Half through Josef von Sternberg's Blonde Venus, I had high hopes that it would be a film antagonistic to family values. No it wasn't. The ending scenes displayed shiny happy family triangulation. A chemist marries a German cabaret artist (Marlene Dietrich). He gets sick and needs money for medical treatment. His wife performs one more time (a racist number) and ends up selling herself to a rich man. Some of the scenes in the film worked very well: it was nice to watch how Dietrich becomes an outsider to a patriarchal society. But, as I said, in the end, she pays her homage to that same society and everything is well.
This might be a bad movie, but it was messy in a rather entertaining way, and it was interesting to note that almost all characters were unsympathetic.
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