The Cinematheque

“A beautiful application of comic style, dry and precisely trimmed off at the edge … Here as throughout Lubitsch’s work there is the sense of something made with the greatest delicacy word by word, image by image, cut by cut.”

Geoffrey O’Brien, New York Review of Books

Compared to Lubitsch’s laugh-filled comedies, Angel, his underappreciated masterwork, might look stark and foreboding. Its principals, played to chilly perfection by Marlene Dietrich, Herbert Marshall, and Melvyn Douglas, seem frightfully capable of never letting their masks slip, and in the film’s intractable plot, nothing is quite as it seems. Marshall and Douglas play diplomat Sir Frederick and the strangely unattached Tony, two old friends—or opponents, once they learn that Frederick’s wife and the woman of Tony’s Paris tryst are the same person. Dietrich’s character goes by many names (Angel among them), but all three characters carry the baggage of unknowable histories. Love is paradoxically constant and absent in this love triangle laced with espionage, and one might call this Lubitsch’s deepest undercover work: everything is related in pure hypotheticals and productive ambiguity, leaving romance and reality in suspense.

“The camera [in Angel] gives us the sense of Dietrich’s presence having no definable beginning … We do not doubt that she must come and go like other human beings, but Lubitsch will not encourage us in this certainty.”

Dan Sallitt, critic and filmmaker

“A terse, elliptical, comedy-tinged yet pain-seared romance … With suavely piercing touches of erotic wit, he points ahead to the modern audacities of Belle de jour.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker