“Showing Bogart the script of To Have And Have Not, Hawks said, ‘We are going to try an interesting thing. You are about the most insolent man on the screen and I'm going to make a girl a little more insolent than you are.' In Morocco, Sternberg had done the opposite: taken the most insolent girl on the screen and made a man a little more insolent than she was.” --Raymond Durgnat.
Picture Dietrich as Amy Jolly, cabaret performer; one-upping a society dame with a firm kiss on the lips; dressed in top-hat and tails; singing “What Am I Bid For My Apples.” Picture Gary Cooper, hang-dog and smouldering with contempt, the Legionnaire whom Amy Jolly loves. Picture her following him out into the desert, on four-inch high heels. “There's a foreign legion of women, too,” she has told him. “But we have no uniform, no flag, no medals when we are brave, no wound stripes when we are hurt.”
Morocco was considered by Chaplin and Eisenstein to be von Sternberg's greatest film: a masterpiece of lighting, design, atmosphere, all created on the backlot, with not a thing left to chance.