Essentially a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich, this 1940 musical-romance brought Dietrich and John Wayne together for the first of three collaborations. Directed by Tay Garnett (The Postman Always Rings Twice), Seven Sinners stars Dietrich as torch singer Bijou Blanche, who travels the South Seas in an endless loop of islands where she is always greeted as a demi-goddess by Navy boys and local clubs.
But eventually, she’s deported for inspiring too much mayhem among all the men who get crazy around her, leading to massive fights and property destruction. On one such island, she meets Navy Lt. Dan Brent (Wayne), a well-regarded officer with a bright future and the eye of the island governor’s attractive and intelligent daughter (Anna Lee).
Having lost his restraint to Bijou’s charms and talk of marriage, Naval higher-ups and others implore Brent to come to his senses before he undoes everything he’s worked for. In the end, poor Bijou is once again blamed for luring a man to his near-doom, and she retreats to her default tragic role in life.
The story is thin, but Wayne has some good moments standing up to a mobster, and there is comic nonsense involving a half-baked magician (Sasha Mencken) and Broderick Crawford as a witless, former sailor who protects Bijou.
More than anything, the film exists to look splendid in production design (for those of you familiar with Dietrich’s many visually sumptuous collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, e.g., The Devil is a Woman, think of Seven Seas as von Sternberg Lite) and for Dietrich to sing a number of tunes in dazzling costumes. Strongly recommended.