What else happened this year? The worst year of the great depression and an important year for establishing totalitarian dictatorships. Also, that picture of the Loch Ness Monster.
What is the plot - in one sentence? We follow a naive German Princess who marries into the Russian Royal family.
I don't have time, just spoil it for me? She marries a simple-minded prince, and eventually becomes Catherine the Great, the one who, in mythology, fucked a horse. Here she’s happy with sleeping with a bunch of noblemen and soldiers, who help her to kill her husband and let her become Empress.
What is the meaning of the title? She’s never referred to as the scarlet empress in the movie, and I had to look up that it was indeed Catherine the Great’s nickname. It’s also weird to have a colour as a name in a black and white movie.
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| Here's our young princess straddling the line of 'coquettish' and 'brain damaged.' Seriously, it's hilarious how stupid she looks at the beginning of this movie. |
Anything that's not aged well? Does a woman get slapped around? Yep! A mistress of the prince is slapped around for some reason.
This is pre-code, so it can hint pretty heavily at sex and goings on in the court, but Catherine the Great as a young, German princess, spends the first half of the movie as a ‘naive’ waif and looks mildly retarded, for want of a better word. Also, it’s Marlene Dietrich, who's gorgeous.
Any thoughts? It took me a while to piece together the plot, as a lot of it is implied rather than explained. Our young princess is brought to the Russian Court, where Empress Elizabeth reigns through lusty fury. The princess marries her mentally challenged nephew (I think), but he already has a mistress so the wedding isn’t going well. It’s even worse when she realises that her handsome soldier lover is the lover Empress Elizabeth, so following the Empresses death, she sets about getting the military on her side to help kill her husband and become the Empress. That’s the plot. It took me a while to work all that out.
Would you recommend this? There’s a literal cast of thousands (it even says so in the credits), and some of the scenes have a really epic feel – the wedding ceremony had a lot of people there, for example, and seeing men on horses storm the castle was pretty impressive. There’s a bit of intrigue and romance, and it looked great, but I probably won’t watch it again. There’s other pre-code movies which are more interesting, romantic and funny that I’d go to first.
Final thoughts? Catherine is a confident, man-hungry Empress by the movies end, and this has to be juxtaposed with her wide-eyed naivety at the beginning, but a lot of her ‘innocent’ looks come across as looking completely stupid by today’s standards. There’s a Scots word, ‘Glaikit’ which means dead behind the eyes, and it fits her perfectly. It was very distracting.
Incredibly, we have a surviving cast member of note. The child version of the Princess, is still alive – she’s played by Marlene Dietrich’s kid. Even more incredibly, this same actor is the cat-loving wife of Robert Mitchum in Scrooged, a movie I don’t think is very good, but which I’ve seen a lot. Anyway, she’s still going, and that’s awesome.
Only about 15 more of these to go, whoo! The others can be found right here pal.
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