This is the last of the seven films Sternberg made with Dietrich between 1929 and 1935. After making this film, Sternberg not only severed his working partnership with Dietrich, but he was dumped by Paramount as well. He never got a chance to work regularly again. The film itself was withdrawn from release after protests by the Spanish government, and not shown again until many years later.
Consider the film's extraordinary visual style: Sternberg's exquisite chiaroscuro lighting; the way he fills up screen space through his use of a deliberately cluttered mise-en-scene, involving screens between the actors and the camera, carnival confetti and grotesques, and so on; the way the picture is almost obsessively focused on Dietrich's image, her costumes, her facial expressions, etc.
Think about the weird sexual undercurrents of the film: the way Dietrich serves as an over-the-top parody of "femininity"; the implicitly masochistic compulsions of the male characters, who pursue Dietrich all the more, the more she rejects and humiliates them; the far-from-innocent knowingness with which the film and the characters move between violent obsession and self- conscious ridiculousness. Is the film a romantic melodrama, or a comedy?