Marlene Dietrich wearing a chiffon dress with fur-trimmed capelet, costume design by Travis Banton for the film Desire, 1936.

Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, John Halliday in Desire (Frank Borzage, 1936) Cast: Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, John Halliday, William Frawley, Ernest Cossart, Akim Tamiroff, Alan Mowbray, Zeffie Tilbury. Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Samuel Hoffenstein, based on a play by Hans Székely and Robert A. Stemmle. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Robert Usher. Film editing: William Shea. Costume design: Travis Banton. Music: Friedrich Hollaender. Frank Borzage's Desire was one of the first films Marlene Dietrich made after she and Josef von Sternberg went their separate ways. Though she's still very much in the Sternberg mode in her makeup, her consciousness of the way she's being lighted, and the couture by Travis Banton, she's also softer, funnier, and more human. She also benefits from being re-teamed with Gary Cooper, her co-star in Sternberg's Morocco (1930), and the only leading man with whom she had any real chemistry in the Sternberg films. Desire is still glamorous nonsense, a romantic comedy in which Dietrich plays a jewel thief and Cooper a seemingly naïve American automotive engineer. They meet on the road to Spain, where Cooper's Tom Bradley plans to spend his vacation and Dietrich's Madeleine de Beaupre is meeting up with her accomplice, Carlos Margoli -- a part planned for John Gilbert that went to John Halliday after Gilbert suffered a heart attack. Cooper is delightful as the infatuated American, whose native shrewdness manifests itself eventually. A subtext about the unsettled situation in Europe runs through the film, though there's no direct reference to the civil war brewing in Spain. Tom Bradley is not one to be outwitted by Europeans like Carlos, who, in a conversation about whether the United States would get involved if war breaks out in Europe, observes, "America's a very large country." Tom replies, "Six feet three." Like most good romantic comedies, Desire gets the best out of its supporting players, including Ernest Cossart as the jeweler and Alan Mowbray as the neurologist whom Madeleine plays off against each other to get her hands on the loot, Akim Tamiroff as a police officer, and Zeffie Tilbury as the larcenous, tippling Aunt Olga. Ernst Lubitsch, who produced, also directed some scenes while Borzage was finishing up another film, and his celebrated touch gives Desire some of its vivacity.