The Song of Songs

When her father dies, Lily moves in with her severe aunt in the city. By day she works in the aunt's bookshop; by night she slips across the street to model for Richard, a sculptor, and falls in love with him. Richard's patron, Baron von Merzbach, also notices Lily, and his intentions are not as clean as Richard's. Directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this pre-Code production was the first American film Marlene Dietrich made without Josef von Sternberg. Dietrich appears here not as a figure of mystery but as a young woman whose innocence is being used. The film says what it has to say about the body, about desire and about what money can buy without going around the houses; had the Code come in a few months earlier, most of these scenes could not have been shot.