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Critics Consensus: Complex, visually stunning, and breathtakingly intense, The Scarlet Empress overpowers its flaws with a confident vigor befitting its legendary subject.
Critic Consensus: Complex, visually stunning, and breathtakingly intense, The Scarlet Empress overpowers its flaws with a confident vigor befitting its legendary subject.
All Critics (21) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (19) | Rotten (2) | DVD (3)
Josef von Sternberg's 1934 film turns the legend of Catherine the Great into a study of sexuality sadistically repressed and reborn as politics, thus anticipating Bertolucci by three decades.
A tedious hyperbole in which Director Josef von Sternberg achieved the improbable feat of burying Marlene Dietrich in a welter of plaster-of-paris gargoyles and galloping cossacks.
Josef von Sternberg becomes so enamoured of the pomp and flash values that he subjugates everything else to them. That he succeeds as well as he does is a tribute to his artistic genius and his amazingly vital sense of photogenic values.
Running a solid hundred minutes, the film first shocks and stimulates the imagination, and then, lacking the dramatic skill to refresh its audiences, becomes steadily duller.
The decor and costumes, and the mise-en-scéne that deploys them, have never been equaled for expressionist intensity.
The film tells the story of Catherine the Great as a bizarre visual extravaganza, combining twisted sexuality and bold bawdy humor as if Mel Brooks had collaborated with the Marquis de Sade.
How best to describe The Scarlet Empress? Delirious? Demented? Diabolical? This historical epic is perhaps the best of the Dietrich-von Sternberg collaborations, so naturally it was a commercial disaster.
They don't get much better than this.
Not the most successful of Dietrich and von Sternburg's collaborations but interesting nonetheless.
Overstuffed with indulgent, idiosyncratic performances using every accent from Budapest to Brooklyn, the film is like a flower so strange and so beautiful it could only have germinated in the hothouse environment of a major Hollywood studio.
Von Sternberg's most realized film that combines a brilliant spectacle of royal pomp and mise-en-scene with Harpo Marx-like silent comedy.
It's a complex, poetic, fantastical, and truly great movie.
As opulent and decadent as can be imagined, Von Sternberg's vision of early court life is suffused in shadows and grotesqueries unlike most films of this sort, bringing to mind the axiom of absolute power corrupting absolutely. The story's not so good, but the imagery will stay with you.
Super Reviewer
what a spectacle this is. the sets are just outrageous. could've used a better script perhaps but definitely worth watching for the fantastic art direction alone. and then there's dietrich...
This was a good historical drama, I didn't know much about Catherine before, but this movie didn't tell me everything I wanted to know. It only covers her youth and the time she marries into the Russian royalty, but we don't get to see how she handles the country as the new empress. It was slightly better than I expected, but it let me down in the end.
A film I've wanted to see for ages and, while it was worth seeing, didn't quite hold up to my expectations. Don't know how historically accurate it is, and I guess that doesn't really matter. I did think it was kinda funny that the last scene was of Catherine with her horse inside the castle, hinting at the urban legend of how she died (not going to go into that...look it up). I can say that Dietrich was breathtaking as Catherine. But also worth watching was Sam Jaffe as the mentally off King. The film is definitely a feast for the eyes. All in all, a good but not great film.
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