MartinHafer
"Angel" is an Ernst Lubitsch film with three top actors, Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall and Melvyn Douglas. Yet, despite this, the story is amazingly flat and unappealing. It's not a bad film...more one that leaves you expecting so much more. After all, Lubitsch is practically legendary as are his movies.When the story begins, Anthony (Melvyn Douglas) meets Lady Barker (Marlene Dietrich) in Paris and arranges to meet her for dinner. During the dinner, Anthony is totally smitten by her and the night seems magical. However, the woman never tells him who she is and he gives her the nickname 'Angel'. When the evening is over, he has no idea who she was nor how to get in touch with her.Sometime later, Anthony meets an old friend, Sir Barker (Herbert Marshall). The evening goes fine...until Sir Barker's wife arrives and Anthony sees that it's Angel. What next? See the film.Making a romantic film that involves adultery is a major uphill battle. Adultery isn't a romantic thing and despite the Lubitsch touch, it all seems a tad tawdry. Tawdrier still, if you read between the lines you realize that the place Anthony and Angel met is essentially a high-priced brothel...though it's certainly NOT obvious when you watch the film. In addition to this big problem, the film simply is too talky and too flat....which is so surprising. I can see clearly why this is not among Lubitsch's more famous films.
richard-1787
Imagine a movie set in Paris directed by Ernst Lubitsch, the masterful director of such Parisian sexual innuendo comedies as Ninotchka, The Love Parade, The Merry Widow (1934 version), One Hour with You, and Design for Living. Imagine as the male lead Melvyn Douglas, who was so great in Ninotchka. Imagine as the female lead one of the great European stars of the cinema, a magnificent beauty like Garbo or Dietrich. Imagine that it concerns a Russian countess living in exile in Paris.But don't imagine that it's another Ninotchka. Far from it. It's Angel, in which all those ingredients that two years later would go to make one of the great Hollywood comedies, with Garbo and Douglas directed by Lubitsch, instead made for one very dull semi-comedy.Where to put the blame? The script, certainly, which isn't funny and never seems to know where it's going. Are we supposed to sympathize with Dietrich's character because she's abandoned by her husband, or condemn her for considering infidelity? The men at Paramount who approved it, and who should have spotted a bomb in the making. It is seldom funny. We seldom care about the characters. (Why did Paramount keep starring Herbert Marshall in pictures? He is just not interesting.) One or two scenes are mildly clever, which was probably Lubitch's doing. The rest verges on stale melodrama. The end isn't convincing.Taken all together, I'd say forget it. This is one Angel that never takes flight.
bkoganbing
Looking at the criticisms so far voiced about Angel, the majority seems to feel it's a neglected Lubitsch masterpiece. Yet this was the film that caused Paramount and Marlene Dietrich to come to a parting of the ways. Marlene would not be back on the screen until she signed a new contract with Universal and made a comeback of sorts in something that would have been unthinkable for her in 1937. That film was a western, but the western was Destry Rides Again.Ernest Lubitsch and Marlene Dietrich hit a double dry spell in Angel. The sum and substance of it is that up and coming young British diplomat Melvyn Douglas meets a mysterious and alluring woman at Laura Hope Crews's palace in Paris who he falls hopelessly for. But the alluring as ever Marlene is merely the very bored wife of a senior diplomat who is a member of the nobility, Herbert Marshall. It also turns out that Douglas and Marshall are old army buddies.Somehow Lubitsch could not work his usual magic with Marlene. Her scenes with the two men seem to have no spark to them. In fact the ending is a bit of a shock, personally I think she made the wrong choice.Where Lubitsch did well in Angel was with the supporting players. Laura Hope Crews is quite a bit different as the worldly countess than as that pillar of southern society Aunt Pittypat Hamilton from Gone With The Wind. Some of the back and forth commentary between Marshall's butler Ernest Cossart and his valet Edward Everett Horton are also quite droll. What snobs those servants can be, much worse than the people who employ them.Sad to say Angel is a film with a lot of gloss, but no real substance behind it.
sandy-32
Given the talent involved -- Dietrich at the height of her allure, Melvyn Douglas (who proved such a wonderful foil to Garbo just two years later in "Ninotchka"), support from such able troupers as Edward Everett Horton and Laura Hope Crews, and above all the famed "touch" of Lubitsch -- "Angel" should be a sparkling romp, a melancholy romance of renunuciation, a worldly social comedy, or better yet, all three.Instead it's a mostly tiresome slog through familiar territory, as if all involved were inspired not by Dietrich or Lubitsch but by the stolid Herbert Marshall as Marlene's aristo-Brit husband.While several recent writers on both Dietrich and Lubitsch have tried to tout this as an undeservingly overlooked film, it's really most worth watching for Crew's pre-Pittypat turn as a Russian emigre-turned-nightclub-hostess, and her few brief scenes can hardly save the picture.Dietrich fans are better off hunting up stills -- she does look terrific in the wardrobe of English Gentlewoman tweeds and furs, and her legendary collection of emeralds were rarely shown to better advantage.
AD
