“It is perhaps the purest expression of Sternberg’s belief in the triumph of aesthetics over mortality.”
Marlene Dietrich is Marie, a widow turned prostitute who's recruited to spy for Austria during World War I. Dietrich’s wily heroine devotes her gifts for seduction and duplicity—as well as her musical talents—to the patriotic cause, until the roguish Russian colonel (Victor McLaglen) draws her into a fatal game of cat and mouse… Reimagining his native Vienna with customary extravagance, von Sternberg stages this story of spycraft as a captivating masquerade in which no one is who they seem and death is only a wrong note away.
