All this to say, what's it to you?

In Germany, a group of actresses are bathing and frolicking in the water, naked as the day they were born, if perhaps more shapely. A group of hikers arrive and watch. The unofficial leader of the actresses―although really, "showgirls" might be more accurate―tells them to leave. The unofficial leader of the hikers will only do so if she agrees to see him again, on a date. Through the magic of editing it's now several years later. The woman is in America, bathing her young son. The man is her husband.

So begins Blonde Venus, a movie that provokes laughter and awe.

Immediately, all is not well. The man, Ned Faraday (Herbert Marshall), is a research scientist whose studies with chemicals have given him a life-threatening case of Scriptborne Illness of Convenience. He needs an experimental treatment to live. The treatment costs a lot of money. Wife Helen is played by Marlene Dietrich, but you knew that. Helen wants to help her husband, and the only way she can do so is―just go along here―to return to the stage. She auditions at a not entirely un-sleazy nightclub and joins their stage show. But this is a reluctant return to the spotlight, purely for her husband's sake, right?

Ha-ha, so very wrong. Any conception of Helen as a shrinking violet who only wants to bake bread and polish silverware dies when she takes off the gorilla mask in the much-discussed "Hot Voodoo" number and surveys the room. You can tell, this is the kind of thing she lives for. And she's drawn the attention of a shady and two-fisted millionaire played by Cary Grant, attention that she returns. Hubby will not be pleased.

The conceit that director Josef von Sternberg is making some kind of moralizing cautionary tale or socially conscious problem picture lasts about as long as the idea of Helen as Suzy Homemaker. Blonde Venus is camp and absurd. When Helen becomes a fugitive, fleeing both the law and her husband, her "Wanted" poster shows her wearing the ridiculous yellow Afro wig from "Hot Voodoo." A life of poverty, homelessness, and single motherhood only makes her more glamorous. Late in the film she gives away the only money she has and is next scene in a white tux, wowing 'em in Paris.

But because it's not entirely serious, that doesn't make it meaningless. It's thrilling to watch Helen rely on her wits. Her wits and a series of black women, whom she forms bonds of mutual trust with, and whom she'd probably never meet had she stayed in her respectable life.

It's a life she does return to, eventually. The ending seems deliberately ambiguous, though. Have she and her husband rediscovered, through it all, their love for each other? Or is this a classic case of staying together for the kid?

One thing is sure. It's the close of a powerful experience.