Strictly average movie

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Well now this is just very silly. As others have pointed out, Victor McLaglen acts his best but is fatally miscast - too rigid, charmless, snide and creepy in a role that is crying out for a Clark Gable or Cary Grant. On the other hand Dietrich was never more beautiful, and you can feel Sternberg's worshipping of her through the camera lens. The photography is luscious and the BluRay restoration a joy. Warner Oland has a small role as something other than Charlie Chan, which is very odd to see.The story, dialogue and characters are thoroughly unbelievable at every turn, and the whole thing, really, is just a delirious but delightful mess, a stilted, fevered, nonsensical fairytale dream about spies, but no less likeable for all that. Accept it and love it for what it is, because it isn't like anything else.

This was made as a response to Greta Garbo's Mata Hari from the previous year about the exotic dancer turned WWI spy. Dietrich's film is also about a woman turned spy, it involves deceit and sexual danger, a woman acting, an intoxicating performance, all these things that Dietrich naturally breathed by simply being herself; but it also had what the other film didn't, von Sternberg directing, here in the space that would later come to characterize the best of Hitchcock.We know that it was Sternberg who seduced the persona of the femme fatale out of Dietrich, later claiming he had discovered her. Seduced what he wanted to be seduced by, no doubt. So it is only natural that we should expect an excellent film here, about Dietrich seducing an audience of eager men. The effort is not for realism, never was with these two. It was always about staging the circumstances that would enable us to dream this woman. It was so in Der Blaue Engel. So it makes a lot of sense that the actual films would exude the scent of movie fantasy, for example here the pure gaudiness of the ball masque with seduction behind masks, or that Dietrich would be allowed a piano in a wartime prison cell. She is playing for us of course, because she and Sternberg knew we wanted to see.Why this isn't then up to par compared to earlier Sternberg, has a lot to do I think with the film lacking a more carefully woven self-reference; what made The Last Command such a breathtaking venture in the space between staged image and tortured heart. There is some that I find tantalizing, namely two consecutive scenes in the end where Dietrich bares her soul from behind long eye-lashes before a military court and soon after before a firing squad. Two audiences where every member would rather hold her in his arms than do what he has to do.The rest is too overt. The message against war is noble but trite, a forced humanism that is not among the rest of the film's agenda. And Victor McLaglen gives one of the weirdest performances I've seen, a leering that borders on perverse. It was originally intended for Gary Cooper, but it's perhaps better that we have it as it is; it adds to the feverish sexual brew.Still, this being Sternberg's temple of worship, we get to dream about this woman. She only concedes to touch the world by playing the piano, this is proper I think. We get to fall madly in love, an instrument at her fingers, herself an instrument for music and the fates.

Dishonoured is an under-appreciated masterpiece. Frequently omitted from lists of collaborations between Dietrich and Von Sternberg, the film is absolutely essential to an understanding of the director's artistic technique and the actor's evolution into her status as an icon for every subsequent femme fatale. Von Sternberg applies a rich sequence of layers of style and character that embellish Dietrich's icily stunning allure as an intelligent woman engaged in a deadly quest for more temporal power in the form of top secret military intelligence and empowerment over the men she manipulates. Along the way, his penetrating interpretation of social conventions depicts a chiaroscuro of surrealistic fantasy in contrast with the gritty reality of doom that engulfs his heroine who is ultimately transformed into a martyr to her own - and universal - femininity.

After THE BLUE ANGEL and MOROCCO, DISHONORED was a bit of a come down for me, in my opinion it is the one film that Dietrich made with Joseph Von-Sternberg that has the least meaning, Publicity hyped it up because it was released at the same time as MGMs MATA HARI with Greta Garbo, unfortunately for Dietrich she was no match for Garbo and MATA HARI wins hands down. DISHONORED is slow, Dietrichs costumes are awful and sloppy and her acting is at its worst, even Von-Sternbergs famous lighting and Visual brilliance is not there, i am highly surprised that it was a hit at all.