Von Sternberg, the supreme stylist and master of studio craft, created the glamorous image of Dietrich through visually elegant lighting; she was another ornament to his exotic sets, rich in visual detail and as complexly patterned with light and shadow. Even the pictorial effect of slatted shutters competes with Dietrich's beauty. The whole surface of the film is sensual: luminous and tactile. And the soundtrack, all natural, without background music, is a "revelation of poetic choices...sounds are strokes, instilled with the same masterly precision as the seething imagery" (Warren Sonbert). Chaplin and Eisenstein were quick to praise Morocco as von Sternberg's most beautiful and best film to date. Given its wildly improbable story and back-lot artifice, Morocco is nevertheless exquisitely designed, not to mention fun for its pre-Code innuendo and insolent stars-Dietrich as the cabaret performer Amy Jolly and Gary Cooper as the hang-dog French Legionnaire whom she loves.