Morocco is a milestone in the history of LGBTQ+ representation in film. As in Der blaue Engel, Marlene Dietrich plays a nightclub singer. In a key scene, she wears a tuxedo and top hat and strolls through the club singing. She briefly flirts with a woman in the audience, grabs her under the chin and kisses her on the lips. It is the first lesbian kiss by a leading actress in a Hollywood film. Director von Sternberg had seen Dietrich in male drag at a Berlin revue and found her androgynous charisma particularly seductive. She also turned women’s heads with her salacious lesbian songs. Von Sternberg staged this challenging moment of lasciviousness for her first Hollywood appearance – the idea for the provocative kiss probably came from Dietrich herself.
She plays Amy Jolly, a woman caught between two men: the rich La Bessière (Adolphe Menjou), who wants to marry her, and the Foreign Legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper). In the end, Amy decides in favour of love – with far-reaching consequences. Sternberg evokes an atmosphere of great passion and emotion in the film. It is based on the novel Amy Jolly, the Woman from Marrakech by Benno Vigny, which Dietrich recommended to her director. The real Amy Jolly, who ran a brothel in Marrakech, later sought contact with the actress, as an exchange of letters in her estate proves. Most of the film was shot in the studio and in the Los Angeles area, but some exterior shots were taken in Guadeloupe. The film earned Dietrich her first Oscar nomination and was nominated in a total of four categories. The press particularly praised the intensity of the visual language and Lee Garmes’s outstanding camerawork. Dietrich’s performance was celebrated as an event, as was her extraordinary personality, which oscillates between dominance and submission. Her performance is always an expression of self-determination and sovereignty, enhanced by a touch of irony.

Kristina Jaspers