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" When Texts Travel: Edward Dmytryk’s The Blue Angel (1959) Remake "
Kosta, Barbara
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AL
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| Record Number
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937701
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LA9sh6n99m
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Main Entry
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Kosta, Barbara
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| Title & Author
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When Texts Travel: Edward Dmytryk’s The Blue Angel (1959) Remake [Article]\ Kosta, Barbara
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| Title of Periodical
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TRANSIT
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| Volume/ Issue Number
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10/2
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| Date
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2016
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| Abstract
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The following paper explores the relationship between Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel and Edward Dmytryk’s 1959 remake to consider what happens when an “original” film is repurposed to address another socio-historical time period, and cultural and national setting. The similarity and, more interestingly, the differences between the remake and its original and the engagement of the historical moments, from which these films emerge, reveal different directorial styles, technological developments, aesthetic choices, cultural practices, performances of gender, and narrative resolutions. Based on the hallmarks of a remake, and on Thomas Leitch’s premise that remakes subscribe to a process of “disavowal” and want “to be just like their model only better,” I question what has been made better in the Hollywood remake set in 1956 Germany. The Blue Angel remake notably subdues the tension between desire and prescriptive social norms and diverges from von Sternberg’s devastating drama of seduction. In striking contrast to Professor Rath’s fatal decline at the twilight of the Weimar Republic, the 1959 version reasserts masculine authority and offers a model of benevolent and fraternal masculinity. In doing so, I argue that Dmytryk rehabilitates the image of Germany, and in contrast to many Hollywood films made during the 1940s, in which many German émigrés played Nazis, he offers an alternate acoustic landscape for a German-accented English. Produced and set during the Cold War, Dmytryk reframes and redresses the image of Germany just when the Federal Republic begins to serve as a crucial political ally.
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