Angel

1937 Directed by Ernst Lubitsch

I want love - and I'm going to get it!

A woman and her husband take separate vacations, and she falls in love with another man.

Marlene Dietrich Herbert Marshall Melvyn Douglas Edward Everett Horton Ernest Cossart Laura Hope Crews Herbert Mundin Dennie Moore Gino Corrado

Alternative Titles

Ange, O Anjo

comedy romance drama

91 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 6

The only difference between a count and a courtesan is a name - and even those can lie in Ernst Lubitsch’s “Angel.”
Marlene Dietrich, among the slew of acting icons labeled ‘box office poison’ in the wave of puritanical prudishness sweeping 1930s America, softened her edges to play a romantic lead in “Angel.”
The gesture was too little and too late. “Angel” was a box office flop, and the film would be her last big budget role for Paramount.
“Angel” is, at least, a heavenly fall from Hollywood grace.
Dietrich translates her cabaret charisma elegantly into Lubitsch’s court of comedic manners. Gone are the gowns of her Sternberg days that teetered between glamor and garishness. Instead, Dietrich brings her worldly…
Review by M_Penalosa ★★★★★ 4

Lubitsch's most melancholic work, where he portends an approaching European war by, for the first time, not filming his character's words but the empty spaces between those words.
Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½

A suspension of reason. Dietrich-Marshall-Douglas are the most uncivilized of civilized love triangles or the other way around. So much just hanging there between the three of them, quiet devasting.
Review by amanda ★★★★½ 2

the silence of this film, the quiet suffering, the unspoken feelings really hurt me. ernst lubitsch is now one of my favorite directors
Review by Graham L. Carter

Lubitsch, a master of sound since its beginning, understood how devastating silence can be.
Review by Tony (tectactoe) ★★★★★ 1

[95]
The next time someone asks what exactly “the Lubitsch touch” is, show them the scene where Anthony is courting Angel in the park. Immediately after Angel gets up to leave under the pretense (in her mind, anyway) that these two shall never again meet, Anthony darts off to buy a bouquet of flowers from an old lady nearby in the obvious hopes that his gesture will act as an ellipsis of their larval relationship. What's so fascinating about this scene is how differently it would transpire had literally any other director been handed the material. Lubtisch fixes his camera not to the loving couple but to the flower peddler, capturing the withered woman’s every glance and facial expression, watching…
Review by daniwiller87 ★★★★½ 4

A neglected wife finds comfort in a lover. This will turn out to be an old friend of the husband.
"Angel" deals with loneliness and seems to legitimize the act of betrayal that goes with it, as if her husband's dedication to work is a fault that deserves it.
Dietrich, impalpable and elusive, with a mysterious past (brothel?), becomes the archetype of the complex female universe, where the feelings she has are not even so explicit and significant.
I was delighted by how everything is treated with intelligence and delicacy, not to mention the underlying elegance, on the weight that a man gives to love - seconds or years - or on how a woman manages to overturn a situation…
Review by vincent price was 6′4″ ★★★½

This didn’t feel like a Lubitsch film at first. There was an awkwardness to its pacing, but soon the film settled into a very slow and serene rhythm, and I was so impressed by the quietness of the dialogue and the performances. Having said that though, the love triangle should have had only one viable and obvious solution. Marlene Dietrich had great chemistry with Herbert Marshall... and Herbert Marshall had great chemistry with Melvyn Douglas... and Melvyn Douglas had great chemistry with Marlene Dietrich....... all I'm saying is that I think I may need to update my "old hollywood movies where all the characters’ problems could be solved with a threesome, perhaps" list 🤔
Review by Jacob ★★★★★

-"Isn't that the one where the husband suspects his wife of... singing with another man?"
-"And catches them! Right in the middle of a beautiful duet."
-"He kills him, doesn't he?"
-"Well, not immediately, no sir. First, he joins them in the most exquisite trio."
Review by trolleyfreak ★★★★★

