“Men cluster to me like moths around a flame, and if their wings burn I know I’m not to blame” So sang Marlene Dietrich, one of the screen’s first femme fatales in Josef Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, (1930), one of seven films he made with her.
Twenty three years later he revisited the theme of the lethal siren with his last, and reportedly favourite film, The Saga of Anatahan, based on a true story and charting the sad decline in morals and humanity of twelve Japanese male sailors shipwrecked off the tiny three mile by one mile rocky, jungle-covered island of Anatahan in June 1944 after their ship is sunk by American planes. Continue reading