In another version of the Mata Hari legend, a gloriously costumed Marlene Dietrich is a streetwalker who is employed by the Austrians to unmask a Russian spy; torn between love and duty, she dies as she started, a prostitute (“in the uniform in which I served, not my country, but my countrymen”). Dishonored is one of Josef von Sternberg's most Romantic and most wittily-plotted films. Raymond Durgnat writes, “Its absurdities...take high camp as a springboard to the dream-delirium that makes Sternberg one of the screen's Surrealist poets of l'amour fou....”