I’ve never really been able to quite put a finger on what makes Marlene Dietrich so great...though in Blonde Venus and Touch of Evil; and especially The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman, I can at least see that its there, and in those films there's not a moment where she's less than marvelous. Whatever it is that makes Dietrich such a fascinating star, isn’t really present in this film...nor, considering its director, is the craftsmanship that made Rene Clair’s films of the early 30s (in addition to later films, including some Hollywood films I understand) so vibrant. Both fantastic names, yet they really seem to be doing very little in this one, except for going through the motions.
The Flame of New Orleans does posess a tiny handful of charms, the first of which is its fourth-wall breaking intro. But even that scene’s charms, in themselves, promise little more than a shallow and droll romantic comedy with a drop of fancy, and what’s what we get. Set in Louisianna, the film’s most commendable features are its production designs, and at times the film is actually kind of pleasant to look at, and reflect the scenery of New Orleans a good deal. Everything else is, at best, merely competent, and Andy Devine gets far too little screen time, which is unfortunate as he’s always one of the best things about any film he has a strong presence in. He’s just background, here, like most everything else in the film.
The film's story is pretty much stock romantic drama: a gold digging woman manages to ensnare a very wealthy man, but she is quickly tangled up with feelings for another man; a sailor, and throughout the film she tries to throw the latter off for the former, but she inevitably winds up with her sailor boy in the end. Its quite uninspired all the way through, though worse love stories have certainly tainted the films of Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Bros, and there is little real chemistry between Dietrich's character and any of the other characters. This isn’t just the case of a film being ‘not for me’, its just a rather plain and flat film barely disguised by the presence of talents. My score - 60
Available as part of Universal’s Marlene Dietrich Glamour Collection, the final film on the double sided first disc and penultimate film in the whole set, and it possesses a rather luminous transfer. I think I'm going to take a little break from her and Bela Lugosi, and finish up the last films of these sets at a later date.
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