Von Sternberg delights in deflating the pomposities of the court, in the process arguably poking fun at his own atmospheric excesses. In one scene, the Empress reaches for her scepter and is inadvertently handed a turkey leg. When he isn’t playing with his soldiers, Peter uses a gigantic hand-drill to poke spy-holes in various walls. This occasions one of the film’s numerous startling images: Catherine looking up dazed as a drill bit twists its way through the eye of the subject of a huge painting. The dialogue adds another dimension of sarcasm. When Catherine objects to Count Alexei’s adulterous moves, he lectures her on the stupidity of morality: "Those ideas are old-fashioned. This is the 18th century!" Von Sternberg also gets mileage out of the legend of Catherine’s strange death in scenes with a sardonically smiling Catherine and her horse.

In spite of its gorgeous insularity, The Scarlet Empress also shows political savvy. Catherine succeeds in deposing Peter by winning over the two forces that have traditionally ruled empires: the church and the army. She secures the church’s loyalty by stripping off her jewels and handing them to the priest for the poor; she captivates the army by flirting with and bedding them, in the tradition of her predecessor.

The Scarlet Empress is a masterpiece of romantic moments, played against grand swelling musical motifs and brilliantly visualized — Catherine holding a gauze net over her face as Count Alexei bends down to kiss her; a breathless encounter with the Count in a haystack, with Catherine repeatedly putting bits of straw in her mouth as mock-protection against his lust; an impromptu rendezvous in a glittering dark forest with a soldier who doesn’t know who she is. Some of the mise-en-scene has a suffocating beauty, as in the bravura marriage sequence where the screen is clogged to the breaking point with images — a strategy that shows to perfection Catherine’s entrapment in a realm where she’s been stripped of her name, her religion, and any romantic ideals she had. There are also quietly evocative moments, such as when Catherine seduces a soldier through a shimmering veil, a combination of the abstract and the sensual that confirms critical views of von Sternberg as the most painterly of directors.

The Criterion Collection’s DVD includes a new digital transfer, fairly sharp but with occasional speckles and a slightly grainy look throughout. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown Criterion did not use the best existing version, UCLA's shimmering nitrate print, for this transfer; so while it's superior to other available video versions, it's somewhat disappointing. There are a few intriguing extras, less than one might wish for but more than many discs contain. A gallery of production stills and lobby cards show von Sternberg’s lighting and composition genius in a still-life context. Robin Wood’s provocative feminist reading of the film is included on the printed insert, along with an hommage by the late underground filmmaker Jack Smith, whose impressionistic writing style captures much of the lure of The Scarlet Empress. Most informative is a 20-minute BBC documentary, The World of Josef von Sternberg (1966). The director is shown demonstrating his meticulous lighting and camera techniques to a group of suitably reverent, if slightly befuddled students, while interviewer Kevin Brownlow elicits typical von Sternberg insights about everything from actors ("They’re used as marionettes . . . as bits of color on the canvas . . . objects") to his sources of inspiration (painters only, "I have no traceable influences to motion pictures"). There’s also a welcome paean — surprisingly garrulous for von Sternberg — to Dietrich, whose commanding position at the center of The Scarlet Empress accounts for much of its charm: "She was quite a gal!"