Like so many campaigners before him,
Gary Cooper joins the Foreign Legion to "forget," and winds up in
Morocco. There, t a smoky cabaret, Cooper meets café entertainer
Marlene Dietrich (making her American film debut). A woman with a very checkered past, Dietrich toys with the callow Cooper, but eventually falls hopelessly in love with him, even to the extent of throwing over wealthy
Adolphe Menjou. The now-famous final image of
Morocco finds la Dietrich, decked out in her cabaret finery and wearing high heels, heading after Cooper's regiment across the desert with the rest of the "camp followers." There is considerably more to the story than that, but these bare-bones details should be enough to entice anyone familiar with the exotic eroticism of the
Josef von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich vehicles. Should you need more enticement, let us inform you that
Morocco is the film in which Marlene Dietrich, dressed in a man's tuxedo for her nightclub act, kisses a female patron squarely on the lips.
