Film

The Scarlet Empress

Name: The Scarlet Empress
Genre: Drama, History, Romance
Released: 1934
Cast: Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser, C. Aubrey Smith

Period drama

Josef von Sternberg's fever dream of imperial Russia—all baroque excess, Marlene Dietrich in impossible costumes, and fever-bright cinematography that makes every frame feel like a hallucination. It's less interested in historical accuracy than in pure visual seduction and the intoxication of power. For anyone who believes cinema is a fever, not a document.

TMDb rating

3.5

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you care more about a film's look than its plot, and enjoy a camera that treats a palace as a dream of decadence, with jokes delivered deadpan.

Skip it if the story moves in tableaux rather than scenes, so if you want brisk narrative momentum or a historically faithful account of the court, the staging will frustrate you.

What it asks of you: A compact 104 minutes of heightened, mocking artifice, where the mood stays arch and operatic rather than warm, and the satire lands through images more than dialogue.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Ivan the Terrible, Part I1944

Eisenstein's masterpiece of Russian autocracy: visual power, political ambition, and a ruler consumed by paranoia. The compositions are just as baroque and formally daring as Sternberg's, and the moral darkness runs deeper.

But It's a Soviet propaganda film disguised as tragedy, and the second part veers into explicit ideology. Black and white, no love story—purely the machinery of state and madness.

Dangerous Liaisons1988

Period intrigue with the same electricity: gorgeous, mannered, driven by seduction as strategy and power. Meryl Streep and Glenn Close play women who weaponise desire. Wickedly entertaining and perfectly acted.

But The 80s sheen dates it visibly. Once you've seen it, the mechanics of manipulation become obvious—it's clever but not mysterious.

Barry Lyndon1975

Kubrick's 18th-century odyssey, photographed like Rembrandt paintings. A gorgeous, pitiless study of ambition and social climbing through a corrupt world. Hypnotic and formally extraordinary.

But It moves slowly and the protagonist is a mediocrity. Admiring its craft and actually *enjoying* watching it are different things for many people.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from The Scarlet Empress

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Andrei Rublev1966

Both are Russian imperial landscapes rendered as fever dreams—less interested in what happened than in how power looks, feels, and intoxicates. Tarkovsky is the spiritual and formal answer to Sternberg's sensuality.

Tarkovsky's epic meditation on art, faith, and power in medieval Russia. It's visually overwhelming—long takes of extraordinary beauty punctured by violence and wonder. A film that makes you feel time passing.

But It's 215 minutes of deliberate, philosophical cinema. Dialogue is sparse. If you need conventional narrative momentum, you'll feel tortured. Not a film you watch; it's a state you enter.

The Favourite2018

Another sensual power game in 18th-century drag—queer desire, manipulation, and female rivalry at court. Faster, funnier, and messier than *Scarlet Empress*, with Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz igniting the screen.

But It's deliberately anachronistic and absurdist. If you want period authenticity or a straight narrative, the tonal shifts will feel jarring.

The Earrings of Madame de...1953

Max Ophüls' supreme meditation on desire, vanity, and social performance. A jewel box of a film—glittering, intricate, devastatingly sad. The camera moves like it's dancing.

But It's deeply concerned with surfaces and manners rather than emotion. The plot is gossamer-thin. Some find it frigid despite—or because of—its beauty.

Queen of Spades1960

A Russian Gothic fever-dream about obsession and supernatural revenge, set in 19th-century St. Petersburg. Gorgeously shot, genuinely eerie, and captures the paranoid grandeur of imperial Russia better than most histories.

But It's slow-burn atmospherics. If you need plot momentum, you'll feel it dragging. The English dubbing is pretty rough.

Cruel Intentions1999

High school as Versailles: power games, seduction, social hierarchy, and gorgeous people saying terrible things. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe are effortlessly cruel and magnetic.

But It's teen melodrama vamping on *Dangerous Liaisons*. If you're not in the mood for camp sophistication from the 90s, it'll feel silly rather than smart.

Marie Antoinette2006

Sofia Coppola's deliberately frivolous take on the French queen—all champagne, fashion, and alienation. It looks exquisite and captures the loneliness of power through pure style.

But It ignores actual history almost entirely. Some find it empty provocation; others find the studied indifference exhausting.

Black Narcissus1947

Powell and Pressburger's lush, sexually charged tale of nuns in the Himalayas. Technicolor so vivid it seems to steam off the screen. A masterpiece of repressed desire and visual intoxication.

But The pacing is glacial by modern standards. The gender politics and racial attitudes are deeply of their time. Some find it a beautiful, boring art film.

Lola Montès1955

Both prize visual excess and erotic spectacle over historical verisimilitude. Both are about women who use their bodies and wills as instruments of power, told through cinema as seduction rather than documentation.

Max Ophüls' final film, a dizzying, circular portrait of a 19th-century courtesan told in fragmented vignettes. It's a formal miracle—the camera moves in spirals, frames multiply, time collapses. Visual storytelling at its apex.

But It's radically non-linear and self-conscious about its own artificiality. You have to surrender to mood and style over plot. Many find it beautiful and bewildering and never want to watch it again.

A Gentleman's Dignity2012

Both understand that power and seduction are performance, that identity is costume, and that what we want most is never what satisfies us. But where *Scarlet Empress* is visually intoxicating artifice, this is intimate, lived contradiction—the opposite approach to the same truths.

A South Korean drama about aging men grappling with ambition, desire, and the gap between who they wanted to be and who they became. Sharp, funny, genuinely moving—utterly different register, same emotional engine.

But It's a contemporary K-drama with all that entails: melodrama, cosmetic beauty, genre tonal shifts. If foreign TV feels indigestible or you're exhausted by the form, this won't convert you.