Respected schoolteacher Rath learns of his pupils’ infatuation with postcards depicting a nightclub songstress. To investigate the source of indecency, Rath goes to the Blue Angel nightclub and is fatefully seduced by the smoldering Lola-Lola, triggering the downward spiral of his life and fortune.

With their seven film partnership, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich traced a path of lush, scandalous romantic fantasies, of which The Blue Angel was their first. A masterpiece of relationship masochism, The Last Laugh’s Emil Jannings wilts before Dietrich, in her career-making role.