Chevalier and Dietrich

3 Chevalier and Dietrich 1929–1935 In February 1931 the French film magazine Cinéa announced its current topic of interest on the cover page and on the back: “In this issue: the French talking film.”1 Just under that, the names of two performers, with a photo portrait of each on the front and on the back: Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich. The rest of the issue served to confirm the linkage between the topic and the stars. Chevalier and Dietrich, whose photos bookended the issue, emerged on the pages in between as the first and greatest of a new generation of stars made pos si ble by sound film, stars of international importance but who also could be claimed by the nation—by France—as two of its own. The new sound technology that helped produce stars like Chevalier and Dietrich had a significant impact on the ways that films played in Pa ri sian cin- emas. The sound of the voice might help create a sensational, extended run of a single film in the city, or the cinematic geography of Paris might come to be understood in terms of the route a par tic u lar sound film might take as it made its rounds of dif er ent neighborhoods. During this transitional period, the screening of a sound film at a par tic u lar cinema followed a week or two later by a silent film threw into relief for neighborhood audiences the overlapping and also dif er ent pleasures of the two technologies. With the film journalism of the period, we can read not just where films played and for how long, but also what the responses might be to going to the cinema to hear a special voice, or to watch once again a par tic u lar face. Film exhibition, film sound, the film image, and the film press, all in a par tic u lar place, can show us something of what it meant, for the typical fan who picked up a magazine like Cinéa or the cinéphile who wrote for it, to experience a shift to a new technology and a change to a dif er ent kind of star. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791382/9781478007531-004.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Including Cinéa there were dozens of film tabloids and journals in France during this period; the Annuaire général des lettres for 1933–34, which kept meticulous track of such things, lists around thirty- five, most of them concen- trating their attention on Paris, although the re were others with interests beyond the capital.2 La Revue de l’écran, for example, a trade journal for cinema man ag ers, focused on Marseille and the area around it, while Les Spectacles reviewed entertainments in Lille, and Les Spectacles d’Alger examined film, theatre, and mu sic halls in and around Algiers. Jean Tedesco, who managed the fash ion able Vieux- Colombier cinema in Paris’s sixth arrondissement, published Cinéa, and because of Tedesco’s well- known interest in film history and the film archive (the Vieux- Colombier specialized in screenings of experi- mental films, documentaries, and early silent movies), his magazine’s ongoing concern with developments in the medium made perfect sense.3 Almost all of the film magazines devoted coverage to the history of cinema, and they sig- naled to their readers that the transition to sound film, even as it was happen- ing, constituted an impor tant period in the growth of motion pictures. These publications interpreted the transition, at least in part, through its efects on film stardom. Information detailing the sound of the language spoken by the star became a means of distilling news about the shift to talkies, much more so than discussions of the changes in equipment or industrial practice, or any of the other impor tant but more mundane aspects of le cinéma parlant. Among the most compelling of the stars of this new cinema were Chevalier and Dietrich, and reading about them in the film magazines of the period provides a sense of the experience of this transitional era in French cinema. Looking through the vari ous narratives of the shift to sound films, in Cinéa, Pour Vous, Les Spectacles d’Alger, and other sources from the period, we can begin to understand how movie enthusiasts learned about film as a local, re- gional, and international phenomenon. These sources also help to explain au- dience preferences for stars and movies, as well as many of the nuts and bolts of the transition to sound; how filmswe re shown and in what languages, for instance, or the stars whose appeal seemed li mited to France or extended well beyond it, and also the impact on stardom of rapid technological innovation and implementation. Studying stardom, film exhibition, and film reception through the primary materials of French film journalism provides the possibility of diferential his- tories of sound film, and also helps complicate our understanding of national cinema. In the cases of Chevalier and Dietrich during the transition to sound, we can see how, for some audiences, stars themselves might signify the nation, often regardless of the country where their filmswe re produced, and how, in CHevalier AND DIETRICH 61 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791382/9781478007531-004.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Figures 3.1 and 3.2 Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich on the cover and back of Cinéa, February 1931. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791382/9781478007531-004.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the case of Chevalier, a star’s “Frenchness” might vary between France and France’s colonies, or how Dietrich, the actress from Berlin, came to indicate a broadly understood cosmopolitan Eu ro pean identity that might be im agined to be as much French as German.4 Placing Paris as well as France and French culture at the center of this in- quiry shows us how the transition to sound generated specific kinds of stardom. This combined history of film sound and movie stardom charts the impact of new technologies on an international commodity (the cinema) and on a specific industrial practice (the production of celebrity). In par tic u lar, this chapter’s study of film reception and exhibition examines how fans in Paris and elsewhere in France as well as in North Africa came to understand and ap- preciate Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier in par tic u lar, but also other stars who emerged during this period, and to update and adapt their devotion to stars more fully associated with silen t cinema. That cinema certainly had produced an extraordinary number of international movie stars; Asta Nielsen from the German film industry, Charlie Chaplin from Hollywood, and Max Linder from France come to mind immediately. For the new movie celebrities of the transitional period, however, the sound of the performer’s voice became the marker of stardom, while for many of the gr eat silent actors, even as they made their transitions to sound, the image remained transcendent. Maurice Chevalier and the Era of the New International Star A fan poll orga nized by the tabloid Mon Film named Maurice Chevalier “King of French Film” for 1930, just one year after he began starring in movies.5 Chevalier displaced the previous year’s winner, Jean Dehelly, who had started out as a leading man in silent movies in the early 1920s and would be out of films entirely by 1932. Thus Chevalier, the great international celebrity of sound film, supplanted a silent film star whose fame never really extended much beyond France. The sound cinema created other major stars. Indeed, rather than eliminat- ing the international performer from cinema (as in the well- chronicled de- mise of Emil Jannings, whose thick German accent made it impossible for him to appear in Hollywood talking films), sound movies produced new forms of global celebrity. In France alone, Hollywood stars such as Joan Crawford and Jeanette MacDonald enjoyed gr eat vogue during the early 1930s, as did Dorothea Wieck, the German star of Jeunes filles en uniform, as well as many other performers from Eu rope and the United States. Many French stars made films intended only for French- speaking audiences but that were produced in other countries, or in France by foreign film companies: Charles Boyer, for CHevalier AND DIETRICH 63 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791382/9781478007531-004.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 instance, who starred in French movies made in Hollywood and Germany, and Francoise Rosay, who appeared with Chevalier in German director Ludwig Berger’s Le Petit Café (1931) and also starred in other French films made by the American studio Paramount at its Joinville fa cil i ty outside Paris. These performers, from Crawford to Rosay, were international stars in terms of where their films were exhibited, or where they worked and for whom. Still other stars we re more purely national, such as Gaby Morlay, who worked consistently for Pathé- Natan, or Pierre Larquey, who made films for Alex Nalpas, Les Films diamants, and other of France’s myriad movie companies from the period. Their films were shown almost exclusively to French- speaking audiences, but even these viewers ranged beyond France, as they might be watching movies in Belgium or Switzerland or North Africa or Southeast Asia. As just one example among many that demonstrates the point, and the diferences between these French stars and those with a more fully international appeal, during the last week of 1931 and the first of 1932, the Majestic cinema in Algiers showed Georges Milton’s latest film, Pas sur la bouche (1931), while the Splendid cinema there exhibited Chevalier in Le Petit Café.

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