British distributors Eureka Entertainment have officially announced and detailed their upcoming Dual Format edition of Josef von Sternberg's Der blaue Engel a.k.a The Blue Angel (1930), starring Emil Jannings, Marlene Dietrich and Kurt Gerron. The release will be available for purchase on January 28th.
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.
Special Features:
New 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-language version.
Original screen test with Marlene Dietrich.
Archival interview clips with Dietrich.
Substantial booklet containing writing on the film, vintage excerpts, and rare archival imagery.
More features to be announced closer to release date!
Note: Included below are trailers for the original 1930s release of the film and the 1960s re-release.
It'll be interesting to compare this feature list with the Region A Kino release. I'm seeing the word "exclusive" a lot for the UK release... so there may be a decision here.
I hope that the technical presentation will be fine (I do not really have doubts considering the average quality for Eureka releases) because this UK release seems far better than the US one (the 2 versions of the film, bonus features that were on the US DVD but are absent from the BD...)
If the PQ and AQ will be as good as the Kino BD personally I do not see any reason to prefer the US one even if you live in the US (if you have a multiregion player of course)
Kino has yet to match or exceed a MoC release in my opinion. MoC and Criterion are still the gold-standard for releases. I do like Kino's Battleship Potempkin/Strike release which may be better than BFI's.
Hm... this edition looks interesting. Never seen this movie before and I'm coming from the german speaking part. Very rare shown movie on TV in the german speaking part. German speaking people have a strange relation to german movies.
Well.. will be interesting to get this blu-ray which contains english and original german track + audio-commentary.
