“Few people in or out of the film industry found it easy to believe producer Joshua Sinclair when he announced to the press, late in 1977, that Marlene Dietrich was about to break her retirement and self-imposed isolation within her Paris apartment. She had, Sinclair continued, agreed to appear on screen in her first speaking role in eighteen years, in the German-English film Just a Gigolo, with rock star David Bowie. Lonely for precisely the human contact she paradoxically but insistently rejected, she also found irresistible a salary of $250,000 for two half-days of work in a Paris studio, where the sets for her scene were transported from Berlin … On a bitterly cold morning in February 1978, she arrived on time for work, “her jaw set and her shoulders hunched with determination”, as an eye witness recalled … next morning, Dietrich returned for the more difficult second task – to sing the film’s title song, which was to be heard near the end of the picture … far from offering the perfunctory delivery of a song she disliked, Marlene Dietrich sang with heart-rending simplicity. Nothing she had done on stage or screen over a period of sixty years could have prepared witnesses that day (or viewers of Just a Gigolo since then) for her astonishing rendition of this simple confessional song. On the words “youth will pass away”, there may be heard a tremor of sadness in her voice that was without precedent in any prior recording or theatrical appearance … And when she came to “life goes on”, the voice became plangent, almost a whisper as she managed, to poignant effect, an octave. In only one take, the scene and the song were captured forever. There was a moment of reverential silence round her and then the bystanders broke into applause.”
/ From Dietrich (1992) by Donald Spoto /
Released in West German cinemas on this day (16 November 1978): the film Just a Gigolo, mainly notable for the final screen appearance by a heavily veiled 77-year-old Marlene Dietrich.