mamalv What a wonderful movie. It captures the blooming relationship between a stuffy military man on the run and a free spirited gypsy totally. Milland is on a mission with a young man to get a formula for a deadly gas from a man in Germany. Along the way they split up, and plan to meet again at a road crossing. In the mean time Milland is running and hiding from the Nazi's when he comes across Dietrich. She makes him up as a gypsy to hide his identity, and they go on their way to his destination. Even though Dietrich is dirty and messy, he becomes closer to her as he sees that she is a unique and wonderful woman. There are many lighthearted moments where Milland tells her to sit on her hands as she is constantly trying to seduce him. The pairing of these two stars is nothing short of magnificent. Milland is absolutely gorgeous and it is not a wonder that Dietrich is having a hard time keeping her hands off him. The war ends and he returns to her to be with her forever.

secondtake Golden Earrings (1947)A tough movie to love, but the best parts of it--or the best part, that is, known as Marlene Dietrich--make it easy to like. The actions scenes, the chitchat, even the opening scenes where men talk with bizarre astonishment a man's pierced ears, are often unconvincing. Even the core plot, looking for a key German scientist before it's too late, stumbles over its own clichés. And even worse, a key weakness is the lead male, the low key and unemphatic Ray Milland.Two years after the end of the war, when this film was made, there must have been a huge appetite for variations on stories about resisting the Nazis. This is a bizarre and highly unlikely one, not because Gypsies weren't involved behind the scenes in the action, but because the idea of a single gypsy woman taking in an Englishman who has to hide, for unexplained reasons, in Germany even though there is no war, is a stretch. (His mission is clear, but why an Englishman has to be undercover isn't historically clear to me.)But this is what we have, and Dietrich, who is German and began her acting in Germany but by this point was long part of Hollywood, plays a very fictional Gypsy. She is used a little like she was in the famous Josef von Sternberg movies, for her "aura," which she had plenty of. Most of the movie follows a series of encounters and difficulties with arrogant Nazis and between themselves. Much of the filming is at night, which is dramatic, and there are scenes of Gypsy camps that are part of a long line in Hollywood films. There is also an interesting followup of sorts from Hitchcock's "Notorious" the previous year, in the use of two key German archetypes, Reinhold Schunzel and Ivan Triesault. This is focusing on the details, which is what you have to do. Or just pull back and see a lovely romance unfold.

richard-1787 Hollywood has made a lot of strange movies over the years, but none stranger than this. WHY this movie got made I will never know, nor how Paramount could have thought it would sell any tickets in 1947. It is the strangest mix of genres I have seen in a long time, a movie that truly does not know whether it is trying to be a serious war drama or a Viennese operetta comedy.It tells the story of a British spy trying to get a poison gas formula out of Germany in the days just before WW II began. Ray Milland, a fine actor, is stuck playing the part like an escapee from Monty Python, all very exaggerated English prep-school dialogue. In Germany he meets a gypsy, Marlene Dietrich, who helps him to travel under cover as, of course, another gypsy. She plays her part like the typical Viennese operetta gypsy caricature, as do the other "gypsies" in the movie. But there are also Nazis, who are not funny at all. And then Milland finds he is starting to think like a gypsy, and that is not treated as a joke. Sometimes the music is for a light comedy, sometimes for a drama. Every time the Nazis show up, the film score plays Wagner, which is funny by itself.This movie could have been a comedy, or it could have taken the plight of the gypsies seriously and done a serious job of showing how the Nazis treated them. Both are hinted at in this movie, but neither pursued. What we are left with is a truly strange mish-mash of genres that must have embarrassed everyone (except the director) involved.Bizarre.

cmyklefty Marlene Dietrich play a Gypsy who helps British spy (Ray Milland) during World War II. They try to stop the Nazis from using poisonous gases for war use. They get romantically involved with each other while there on the mission. A nice entertaining movie to watch.