I noticed, as I was watching something else this morning, a You Tube link to The Blue Angel (1930) and couldn't resist putting it on in the background...inevitably, even though I've watched it goodness knows how often before, I was pulled in again and ended up watching it properly. Amazingly it was actually the recently found English language version long thought lost until someone found a copy in a forgotten cupboard somewhere (like a lot of early talkies they simultaneously filmed each scene twice, once in German then again in English). It's a great film even if it's simplistic morality is superficially off putting (the consequences of sex being humiliation, poverty, madness and death) but the combination of Josef von Sternberg, Emile Janning and Marlene Dietrich makes it something very special. Everyone remembers it most as the film that transformed Dietrich into an International movie star but there's more to it than that; it offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of those politically and sexually subversive cabarets that flourished in the years between the Great War and the appointment of Hitler as chancellor in 1933, the world of Dietrich, Lotte Lenya, Brecht and Mack the Knife, it's also directed in the tradition of German Expressionism and Janning gives probably the best performance of his life - his comedic cock crow becoming an unearthly scream of despair and madness.

Having surrendered myself to it I just had to search for the Sternberg/Janning film that preceded it, The Last Command (1928), which I hadn't ever managed to see before, and there it was, sitting enticingly in its You Tube home. Sometimes I love the Internet...well most of the time actually. Janning got the first ever awarded Oscar for Best Actor for this one, well the academy actually voted for Rin Tin Tin but the Oscar people thought it wouldn't do anything for their credibility if they gave an Oscar to a dog so it went to human runner up Janning instead. A really interesting film although with a couple of serious plot flaws and I must admit my sympathies stayed firmly with the revolutionaries and not with the central character (it was self consciously meant as an answer to Eisenstein....it didn't succeed). Some great set pieces in it with imagery that stayed with me the rest of the day.

So, my own little Josef von Sternberg festival, a pretty good day and I will end it by raising a glass to the Weimar Republic, a fascinating place swept away by the Nazi's, a very different version of Germany than the one that inevitably dominates the popular perception.