"Actor: Hans Albers"

• THE BLUE ANGEL | Blu Ray | (28/01/2013) from £13.35   |  Saving you £6.64 (49.74%)   |  RRP £19.99

  The Blue Angel is one of the first German language sound films (filmed simultaneously in an English-language version), and the picture that represents the initial collaboration between Josef von Sternberg and his immortal muse, Marlene Dietrich. Following up his role in Sternberg's great silent The Last Command, Emil Jannings portrays a schoolteacher named Immanuel Rath, whose fateful expedition to catch his students frequenting the cabaret known as The Blue Angel leads to his own rapture with the establishment's main attraction Lola (Dietrich) - and, as a result, triggers the downward spiral of his life and fortune. Directed by Sternberg while on loan from America to the pioneering German producer Erich Pommer, The Blue Angel is at once captivating, devastating, and powerfully erotic, laced-through with Sternberg's masterful cinematography. From here, the director and Dietrich would go on to make six more films together in the span of five years, and leave a legacy of some of the most indelible iconography in the cinema of glamour and obsession. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present The Blue Angel in a new Dual Format presentation that incorporates both versions of the film in 1080p HD for the first time in the UK. Special Features: 1080p HD Presentation of both the German-language and English-language versions of the film, with progressive encodes on the DVD Newly translated optional subtitles on the German-language version, and SDH on the English-language version New and exclusive video essay on the films by critic and scholar Tag Gallagher New and exclusive feature-length audio commentary by critic and scholar Tony Rayns on the German-langauage version Original screen test with Marlene Dietrich Archival interview clips with Marlene Dietrich Substantial booklet containing writing on the film, vintage excerpts, and rare archival imagery

• Hitlers Hollywood Dual Format (Blu-ray & DVD) edition | Blu Ray | (05/11/2018) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £N/A

  Eureka Entertainment to release HITLER'S HOLLYWOOD, the story of one of the most important and most dramatic periods in the history of German cinema, in a Dual Format edition (which also includes the 2014 documentary From Caligari to Hitler) on 5 November 2018. Nazi-cinema was a state-controlled industry, subject to rigid political and cultural censorship. At the same time, it aspired to be Great Cinema; it viewed itself as an ideological and aesthetic alternative to Hollywood. A German dream factory. Rüdiger Suchsland's Hitler's Hollywood takes a closer look at the roughly 1000 feature films made in Germany between 1933-1945, examining how stereotypes of the enemy and values of love and hate managed to be planted, into the heads of the German people, through the cinema screens. Features: Option of the original German language version with optional English subtitles OR with English language narration by Udo Kier From Caligari to Hitler: German Cinema in the Age of the Masses Director Rüdiger Suchsland's 2014 documentary on the social and cultural impact of German Cinema during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933)

• Munchhausen | DVD | (18/08/2003) from £8.98   |  Saving you £13.00 (185.98%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Enjoying the dubious billing of being the Third Reich's "finest fictional moment", Münchhausen lives up to the hype. Commissioned by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to mark the 25th anniversary of the UFA film studio in 1943, director Josef von Baky was given every incentive artistic, technical and financial to create a state-of-the-art film outflanking Hollywood--and, in most respects, he succeeded. Hans Albers is understatedly right as the buccaneer aristocrat, his adventures over the centuries made possible by preternatural longevity. Hermann Speelmans gives sterling support as loyal manservant Kuchenreutter, while Brigitte Horney has appealing decadence as Catherine the Great. The spectacular Venice canal sequence and whimsical moon episode are balanced by strong scriptwriting from "Berthold Bürger" (Erich Kästner of Emil and the Detectives fame), with Georg Haentzschel's lushly eclectic score scarcely inferior to those by his more famous Hollywood counterparts. A tendency to send-up non-German nationalities hints at Nazi ideology, but otherwise this is pure--though never soulless--escapism, produced to the highest artistic standards. On the DVD: Münchhausen on disc is presented in a restored print which recaptures the original's breathtaking interplay of colour, and the soundtrack has been very adequately cleaned up. Just eight access points and subtitles in English only, but a photo gallery of over 100 stills and memorabilia to chart the course of the film in detail. R Dixon Smith's insightful documentary feature gives the lowdown on why the film was made. All the more remarkable, then, that it's survived the vicissitudes of its era so handsomely. --Richard Whitehouse

• The Blue Angel - - Two Disc Special Edition | DVD | (23/09/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel is a crowning achievement of Weimar cinema an exquisite parable of one man's fall from respectability. Emil Jannings the quintessential German Expressionist actor stars as Professor Immanuel Rath the sexually repressed instructor of a boys prep school. After learning of the pupils' infatuation with French postcards depicting a local nightclub songstress he decides to personally investigate the source of such indecency. However as soon

• Classics of German Cinema | DVD | (21/05/2007) from £73.71   |  Saving you £-28.72 (N/A%)   |  RRP £44.99

