A montage of a child's fantasy of torture chambers, axed heads, and a human bell-clapper sets the tone for The Scarlet Empress, Josef von Sternberg's rendition of the life of Catherine the Great. Marlene Dietrich portrays the empress who molded political prowess into sexual power, and Sam Jaffe gives a very bizarre performance as the pop-eyed Grand Duke. UCLA Film Archives' Charles Hopkins writes, “This beautiful, delirious treatment...was supposedly based on one of the Empress's diaries, but Sternberg's Russia was as fanciful and stylized as Eisenstein's in Ivan the Terrible. The film looks more expensive than it was (most of it was shot on one ingeniously constructed set); and when Ernst Lubitsch, who was then head of production at Paramount, complained of Sternberg's extravagance in hiring a mob of extras for one brief shot, the director was able to tell him that he had used stock footage from Lubitsch's 1928 production, The Patriot. (That one shot is all that survives of The Patriot today.)”