40 Films in Robotech: The Blue Angel (1930)

 

This Robotech film was mentioned in another Robotech film – Network (1976). We'll cover Network in a post later this year. For now, let's travel back to 1930...

 ROBOTECH MENTION:  

Page 80 of Jack McKinney’s Robotech book Metamorphosis mentions two films in the passage below: Cabaret (1972) and The Blue Angel (1930). Okay, it doesn’t spell out The Blue Angel, but it does call out Marlene Dietrich in a cabaret costume…

Dietrich’s first big break was The Blue Angel, after she was discovered by the film’s director, Josef Von Sternberg, and cast as the film’s lead role—the sensuous nightclub performer Lola Lola. In the final performance of Lola Lola in the film, she is very much dressed like Lancer/Yellow Dancer in the above passage. The snippet above is a small scene from the novelization of Robotech television episode 71, The Secret Route.

 SYNOPSIS:  

From the back cover of the Kino Video DVD (2001): “Emil Jannings, the quintessential German expressionist actor, stars as Professor Immanuel Rath, the sexually-repressed instructor of a boys prep school. After learning of the pupils’ infatuation with French postcards depicting a local nightclub songstress, he decides to personally investigate the source of such indecency. But as soon as he enters the shadowy Blue Angel nightclub and steals one glimpse of the smoldering Lola-Lola (Marlene Dietrich), commanding the stage in a top hat, stockings and bare thighs, Rath’s self-righteous piety is crushed. He finds himself fatefully seduced….”

 AWARDS & KUDOS:  

TCM lists The Blue Angel as a “must-see movie” from one of “cinema’s most influential filmmakers” director Josef Van Sternberg. 

 OTHER COOL FACTS:  

The Blue Angel has an English and German version (entitled Der Blaue Engel). Both versions were shot simultaneously, although the English version still has a lot of German-spoken lines.

 ROBOTECH REASON:  

Like the ill-paired, reserved professor and streetwise, somewhat shady Lola-Lola, Carla and Lancer are ill-matched, one-time lovers. In Robotech, Lancer as his alter ego Yellow Dancer assumes the role of Lola-Lola – a cross-dressing cabaret star who can’t help but conjure up old feelings from a previous relationship with the now prim, proper, well-cared-for Carla. So much so that Carla considers leaving her rich fiancée and fortunes to join Lancer on his quest to Reflex Point…until Lancer levels with her that life on the road with him is not her destiny and she should go back to her fiancée. 

To read my ⭐⭐⭐ ⭐(out of a possible 5 star) rating for The Blue Angel on Letterboxd, click here.