The Blue Angel

The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) is a German musical comedy-drama film released in 1930 and directed by Josef von Sternberg, with Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings and Kurt Gerron in the leading roles. The screenplay by Carl Zuckmayer, Karl Vollmöller and Robert Liebmann, with uncredited contributions from Sternberg, adapts Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat and is set in an unnamed northern German port city. It follows a respectable schoolteacher who becomes infatuated with a cabaret singer, is drawn into her world, and ends as a cabaret clown on the edge of madness. The film made Dietrich internationally famous and introduced her signature song, Falling in Love Again (Can't Help It), by Friedrich Hollaender and Robert Liebmann. It was shot at the same time in German and English versions; the English version was long thought lost until a print found in a German film archive was restored and screened in San Francisco in January 2009. The German version is generally judged the better one, and the film is counted a classic of German cinema.