In Morocco Marlene Dietrich plays Amy Jolly, a wandering cabaret singer with a shady past who ends up on the shores of North Africa and falls for legionnaire Tom Brown, played by Gary Cooper. In one of Dietrich's iconic screen moments, she performs one of the first ever female-to-female kisses on a Hollywood screen. Morocco was also one of her most famous collaborations with auteur Josef von Sternberg.

Sam Mills will introduce the film and discuss how Dietrich's bisexuality influenced her acting, how the famous kiss made it past Hollywood censors, and how Dietrich's creative partnership - and tussles - with her director von Sternberg flavoured her performance.

Sam Mills

Sam Mills is the author of numerous works of non-fiction and novels, including Uneven: On Bisexuality, which explores bisexuality across the last two centuries through the lives and lives of various cultural figures such as Oscar Wilde, Colette, Bessie Smith, Susan Sontag, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Madonna and Marlene Dietrich. Her previous publications include the novels The Watermark (Granta) and The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair) and the memoir The Fragments of My Father (4th Estate), which was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize. She has written for a number of publications, including The Guardian, The Independent, The Spectator and The London Magazine. She is the co-founder of indie press Dodo Ink, a publisher dedicated to publishing daring and difficult fiction.

Cast:
Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Adolphe Menjou