If Cinemascope was, as Fritz Lang so memorably put it in Contempt, only good for filming “snakes and funerals”, then the unspoken axiom of Technicolor in the ‘30s and ‘40s was that it was mainly good for musicals and epics. A movie as grandly ambitious as Gone With the Wind and one as sweetly intimate as Meet Me In St. Louis both came under the Technicolor banner because, for all their differences, they were both seen as movies that required an extra “wow” factor. Movies that were full of spectacle and motion and energy.

How strange it is then, to go back to the dawn of three-strip Technicolor films and find an odd little hodgepodge of genre films, none of them very epic in scope. The very first full-length, live-action Technicolor film was an adaptation of Vanity Fair (retitled Becky Sharp and starring Miriam Hopkins).  It was followed by The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a Western romance, Dancing Pirate, a musical comedy, and then in 1936, came the strangest of them all, The Garden of Allah. No spectacle, no scope, and no dance numbers. Instead, it was a short, solemn feature about a Trappist monk (Charles Boyer) that falls in love with a beautiful, devout woman (Marlene Dietrich) in the desert. Hardly a likely candidate for lavish Technicolor treatment. And yet not only was it made (produced by none other than David O. Selznick) it won a special Academy Award for its use of color, the first ever Oscar given in recognition of color cinematography.

I hadn’t realized until I watched The Garden of Allah, how often Technicolor cinematography is tied to the idea of motion. Musicals and adventure films thrive on constant movement and animation. These were the kind of films that got the full-on color treatment for most of Hollywood’s Golden Era. The bright, lustrous hues of Technicolor were considered too distracting for serious dramas, films that were meant to engage your mind as well as your emotions. Yet the primary element of The Garden of Allah is its stillness. The characters don’t engage in swordfights or races or parades. Instead, they walk, they pray, and they talk. Most of the shots with Charles Boyer and Marlene Dietrich keep the actors in intimate close-up. They barely ever move their hands or use their bodies. Both actors bury the wry sense of humor that informed their best performances and deliver their lines with straightforward sincerity. It’s a stylistic choice that turns their scenes into something that’s less like a Hollywood film and more like a series of paintings.

Even when the camera cuts away from its leads, the predominating mood is one of solemnity and quiet over one of excitement. In a scene where the sheltered Boyer observes a female dancer for the first time, director Charles Boleslawski barely even gives us a glimpse of her gyrating hips. Instead he keeps the camera locked on her face and we cut between Boyer, visibly transfixed and repelled at the same time, and the dancer, whose flirtatious expression slowly begins to seem almost grotesque under the relentless focus.

When Boleslawski does allow us some breathing space from the actors, we instead cut to shots of the gorgeous, living desert all around them. But even there, the camera lingers on sand dunes and sunsets, keeping the landscape at a distance. The night shots are almost like reels cut from an animated film, with completely artificial blue skies and twinkling white stars. The effect feels almost like medieval and Renaissance artwork. It’s as if the film is trying to limit the sense of perspective and depth, flattening the images out rather than opening them up. If the color photography wasn’t so rich and beautiful, this might work to its detriment. Instead, the flatness feels perfectly in tune with the mood. After all, we’re trying to delve into the mind of a runaway Trappist monk, a man struggling with whether or not to believe he can escape eternal torment by giving into all-consuming love. Of course, this man would see his romance in the visual language of a stained glass window. The Garden of Allah is far closer to a fable or allegory than it is to a real romantic narrative.

The other visual element that makes The Garden of Allah such a distinctive movie is how much texture and sensuality it gives to the desert sand. This may seem contradictory, given how much emphasis I’ve given to those flat, artificial backdrops. Yet this film does its best to turn the sands of the desert into a secondary living character. In one scene, Dietrich visits a fortune teller (played by John Carradine, his eyes looking astonishingly blue in Technicolor). Here, the fortune teller doesn’t read palms but instead sees the future by drawing patterns in the sand. Dietrich listens to his prophecies of doomed love and, like all romantic heroines, marches off to her fate with nary a doubt in her mind. In a striking shot, Carradine reaches out and buries his head in the sand, feverishly grasping the sands and letting them sink slowly through his fingers. You can almost see Selznick and Boleslawski in the background, marveling over the newfound power to make a sensory experience come alive for the viewers. It’s moments like these that make the early Technicolor films so thrilling. Filmmakers were discovering new words in the cinematic language, new ways to make the audience shiver.

Selznick originally intended to give the part of Domini, the rich and wise young woman, to Garbo. When the role finally came into Marlene Dietrich’s hands, apparently nobody thought to redesign the character, resulting in some memorably awkward early scenes. Any movie that begins with Dietrich, the queen of gleeful hedonism, praying sweetly in a chapel and extolling her fond memories of the convent life, is just daring you not to giggle. Nor is it very believable when Dietrich has to act shocked and horrified at the idea that a monk would break his vows to Christ. Behind the scenes, Dietrich was none too happy. She didn’t like the script, she didn’t like her co-star’s toupee (during the making of one intimate scene, the collected sweat splashed down onto her face), she didn’t like the costumes, any of it. And yet, Dietrich’s presence begins to work as the film goes on. Instead of trying to craft a believable character, she instead just gives herself up to pure sensual surrender. Not so much to Charles Boyer (frankly, the two don’t generate a lot of chemistry), but to the desert itself.

The whole key to Dietrich’s performance is given in a short bit of dialogue between her and her travel guide (a puckish Joseph Schildkraut). After a dose of Schildkraut’s poetry, Dietrich muses that perhaps the sun has something to do with his lyrical thoughts. “This sun is nothing. Wait ‘til Madam gets beyond the mountains and through the gates of the Sahara. There the sun blazes!” Dietrich exhales in rapturous contemplation. “Let it blaze!” she replies.

In later years, Dietrich would come to regret her negative attitude on the set of The Garden of Allah, writing in her memoirs that it was “the most beautiful color film ever made.” There’s probably far too much competition for the title to make it worth arguing about, but there’s no question that The Garden of Allah fully deserved it honorary Oscar for cinematography. It’s a lovely film to look at and is worthy of attention as more than just a strange little curiosity in Hollywood’s development of Technicolor. It’s a movie that treats Technicolor as if it were a religious miracle all its own. And, to anyone who believes in the church of cinema, it is.

Aubyn Eli blogs about color movies-and a whole of black-and-white ones-at The Girl with the White Parasol.