Destry Rides Again: Riding High

According to Dietrich biographer Steven Bach, by the time the star arrived, only forty-five pages of script were completed. The eventual writing credits went to Jackson, Henry Myers, and Gertrude Purcell, with no mention of Manning. Jackson complained that Remarque, who’d followed Dietrich to Hollywood, hung around the set “and tried to rewrite things.” And years later, George Beck would testify to the House Un-AmericanActivities Committee that he’d written part of Destry too. At least the song credits remained clearly established. One of the carrots Pasternak dangled for Dietrich was the prospect of melodies by Frederick Hollander, who’d written “Falling in Love Again” for The Blue Angel; lyrics were contributed by the great Frank Loesser, who’d go on to pen Guys and Dolls. They came up with the raucous “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” and “You’ve Got That Look,” both of which would be key to Dietrich’s performances for the rest of her life.

Directing duties went to George Marshall, a jack-of-all-trades who, in the course of a wildly diverse career, would make westerns, comedies (including Bob Hope vehicles), musicals, the first Dean Martin–Jerry Lewis film (My Friend Irma, 1949), and at least one famed film noir, The Blue Dahlia, from 1946. His ease of temperament and high regard for Dietrich undoubtedly helped when script pages were arriving sometimes mere hours before he called “Action!” The cinematographer was Hal Mohr, who had lensed such singular beauties as Henry King’s State Fair (1933) and William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), and Destry itself deserves more credit for its good looks. In 1939, it was unusual to have a movie begin with an action sequence. This film goes all out with a long, slow track alongside the sidewalks of Bottleneck, where the chief entertainment appears to be drunkenly shooting guns into the air, fistfights, and destruction of property, with a heavy emphasis on the first. (Watch for what’s obviously a prostitute rolling a customer, a Production Code no-no; maybe the Hays Office was too busy reading the credits that Universal had splashed across these scenes of mayhem.)

The two-story Last Chance Saloon set allows for a number of beautiful shots, such as the early high-flying one that glides from the dance floor to the barroom in back, as Kent strolls along the railing above to survey his rotgut kingdom. A crowd of men is arrayed along the length of the bar, lustily swinging into Hollander and Loesser’s “Little Joe, the Wrangler.” We descend from the balcony to the bar as someone throws ice at the head of Loupgerou, the bartender played by Billy Gilbert, yet another great character actor. As he gets a signal from the boss and moves down, we see a gaggle of raucous drunks, but we hear that voice—Dietrich, coming in for the chorus. At last, Frenchy turns around with a wink, one hand rolling a cigarette, and finishes: “Oh, he sure did like his likker, and it would have got his ticker but the sheriff got him quicker—eeeyahooo!”

Everything about this introduction would have been startling to an audience accustomed to Marlene the Goddess: her mop of curls, like Shirley Temple gone very, very bad; her tatty costume; the cigarette rolling, a skill Pasternak insisted on. But it’s that banshee howl at the end of the chorus that truly announces the New Marlene. Who would have expected a glittering Berlin artiste to come up with a saloon-shattering yowl like that?

Prerelease hype is not just a twenty-first-century phenomenon, and even with a Civil War picture called Gone with the Wind sucking up the oxygen, Destry Rides Again got plenty of column inches. By the time the film was released, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was already establishing Stewart as a major star, and the return of what the Motion Picture Herald called “the disastrously oversold Marlene Dietrich” had stirred fan-magazine interest as well. Most anticipated of all was the Dietrich-Merkel brawl, with canny Universal even inviting reporters on set for the filming.

What the press would only hint at was something that seems obvious viewing the film now: Dietrich and Stewart were having a torrid affair. Years later, Maria Riva would write that her mother had an abortion shortly after Destry wrapped, and Peter Bogdanovich has said that Dietrich told him the same thing. Whatever happened, Stewart himself was diplomatic. “After a week’s work on the picture, I fell in love with her,” he said. Lest anyone think that was a confession, his remarks concluded with, “The director, cameraman, cast, and crew felt the same way. We all fell in love with her.”

If so, they weren’t the only ones. The New York Post editorial page lost its cool completely, declaring that “Marlene Dietrich in short skirts, singing . . . on top of a bar, is a greater work of art than the Venus de Milo.” Variety, considerably more subdued but still charmed, called her “the teeterboard from which this picture flips itself from the level of the ordinary western into a class item.” “Very good salesmanship,” as von Sternberg had told her. It was clear that Dietrich was now back to being a class item herself, and that many more goddesses with feet of clay were ahead of her, even if none could make quite the same impact. At the end of Destry Rides Again, Tom Destry is starting to tell a youngster another one of his tales when a wagon rattles by. In the back is a little girl, played by soon-to-be starlet Betta St. John. She’s almost as pretty as Frenchy, with curls like hers, too, lustily leading a chorus of “Little Joe.” Destry’s face goes misty as he remembers. Eighty years later, Frenchy still has that effect on people.