SCHELL VS. DIETRICH: IT’S A DRAW : Actress Wins the ‘No-Camera’ Battle, but Director Scores a Documentary KO

Maximilian Schell has this theory about individual lives being lived as feature films. It is not a formal theory, nothing he has written down or even labeled. It is just a view that emerges during a comfortable, almost mesmerizing conversation in his suite at the Chateau Marmont.

It emerges as he talks about the role he played in Marlene Dietrich’s life, the role of the documentary film maker who sparred and fought with the movie legend during 10 days of interviews in her Paris apartment in 1982.

It emerges when he talks about his own film performances, of how he looks back on himself in “The Young Lions” and “Judgment at Nuremberg” and “The Man in the Glass Booth” and sees each image of his aging self as part of a life mosaic.

And it emerges when he turns the interview completely around. When instead of answering a question about how his career experiences have affected him, he has you do a quick resume of your own life to see if you don’t agree that each entry somehow follows the last. As one scene follows another.

One moment, we’re talking about Marlene Dietrich’s stand against Nazi fascism during World War II. The next, we’re talking about a future reporter growing up with Depression-era Kansans in southeast Los Angeles. Some movies are more interesting than others.

“Everything you do has certain significance, a certain weight,” Schell said in that richly resonant Viennese accent. “I think there is a film in everyone.”

There was certainly a film in Dietrich, who is now in her mid-80s and more than 20 years beyond her last major film role. Schell’s “Marlene,” a 1984 feature documentary Oscar nominee that only recently found its way into American theaters, gives witness to Schell’s life-as-film theory.

“Marlene” is actually two documentaries in one. It is, first of all, a spicy, illuminating recap of the star’s life and career, complete with the appropriate excerpts from such films as “The Blue Angel,” “Destry Rides Again” and “Witness for the Prosecution.”

But, more interestingly, it is a documentary about the attempts--often futile--of a respected peer to penetrate the star’s own mythology. On the ladder of movie legends, perhaps only Garbo occupies a higher rung.

Schell appeared with Dietrich in the 1961 “Judgment at Nuremberg,” but he had been with her socially only once. By coincidence, it was in another suite at the Chateau Marmont.

“It was very strange. She just showed up here one day while we were doing ‘Judgment at Nuremberg,’ ” Schell said. “The porter called and said, ‘Miss Dietrich is here to see you. Can she come up?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’

“It was a very friendly talk. She cooked for me. She seemed to like my work very much. Then we never saw each other again until this film came up.”

As the story goes, when Dietrich agreed to a documentary on her life, she asked the producer to hire Schell as the film’s narrator. Dietrich did not want to appear on camera during interviews, but she would comment on her life and on excerpts from her films.

Schell said Dietrich sent him two scripts for a documentary, one written by a friend of hers, the other by a professional screenwriter. In the margins of both scripts, she had scribbled things like “rubbish,” “a lie,” “this is not true.”

“I said to her, ‘If I write another script, you will write the same things about it,’ ” Schell said. “ ‘You know your life better than I do. Why don’t we just talk about it?’ ”

It took a long series of negotiations to get Dietrich to agree to be interviewed on tape by Schell, and to allow Schell to direct the film. The actress didn’t see a need for a director, just a film editor and a good narrator. She even described how the film should be done.

“ ‘You just have to see me leaving Germany on the boat, then you see my arrival in America in newsreels, then you see my first picture in America,’ ” Schell quoted her as saying. “I was to follow that exactly. I said, ‘That’s rather dull. Do you find that exciting?’ She said, ‘I am not contracted to be exciting.’ ”

Eventually, Schell set up his tape recorder in Dietrich’s apartment and turned it on. It was like ringing the bell for Round 1 of a heavyweight boxing match. Dietrich resisted his questions, insulted his methods, denied events that he described and accused him of trivializing her life.

At the beginning of one of their early sessions, Schell said the abuse got so bad, he told her, “What am I doing here? I cannot work this way,” and he walked out of her apartment.

When he returned the next day, she was livid. She scolded him for his rudeness, saying no one had ever walked out on her before, adding that the list of people who had enjoyed her presence had included some of the world’s most important political figures.

“You should go back to Mama Schell and learn some manners,” Dietrich concluded.

Schell acknowledged that at that moment, he felt like a man who had dived off a boat to go for a swim and then looked up to find that the boat was gone.

“It was an adventure,” he said. “You’re on the ocean and it suddenly becomes fascinating trying to figure out how you’re going to make it. Is there an island? Is there another boat? Or is it just going to be swimming?”

Schell’s life raft came in the way of an inspiration. Why not make the process of making the film part of the film itself? What could be more revealing of the subject than what he was going through with her? “Marlene” became, as a friend suggested to Schell, “a film of denial.”

“I tried to let the audience participate in the process we had to go through,” Schell said. “When my co-workers and I listened to those conversations, they laughed and said, ‘It is like a duel between you two.’ That duel is the movie we had.”

There were pleasant moments too. Dietrich, although full of contradictions, had lucid memories of most events, particularly of her controversial (in her home country) stand against fascism. During one session, Schell read a poem to her that her mother read to her as a child and she began to cry.

“At that moment, I took her hand and that was the only time where she accepted tenderness physically,” he said. “It was a wonderful moment. I thought, ‘If only it could have been filmed. But I had no camera, and she didn’t want it.’ ”

Schell ended up paring 10 hours of taped conversation down to 45 minutes of off-screen dialogue. The dialogue is fascinating, a mixture of egocentric crankiness and poignant reflections.

Schell couldn’t cover all of the sound and narration with film and newsreel clips, so he re-created the environment in which the interviews were taking place. A year after those sessions, in a Munich mess hall, he duplicated Dietrich’s apartment and the foyer outside. While we listen to the two of them thrust and parry, the camera moves about, peering through cracks and seams, giving us taunting glimpses of her furnishings and, at times, coming so close it seems she is inches from the frame.

Whether by intuition or design, Dietrich forced Schell to make a better film than he would have had she agreed to be on camera. “Marlene” is far more interesting as an examination of her phenomenon than it would have been as her sanctioned biography.

“Maybe that (improving the film by refusing to be photographed) was her instinct,” Schell said. “I don’t think that is what she knew. I didn’t know. Afterwards, it was clearly the virtue of the film. She gave herself greater presence by not being seen.”

“Marlene” has suffered from the theatrical stepchild status that falls to all documentaries, foreign and domestic, in this country. Despite an Oscar nomination and film festival awards, it took two years for “Marlene’s” producers to find U.S. distribution.

But the film has ended up in good hands. Alive Films, launching its North American release with several prominent festival appearances, opened it in New York and Los Angeles before Christmas and it is still going strong in both markets. (It is playing at the Beverly Cineplex in Los Angeles.)

The film was named best documentary of 1986 by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics and is being carefully hand-delivered to other markets around the country. The last line in the movie comes from Dietrich, predicting that the movie would never sell in America.

The grosses have been so good that Dietrich herself broke her long silence with Schell to comment on them.

“She called me once and left a message on my answering machine,” Schell said. “She said, ‘Why don’t you call me back? I have something good to say for once.’ She said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we had that fight?’ ”

For Schell, the fight is a bittersweet memory. It is a fight that he both lost and won.

“In the talks with her, I was the clear loser,” he said. “But I don’t mind. It was a precious loss.”

3 lines of 12p for both pieces of art