Stuffed-shirt professor Emil Jannings doesn’t so much fall in love with Marlene Dietrich here as he does become afflicted with a sweaty, tingling, sleepless case of raw lust. That’s what happens to a chaste man. He has no defense against the draw of a woman whose every leg cross and bat of an eye can cause a scandal. Men of experience have a hard enough time with it. A guy like the professor here, a flabby, sexless bachelor who’s an instructor in one of those old German prep schools that are always depicted in the movies as only slightly less oppressive than Roman slave ships, doesn’t stand a chance. Not against Dietrich, at least. She’s a cabaret singer with the kind of sultry presence that glows in the smokiest room. She performs sentimental love songs in as little clothing as the 1930 screen would allow and she’s clearly no virgin, God bless her. A great thing about this film is that while Dietrich is callous, her treachery is not what sends Professor Jannings spiraling down the drain. She’s not innocent, but Jannings is largely a victim of his own weakness. As in many films made for adults, there is no straight villain here, just a toxic relationship that should never have happened. Great director Josef von Sternberg, a veteran of the silents making an early talkie with his new favorite actress (Dietrich would go on to work with Sternberg in six more celebrated films), gives it to us as a German Expressionist dream in a cruel and sumptuously cinematic nightworld. It’s beautiful, but not pretty. Sternberg is never afraid to bring us down and Emil Jannings lays out the professor’s madness and misery sometimes without saying a single word. In the end, sexual repression doesn’t work. Never has. It only makes people weirder.