Browsing through the aisles at our local video mega-store last night, the Missus and I decided to do something different and rent a classic. Our eyes were drawn to the cover of Morocco, starring Marlene Deitrich and Gary Cooper. We quickly conferred and decided to rent the film for the following reasons: (a) it is set in Morocco, a country we have a fascination with, (b) we had never watched a film starring either Marlene Deitrich or Gary Cooper, and (c), the plot involving a romance between a cabaret singer and a member of the French Foreign Legion sounded like it could be fun.

Morocco, Dietrich's first American film, was released in 1930, and as a result the picture is all in Black & White and the sound quality is absolutely atrocious. With our DVD’s and surround-sound home theatre systems we moderns often forget just how far sound and picture quality has come in the past 70 years. The sound and picture quality were so bad that we were tempted to turn the film off after the first five minutes, to be honest.

The film’s plot is quite simple: Amy Jolly (Dietrich) arrives in Mogador, Morocco to perform in the local cabaret. Tom Brown (Gary Cooper) is a private in the French Foreign Legion who is bored with life and love, yet continues to womanize for lack of something better to do, and finds himself falling for the cabaret singer. La Bessiere (Adolphe Menjou) is a rich French businessman who meets Jolly on the boat to Mogador and tries to woo her throughout the course of the film. He is everything that Brown is not: reliable, honest, wealthy, and considerate. From the get-go it is obvious that Jolly will eventually choose the handsome, reckless, dangerous and fickle Brown. Don’t the women just love the bad boys? Jolly spends most of the film tediously flipping back and forth between Brown and La Bessiere. Brown can’t make up his mind either. I just wanted them to hurry up and get together and be done with it.

Morocco does have a few redeeming features. Dietrich’s performance as Amy Jolly in the Cabaret was quite risqué and naughty, containing a few phallic jokes I didn’t expect from a 1930’s film, and a decent amount of the Moroccan landscape, architecture and music was included. And that’s about the size of it. At ninety minutes, the film was about 60 minutes too long. My better half struggled to stay awake, even though we watched the film early in the evening.

Morocco earned four Academy Award Nominations back in 1930, including Best Director (Joseph von Sternberg) and Best Actress (Marlene Dietrich). Either there wasn’t much competition that year or all the other films were fantastically bad. Morocco is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination; it is not even good. My final analysis: don’t bother.



Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older