  Perhaps no period of any national cinema extends its influence so powerfully into the present day of movies as that of the German cinema of the Weimar era. From the fraught angles that accompanied magisterial set-design to the dreamlike interplay of light and shadow German films of the pre-WWII era defined the famed ""expressionistic"" visual style even as they tested the boundaries of social and sexual taboos. This collection contains five films. Four are classic films emblematic of the legendary Weimar period and one is an historical curiosity commissioned under the Nazi regime. Paul Wegener's and Carl Boese's 1920 film Der Golem represents the second (and the only fully surviving) film treatment by Wegener of the Yiddish folktale based around a towering clay monster created by magic corrupted by evil and redeemed ultimately by the force of the human soul. From the same year comes Robert Wiene's nightmarish classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - a story of mesmerism sleepwalking and murder - a demented dreamscape that perhaps single-handedly galvanized the Expressionist movement of silent cinema. Nine years on Joe May's Asphalt opens a door to the sordid carnality lurking inside the Weimar heart of darkness - and gives audiences the gift of Betty Amann the greatest ""siren unsung"" of the early silver-screen. No lack of recognition would beset the besotted lead of Josef von Sternberg's 1930 masterpiece The Blue Angel - presented here in both its German- and English-language versions. Simply put this tale of a mild-mannered professor (Emil Jannings) sucked into the world of a licentious cabaret artiste introduced the public to an immortal: her name written among the stars would read ""Marlene Dietrich"". By 1943 a new era had dawned one in which Joseph Goebbels called the shots and it was Josef von Bky's Mnchhausen that epitomized the ""new German epic"" - a state-sanctioned Agfacolor melange of the picaresque and Aryan myth that nevertheless served to inspire Terry Gilliam's more benign modern fantasia The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Myth sex magick and the ""tall-tale"": Classics of German Cinema: 1920-1943 presents the viewer with a selection of masterpieces that tower not only over the awesome first phase of German movies but over the origins of world cinema as a whole. 1. Der Golem 2. Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari 3. Asphalt 4. The Blue Angel 5. Munchhausen

• The Blue Angel | DVD | (17/09/2001) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Two things make it impossible to consign Josef von Sternberg's seedily atmospheric 1930 masterpiece The Blue Angel to the archives of museum land: it was the first film to put Marlene Dietrich in front of an international audience; and it features a towering performance from Emil Jannings as the professor whose fall from grace is precipitated by his obsession with Dietrich's archly vampish showgirl Lola-Lola. On both counts The Blue Angel remains a potent, vibrant work which still has moments of real relevance. Dietrich's performance is indeed hypnotic: von Sternberg lights her face and exposed flesh--shoulders and thighs--in a way that clearly indicates the erotic charge she generates among the men in the Blue Angel night club, and in Jennings in particular. Before our eyes his repressed, puritanical self-will disintegrates and his fate is sealed. The pivotal moment is, of course, when Dietrich teases her audience with "Falling in Love Again", her stockinged and suspendered legs astride a beer barrel, a top hat rakishly on her head. It would become the signature tune of her cabaret act in later years but here she delivers it with a far less studied, throwaway cheeriness; how, indeed, can it be her fault if men cluster around her like moths around a flame? This is the raw material on which an icon was built, but there is much else to fascinate in the film itself: you can still smell the pungent grim reality of a trouper's life on the road; and the professor's pathetic efforts to control his class of unruly boys still resonates today... this is an essential piece of film history. On the DVD: The Blue Angel is presented in its German and English-language versions, both restored and digitally remastered. As far as the sound quality is concerned this is of limited benefit since there is a great deal of distortion on both versions. But thanks to the picture restoration we can see how von Sternberg treats Dietrich: her face becomes a radiant, mocking pool of light always in contrast with the dark, grainy characters around her. The English version (in truth, only the Dietrich/Jannings scenes were shot in each language) is slightly pruned, missing a key scene in which the professor's repressed sensitivity is established at the very beginning. So despite some erratic sub-titling, the German version remains definitive. And it also reveals the worldliness of the original lyrics to Friedrich Hollander's classic songs: "I Was Made for Love from Head to Toe" suggests a rather more robust attitude than the vague whimsy of "Falling in Love Again." A final thought: releasing films of this importance on DVD surely creates an opportunity to put them in context by including documentary and factual resources, but this release has no extras of any kind. At the very least it cries out for an authoritative commentary. --Piers Ford

• Asphalt | DVD | (12/04/2005) from £28.00   |  Saving you £-8.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A well-dressed lady thief (Betty Amann) steals a precious stone from a jewellery shop. The aged jeweller prefers to let the young woman go but the policeman who catches her explains he is obliged to pursue the case further. She tries to seduce the policeman (Gustav Frohlich) and he gradually succumbs to her charms but her criminal background dooms their relationship when an argument leads to murder... One of the last great German Expressionist films of the silent era Joe May's 'A

• The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes | DVD | (29/10/2012) from £16.18   |  Saving you £-3.19 (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Hans Albers and Heinz Rhmann play two confidence tricksters. They manage to stop a night train for nefarious purposes, and impersonate Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Romantic involvement with two young British female travellers ensues, but the plot deepens into the disappearance of rare Mauritius postage stamps which they undertake to recover, in their role as Holmes and Watson.

• The Blue Angel | DVD | (13/10/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  For director Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich it all began with The Blue Angel, one of the masterpieces of Germany's Weimar cinema. This landmark film thrust the sultry and unrestrained Dietrich on an unsuspecting international film audience. She plays the prototypical role of Lola, the singer who tempts repressed professor Emil Jannings (the king of expressionist actors) into complete submission night after night at the Blue Angel night-club. The film perfectly captures the masochism and degradation of the Weimar Republic, just before the rise of Adolf Hitler. And yet the moral confusion exhibited by Jannings is really due to his own torment. Dietrich is merely an instrument of his innermost desires, standing on stage in top hat, stockings and bare thighs singing "Falling in Love Again". --Bill Desowitz, Amazon.com

• Blue Angel | DVD | (24/05/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99