No Emperor, Only an Empress

The opening montage of the Catherine the Great biopic The Scarlet Empress (1934)—the fifth of six films made by Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich at Paramount between 1930 and 1935, which have recently been released as a box set from the Criterion Collection—sets the tone for the duo’s most outrageous and gleefully perverse collaboration. With an eye for the salacious, Sternberg depicts the reign of the czars in 18th-century Russia as a torture garden, with women the primary victims. Featuring some startling glimpses of nudity (all the more startling given that the film premiered a few months after the creation of the Production Code Administration), the montage shows women being burned at the stake, their heads rolling off executioners’ blocks, and their bodies tumbling out of iron maidens (one among many historical inaccuracies and anachronisms in Empress, never mind the credits’ proud claim that the film is based directly on Catherine’s diaries).

“A sensible actor does not involve his emotions in a performance… The female, however, does not react the same way as the male, as every psychologist will testify. It is the nature of a woman to be passive, receptive, dependant on male aggression, and capable of enduring pain. In other words, she is not naturally outraged by being manipulated; on the contrary, she usually enjoys it.”