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It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Von Sternberg must have been railing lines of coke when he came up with this soapy drivel. Look, you've got Marlene under your thrall. Put her in some movies where she can sing a bit, show her legs a bit. Can't be that hard. What you don't have to do is create a movie with more plot points than an entire season of Breaking Bad. I mean, one minute she's crawling through a Mississippi flop house, the next scene she's in a white tux singing French to the French. On the other hand it is beautifully photographed. Marlene, well, even when she's on the lam, staying in a rooming house with chickens, she's the hottest thing in movies. I mean, holy smokes, look at the way she brushes the pigeon off her shoulder. I had trouble deciding which male lead I wanted to punch in the face harder: the sap Faraday (Marshall) or the obnoxious Townsend (Grant). I can't see how Dietrich's character could have spent more than 10 minutes with either of them. Dietrich deserved better writers.

Blonde Venus (1932) *** (out of 4) Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) learns that her husband Edward (Herbert Marshall) is dying of radiation poison but there's a doctor who might be able to save him. The only problem is that they don't have the money so she goes back to working as a cabaret singer where she meets millionaire Nick Townsend (Cary Grant). At first Helen is just after the money to save her husband but soon her and Nick fall in love.Dietrich and director Joseph von Sternberg once again create a winning film that manages to be highly entertaining even though some pretty big flaws. Even though the film does have some flaws there's no question that the cast is terrific and once again the director offers up a beautiful looking film to say the least.The biggest problem with the movie is how melodramatic it gets in the middle. There's a long subplot dealing with the husband snapping after he learns of the affair and Dietrich takes off with the kid. This is where we see her struggling to do anything good for the kid as she has to keep avoiding detectives and others who are looking for her. I found all of this stuff to be rather silly because it makes the husband out to be an incredible villain and for the life of me it just didn't make too much sense.It didn't make too much sense in many reasons because this was a Pre-code and it did feature a woman cheating on her husband with several men and she was made for the viewer to root for. A lot of credit has to go to Dietrich because she's extremely strong here. She's given a couple musical numbers that she nails just fine but I was really impressed with her dramatic work and especially her love for her son. Marshall is great playing the bad guy and Grant is wonderfully charming in his part. The early romance scenes between he and Dietrich are certainly the highlight of the film. Dickie Moore is also good in his role as the son.BLONDE VENUS isn't a masterpiece but it's certainly an entertaining film. Yes it has some major plot flaws but there's no doubt that fans of Dietrich and Grant will enjoy it.

Josef Von Sternberg really went over the top with this outrageous pre-code melodrama starring Marlene Dietrich about a devoted wife and mother (first seen as a single German girl swimming naked in a lake in her homeland) who becomes a kept woman in order to financially help her husband be cured of uranium poison. She later runs off with her son when he comes back and discovers her affair with Cary Grant, becoming a prostitute and later basically homeless in order to keep their whereabouts secret. She is forced to give him up, and is basically destitute when her fortunes turn and she becomes the singing toast of Paris. Von Sternberg lets Dietrich utilize every single emotion possible, running all over the world in every style, yet barely shedding a tear over all of heartache.Herbert Marshall is the unfortunate husband and Dickie Moore the toted kid. Grant's suave lover keeps getting the shaft as it is obvious where Dietrich's heart really is. She is the whole show, even performing in a gorilla suit she strips out of to sing "Hot Voodoo". Movie stills make this appear to be better than it is, its deliberate camp so obvious that you may laugh at it, not with it.Then, there is the editing, taking Dietrich down, down, down, ending up in a woman's shelter (15 cents a night) where she drunkenly stumbles in, tells off a bunch of old hags and stumbles right back out, and where do we see her next with no explanation of how she got there? Glamorously dressed to kill in Paris, of course, as famous as Josephine Baker. Only Von Sternberg and Dietrich could get away with this, style without substance and glamour without grace. The result is as phony as the curly blonde wig with arrows in it that she wears after stripping out of her gorilla fur.

Blonde Venus unfortunately turned out to be the one and only collaboration of Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant. Sad to say though, Grant was not the lead here, just the other man who comes between Marlene and husband Herbert Marshall. There's no real chemistry in this one between any of the principal players and the best scenes are with Marlene and little Dickie Moore playing her son with Marshall.The best thing about Blonde Venus are Marlene's musical numbers and they're memorable because of the inimitable way she puts over a song. All Dietrich fans should treasure her Hot Voodoo number where Marlene has a gorilla suit on and does a sexy strip out of that costume and gives us a look at voodoo can do to us.But when its not showing Dietrich's legs off and her husky singing, the film is the story of a woman in love with two men. Husband Herbert Marshall is a research scientist who contracts 'radium poisoning' and needs money to go to Europe for a cure. Dietrich gets the money by doing some entertaining in a seedy dive where she comes to the attention of wealthy playboy Cary Grant. From there the plot progresses to the inevitable Hollywood conclusion with a script that was written by Joseph Von Sternberg who directed the film as well.Paramount was taking a shot in the dark here with radium poisoning gambit. The plain truth is they didn't know a whole lot about radioactivity then. The discoverer of radium Marie Curie did in fact die of cancer contracted from too much exposure to it. But one didn't just go somewhere for a miracle cure for that sort of thing.Herbert Marshall was always playing the injured party it seems in a whole lot of his films. He's well remembered for being Bette Davis's husband in The Little Foxes, a much better film than Blonde Venus. I also remember him in When Ladies Meet where he was cheating on Greer Garson with Joan Crawford and he went through the film with an air of innocence that you would think he was the party offended. Marshall had these roles down pat, but he had more to him in his acting repertoire.Even before The Code was put in place Paramount had a lot of trouble with the Hays Office in getting this one exhibited. Some changes were made that no doubt weakened the plot and the story. Marlene is basically in love with two guys at the same time and that was a no go back in the day.Blonde Venus didn't do that well at the box office, it was quite a let down from her previous film Shanghai Express. After this one she and Joseph Von Sternberg were separated and she did her next film, Song of Songs with Rouben Mamoulian.Blonde Venus is great Dietrich who's asked to carry a weak story.