the French director René Clair said of Marlene Dietrich’s role in The Flame of New Orleans, his first American film. “But she understood this. I didn’t do it against her will. When Norman Krasna and I wrote the script, we intended that it be ironic—a romance with a sense of humor. Perhaps that’s what surprised the public: they didn’t know quite how to take it.”Alas, there was little to take. “I’m going back to New Orleans,” said Dietrich as Frenchy toward the end of Destry Rides Again; that was the inspiring cue for Clair, Krasna and producer Joe Pasternak. As an elegant adventuress who courts a rich man, pretends to be her own slatternly cousin and eventually falls in love with a poor sailor, she was The Flame of New Orleans, and the picture was designed to be suffused with those delicate Gallic ironies for which Clair was previously admired (as, for example, in his French films Sous les Toits de Paris and Le Million). But the antic glee and appealing nonsense of Destry or Seven Sinners are absent from this mild confection, which —only on paper—had all the ingredients of a riotous Feydeau farce.Disliking the script (“a flop”), her director (“he wasn’t exactly one of the friendliest men”) and her co-star Bruce Cabot (“an awfully stupid actor”), Dietrich was bored from the first day of production in February 1941.