Excerpts from an interview Billy Wilder gave to writer Adrian Turner in 1979:
"'The Lubitsch touch' is the most difficult thing in the world to define... It's just like asking what made Garbo Garbo or Marilyn Monroe Marilyn Monroe. It wasn't schooling, nor was it years at, let's say, the Swedish Academy. It was the element 'x'. If we knew that we could sell it to manufacturers.
"'The Lubitsch touch' was just elegance of mind, the original way he had of attacking a scene, or a moment, or a dialogue twist. I think the secret was that he involved audiences by giving them some hints so that they became his co-conspirators... in other words he never spelt out 2 +…
Review by Augie

Lubitsch never fails to make me misty-eyed. There is a moment early on when the camera focuses on a flower vendor for an extended period of time; we hear a heartbreaking romantic separation take place, but we don't see it, instead we see the vendor's reaction, and then we see her pick up the flower that has been left behind. This was the first of many moments to make me tear up. Another is when Marlene plays the piano, one of my favorite things in all of movies is watching Marlene play the piano.
Review by kit ★★★★ 1

refusals:
—flower woman staring then dusting off discarded violets
—roving binoculars catching angel's stunned reaction to something unseen
—the back of a framed photograph then a cut before tony reaches it
—servants inspecting plates from the dinner in another room
—a black telephone idling on the table overhearing plaintive piano
—camera resting on their backs as they walk out the door together

Recent reviews

Review by CADR ★★★★★

What’s in a name? So much is said between the lines, the quiet is so loud, the Lubitsch touch of gold, the camera a weapon and the misdirections abound. It’s the parallax view of love, a question of melancholy and semantics. A case of complacency versus contentment. To Mr. Halton, 1 hour spent with her is too short, but to Mr. Barker, 1 hour means 60 long minutes. But those 60 minutes could also mean — as Mr. Halton points out — 3,600 precious seconds. To count the time or make the time count. What a movie.
Review by Ryan Fischer ★★★★

Though the resolution is more-or-less foreordained, there's still a lot of tension in this love triangle, and it is pretty satisfying how the weight of the final decision shifts in the end.
Review by matnol9 ★★★★

A Paramount worldly-wise romance drama has Marlene Dietrich as a unhappy wife of a burdensome British statesman Herbert Marshall, who surreptitiously travels to Paris to a discreet ‘salon’ and meets a lusty gentleman Melvyn Douglas who becomes enamored by her beauty as she flirtatiously plays along incognito.
This is a rewatch and I now realize and appreciate the sophisticated direction of the camerawork with the sharp observations, along with the subtle dialogue and humor...Marlene was uniquely gifted with expressive eyes...Marshall always immensely enhances any film...Melvyn is great at inquisitive characters...Edward Everett Horton and Ernest Cossart adding dry humor as the valet and butler.
Review by orso🍁 ★★★

Dietrich <3
Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 6

The only difference between a count and a courtesan is a name - and even those can lie in Ernst Lubitsch’s “Angel.”
Marlene Dietrich, among the slew of acting icons labeled ‘box office poison’ in the wave of puritanical prudishness sweeping 1930s America, softened her edges to play a romantic lead in “Angel.”
The gesture was too little and too late. “Angel” was a box office flop, and the film would be her last big budget role for Paramount.
“Angel” is, at least, a heavenly fall from Hollywood grace.
Dietrich translates her cabaret charisma elegantly into Lubitsch’s court of comedic manners. Gone are the gowns of her Sternberg days that teetered between glamor and garishness. Instead, Dietrich brings her worldly…
Review by Connor Denney ★★★★

Ernst Lubitsch was one of cinema's great manipulators of power dynamics, and Angel is one of the best examples of this strength. Maria and Tony's playful hedonism in the first part of the film, his desire for stability never taken seriously, gives way to a tenser show of canniness when his knowledge can damage her life and happiness. Sir Frederick, who spends most of the film in the dark, finds nobility in emasculation as the film approaches its conclusion. It's an impressively well-constructed work that spins its love triangle around multiple times in order to better articulate the unique passions and weaknesses of each of its protagonists.
Review by DoranMartell ★★★★½

