replaced. Marlene reapplies her lipstick and is killed in a hail of bullets.