Library Elise Sutton

Ms Kathleen's

Screen 18 of 26

Wedding music is played as the two have a reception with all of the other members of the traveling show. The Magician then makes eggs appear from the Professor's nose to the delight of everyone. The eggs cause Lola to begin clucking like a chicken, in turn causing the Professor to swallow his pride as he crows like a rooster.

On the wedding night, the Professor waits like an anxious virgin groom (he many have already slept with her but he was intoxicated and can’t remember) while Lola changes into something sexy behind a curtain. It is notable that Sternberg does not give us any scenes of Rath and Lola making love, none of the sort of erotic acrobatics that show up in later sex-charged films. This is tremendously important, for it is all too suggestively implied in the few shots he shows of the professor fumbling clumsily with the sexually experienced dominant woman that any sex act between them would be callow and crude, totally without pleasure for him. It is sex in its more neurotic form that is the essence of this picture. It is the lust-bloated arrogance of a man who thinks he can impose his domination and his whole stuffy, sterile way of life simply by having a woman go to bed with him.