8,5/10
Hay elementos claramente cómicos y el tono de fina ironía de la película hacen que esta pueda catalogarse como comedia, pero me ha parecido un drama de los buenos. Y es que lo de Lubitsch aquí vuelve a ser de escándalo. Qué manera de sugerir, qué manera de narrar en imágenes. Una cosa tremenda.
Review by daniwiller87 ★★★★½ 4

A neglected wife finds comfort in a lover. This will turn out to be an old friend of the husband.
"Angel" deals with loneliness and seems to legitimize the act of betrayal that goes with it, as if her husband's dedication to work is a fault that deserves it.
Dietrich, impalpable and elusive, with a mysterious past (brothel?), becomes the archetype of the complex female universe, where the feelings she has are not even so explicit and significant.
I was delighted by how everything is treated with intelligence and delicacy, not to mention the underlying elegance, on the weight that a man gives to love - seconds or years - or on how a woman manages to overturn a situation…
Review by Lars Johnson ★★★★

Having seen now nearly a score of his films, I feel like I’m starting to catch onto one of the sneaky patterns of Ernst Lubitsch’s film style: a penchant for incredibly confusing opening sequences. The first time I saw Trouble in Paradise, the opening flirtation scene left my head spinning—Baron? Countess? Who are these people?! I thought this was about thieves?—and To Be Or Not To Be starts with Hitler affably walking the streets of occupied Poland—uh, what?? who? an actor??

Angel follows this trend, with Marlene Dietrich in Paris, giving fake names at hotel desks and generally acting shady. It isn’t until well into the second act of the film that we get solid context for her character’s actions, and…
Review by babadook ★★★½

Expectations must be adjusted prior to viewing: this is not a comedy; Lubitsch and his screenwriters are said to have even toned down much of the humor in the play. But the Touch is still very much there, albeit on a different, more sober, register. The result is gentle and melancholic - its unexpected profundity reminds me of Ophüls.
(It is said that Dietrich was proud of the "box-office poison" label she earned following this film's poor reception and once engaged in a debate with Katharine Hepburn during a train ride on who could act in more box-office bombs. As if I couldn't love her more.)
Review by Karina Solórzano ★★★★★

Angel, al igual que Trouble in Paradise (1932) muestra un Lubitsch con la maestría total para construir un triángulo romántico con intriga. Si Trouble in Paradise anticipa la idea del macguffin que desarrollará Hitchcock, Angel juega con la identidad de su protagonista: el misterio del cabello de Marlene Dietrich –castaño o rubio– antes de Kim Novak.
Dietrich se integra a esa fantasía europea en la que habitan condesas y ladrones, ella junto con Maurice Chevalier imprimen cierto exotismo y erotismo a sus personajes. El director toma el mito existente en torno a la personalidad de Dietrich para construir su personaje, en la película el amante la llama Ángel y ese nombre remite a El ángel azul (1930), la que la…
Review by orinow ★★★½

"czegóż można spodziewać się po Francuzach", albo "o ile pokój przetrwa jeszcze ze trzy tygodnie", czyli drętwy romans w Paryżu, motorem do pokazania fatalnej kondycji Europy, blada satyra niemal na granicy bezsilnego hejtu, sophisticated comedy...
The story describes a love triangle initiated by Lady Maria Barker (Dietrich), the comfortable but neglected wife of Sir Frederich Barker (Marshall), a top-level British diplomat in the pre-World-War-II era.
Although Frederick provides well for Maria and appears to love her, he has been neglecting her in favor of pursuing his busy diplomatic career. One day when he is in Geneva on important business, she secretly flies to Paris to visit the Russian Grand Duchess Anna, who operates a high-class escort business. By chance, Maria…