Here’s another somewhat rare one – MOROCCO is one of those flicks that seems to have only come out as one part of a Marlene Dietrich box set. Outside of that, it hasn’t been on DVD as far as I can tell, so I went back to Movie Madness and picked it up on – gasp – VHS.
Remember VHS?
Anyway, MOROCCO stars Marlene Dietrich as a traveling cabaret singer who finds herself entertaining at a bar in the title country just as the French Foreign Legion marches into town. Gary Cooper, as one of the Legionnaires, is seduced into a lustful romance with Dietrich after he checks out her hot act in which she slinks around in a tuxedo and kisses an unsuspecting chick in the audience.
That’s probably the most famous scene. The rest of the movie is kind of slow – it’s from that awkward era when silent films had just gone out of fashion but sound films hadn’t quite been figured out yet. Still, being pre-code, it has a little more style and flair than some later more restrained flicks, and with the help of Dietrich’s performance, is able to maintain a certain sultry level of eroticism for most of the running time.
The movie does transcend its own limitations a little bit right at the last moment, in a lonely final shot of Dietrich marching off into a windswept desert that seems ahead of its time and out of the ordinary for a mainstream Hollywood flick. There’s no big swell of over dramatic music, just the dull drum beat of war and the sound of the sand blowing in the wind.
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