The Scarlet Empress

The penultimate collaboration of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich was also their most ambitious and, maybe, their very best. Dietrich plays Catherine, a young woman who is married into a Russian royal family. Discovering her husband (Sam Jaffe) is cruel and deranged, she finds love in the arms of a colonel in the army (John Lodge), transforming her from wide-eyed virgin to formidable Catherine the Great. Declaring that he would rather make a ‘magnificent flop’ than a ‘mediocre film’, von Sternberg may not have found an immediate audience for his staggering mix of grotesquery and sensuous beauty, but The Scarlet Empress has since been recognised as one of his true masterpieces. (Powerhouse Films)