Shanghai Express

1932: Sternberg and Dietrich plus Anna May Wong

A train ride through China

The problem with this Josef Sternberg film, though it is beautifully photographed and contains a nice panorama of characters on a dangerous ride by rail through war-torn China, is that the star, Marlene Dietrich, mugs for the camera in ways that seem directly lifted from a primitive silent film. She rolls her eyes frequently as if to help visually to enunciate her dialogue, but the eye rolling seems out of synch and she does gesticulations with her hands that also seem out of synch, as if her English language skills and her mannerisms are operating on two different levels, which is to say, the artifice of Dietrich's acting in Shanghai Express is thick and heavy.

Not the case with co-star Anna May Wong who plays her role absolutely au natural by comparison, and makes the most of her more limited space. With another ten minutes of screen and dialogue she would have completely usurped the film from our nominal feature players Dietrich and Clive Brook as a stuffy, conflicted and ultimately honorable British military surgeon who knew Dietrich's character in the past, but after a relationship "smash up," has both loathed and pined for her ever since. Their scenes together are an improvement for both, and the stiff posing becomes minimized as the two actors work their dialogue back and forth, warming up the story to an authentic romantic level that is expected from a "love story" out of Hollywood, and humanizing the two stars considerably.

Their story is shared with an assortment of other characters, though. They're all passengers on a train going deeper and deeper into one trouble after another, passing through battlefields and Chinese villages held one minute by government forces and then another minute by a rebel bandit-army. These revolutionary forces are being secretly led by film co-star Warner Oland, playing a half-Chinese and half-white businessman who is actually a warlord who tells the talkative Eugene Pallete (as a traveling American salesman) "I'm not proud of my white-blood," conjuring up a more definitive statement about the situation instead of the mostly low-key racial tensions that otherwise pervade the film. Pallete's character seems to have more dialogue than anyone else simply because he rifles it off so fast, at one point in frustration saying "What's the future in being a Chinaman? You're born, you eat your way through a handful of rice, and you die. What a country. Let's have a drink."

Ironically, though, it isn't as simple as the mixed-race warlord wanting to be a true Chinaman, or the motley group of mostly European passengers unable to comprehend the country they're in on its own terms, that marks the movie. Rather it is Anna May Wong's low-key character who "settles the hash" of other people's wrongdoing, and the pre-Hayes code scowling preacher played by Lawrence Grant who turns out to be the only person who can see and understand what's going on between Dietrich's notorious "Shanghai Lily" character and the stiff-upper-lip surgeon who can't seem to parse his own emotions, let alone the floozy played by Dietrich. An angry dressing down by the minister to the cock-sure surgeon loosens things up in the love story, but there's also a funny but sinister sub-sub story in Shanghai Express. A German passenger (Gustav von Seyffertitz) is an opium smuggler (and quite possibly an addict, too) who is arrogant, bossy and maintains a disguise as a sort of hypochondriac invalid, demanding everyone pay special attention to his needs, acting as if by right he should rule all. Director Sternburg, an Austrian Jew who worked only once in the German film industry (Blue Angel, 1930), filmed a stereotype into Shanghai Express that would become multiplied a thousandfold in other films as the Nazis gained power in Germany and then all of Europe.

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Original Page May 29, 2025