by Aengus Kelly

In 1939, Marlene Dietrich’s Hollywood career was in trouble. The ice-queen who had conquered the world as “Shanghai Lil” hadn’t had a hit movie in years. As luck would have it, with war brewing in her native Germany, Dietrich found herself in the right place at the right time. 1939 was a golden year for Hollywood productions: ‘Gone with the wind’, ‘The Wizard of Oz’, ‘Stagecoach’, ‘Mr.Smith goes to Washington’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Goodbye Mr.Chips’, ‘Gunga Din’, ‘Ninotchka’ and of course the musical comedy ‘Destry Rides Again’, all hit the screens in this year. It was ‘Destry Rides Again’ which made a star of Dietrich all over again. The only problem was, ‘Destry’ wasn’t a traditional role for Marlene. There were plenty of songs, plenty of drinks, but her role of ‘Frenchy’ also involved one of the silver screen’s most memorable fights.

‘Destry’ is Dietrich’s movie. Her co-star, Jimmy Stewart, plays the eponymous sheriff who rolls into Bottleneck to clean it up. The town is run by a crooked mayor and a gang of hoodlums. ‘Frenchy’ is a saloon singer and gangster’s moll, who hustles at the poker table with a flutter of her eyelashes. In one scene she wins the Russian Callaghan’s trousers from him, and when Callaghan’s wife turns up to reclaim them, the two women destroy the bar in a rolling and tumbling bar-brawl. When Jimmy Stewart throws a bucket of water over them, Dietrich attacks him instead.

Callaghan claims her husband’s trousers

This movie is all about Pacifism.  It seems quite appropriate that, in 1939, the young American sheriff comes into town, without any guns, to help the ageing, drunk old sheriff ‘Wash’ (the British Empire) overcome the evil bad guy, with the help of the Russian (Callaghan). Even Frenchy (Dietrich), initially a collaborator with the bad guys, is seduced by the idealism of Destry and is instrumental in providing the crucial resistance at the end.

Destry’s introduction to Frenchy

What is apparent throughout the movie is how much fun Dietrich had making it. We meet her first in the bar singing “Little Joe”. Even by the end of the movie, after Frenchy has been shot in the back, sacrificing herself to save Destry, Dietrich’s presence looms large. The epilogue has a group of children remembering her in a chorus of “Little Joe”.

The best line in the movie is: “Women always look their best in the peace and quiet that follows a storm of violence”. We can appreciate this as Dietrich sings “You’ve got that look” and as Destry falls, inevitably, in love with her.

You’ve got that look

What people mostly remember about this movie, apart from the experience of hearing Marlene Dietrich holler “Yee-har” like a cowgirl, is the big musical set piece for the hit-song “See what the boys in the back room will have (and tell them I'm having the same)”. It is Dietrich’s moment to tell us that she is back, bigger and brighter than ever, that she “still serves the best coffee in Bottleneck”.

“When we ran them out of town the breeze from their coat-tails set off a sizeable windmill”