Dietrich plays a Spanish femme fatale who comes between two friends in
the last of her films with Sternberg. The plot is pure melodrama; it
hasn't aged well and was absurd even then, but that's beside the point.
As in other Sternberg / Dietrich collaborations, the screen is
bursting with the director's outrageous cinematic invention, which
for all its artifice conjures into life the most powerful emotions. The
lavish studio sets owe nothing to historical Spain and everything to a
passionate, impulsive Iberia of the imagination, amid which dances
Dietrich's face: a mask of desire and indifference, cruelty and lust,
shadows and light.
