"Enthusiastically, (Ado) Kyrou has characterized Sternberg's cinema universe, 'made up of the strange and of eroticism,' as purely Surrealist, a universe whose creator 'burns away the visible envelope to explore all its latent richness'" (Matthews, Surrealism and Film). The Surrealists gave themselves over to Sternberg's films with Marlene Dietrich much as they had approached Les Vampires and the Pearl White serials: by identifying with the actress herself, who embodied the disruptive force. Dietrich singing "Hot Voodoo" in a gorilla suit brings the exotic home to roost in Blonde Venus, in a way that is antithetical to Professor Unrath's pathetic imitation of a chicken in The Blue Angel. And when she peels off her gorilla hands (not to mention her head), she is Gilda gilded with the delicious element of the absurd. Blonde Venus is Sternberg's only Dietrich film set in this country, but Sternberg's America, like his Russia or China, exists on no map we're likely to see. His portrait of family life is reminiscent of early Douglas Sirk in its looming depression, while his forests, bordellos and flop-houses have an uncanny incandescence.