DIETRICH, Marlene

(1901–1992)

   Everything about Marlene Dietrich’s early life was shrouded in a mystery created by press agents and herself, including her age and her parentage. Early biographies list her birth name as Maria Magdelena Dietrich von Losch and have her being born in 1904, but she was actually born Maria Magdelena Dietrich in Germany in 1901. She developed a very successful film and singing career in Germany before coming to the United States and playing in many popular non-Westerns throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Dietrich’s first film after becoming a U.S. citizen was, fittingly, a Western—at the time, an American film genre. In Destry Rides Again (1939), opposite Jimmy Stewart, Dietrich played Frenchy, probably the most famous saloon girl in any Western. What made Dietrich’s Frenchy such a great character was the transference of the sultry Germanic Dietrich persona to the old West. In her first scene in the film, her back is turned as she is singing “Little Joe, the Wrangler” in her famous dark and husky voice. The soonto-be-no-more town sheriff is in the audience. She turns and faces the camera directly, which happens to be the perspective of Kent, her boss and friend in villainy. She winks, rolls her cigarette, and then looks alluringly at the luckless sheriff, now listening to his death song. Soon after the song, a naive Russian immigrant, Boris (Mischa Auer), pats her rear. She turns and slaps him, showing that she is no common dance hall girl. He worships her thereafter. Later in the film, Frenchy sings “You’ve Got That Look (That Leaves Me Weak) ” in as sultry a manner as anything seen in cinema Westerns. She wears a feather boa, which she uses to excite the saloon patrons. The camera cuts back and forth between Frenchy and Boris, who rolls his eyes backward, embraces a wooden column next to him, and kisses the column as if it is Frenchy. Another cowboy, turned on by Frenchy’s performance, fires off his pistols in the air to symbolize his arousal.

   Deputy Sheriff Destry (Stewart) sees through her completely but manages lots of good clean 1930s-style sexual byplay. Marlene Dietrich’s Frenchy set the standard for future saloon girl characters and was so famous that Madeline Kahn parodied Dietrich in the 1974 Western spoof Blazing Saddles (directed by Mel Brooks). Well into her mature years, Dietrich starred in one other Western, Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), a revenge Western in which she attempts the Frenchy act one last time.