Wealthy Monsieur La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou) and poor Amy Jolly (Marlene Dietrich) arrive on the same boat at Mogador in Morocco where Amy takes up a job as bar singer. La Bessiere quickly falls for her but has a rival in foreign legionary Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). This film is far from perfect and probably the worst of Dietrich's pictures I have seen so far. But let's first see, what do I like about it? The photography is good; hold out to the final scene: that is really great. Menjou is good. Anything else? Cooper and Dietrich do decent jobs. But that's about it for my taste. The plot is less than compelling. It is slow moving and fails to generate much suspense (vulgo, it is pretty boring), probably at least in part because none of the characters is really likeable. Both Cooper and Dietrich play people bruised by their past, but how they were bruised is never explained and their acting is too melodramatic for their emotional baggage to be convincing. The dialogues are terrible, with long pauses (fraught with significance) between what people say to each other. Hardly anyone gives a straight answer to what someone else is saying. Everything is oblique and seems to hint at a hidden subtext which I failed to discover, probably because I am just not perceptive enough as a moviegoer. The ending? Some reviewers interpret Cooper as a cad, but here I disagree. I think his decision is supposed to be noble. But do I care one way or the other? I don't. The film fails to make me care, and that's another reason why I don't like it. 4 stars.
Review of Morocco
