In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
Josef von Sternberg’s Shaghai Express is an old-school Hollywood melodrama in all the best ways, and also in all the worst ways. It’s a big story with topical interest set in an “exotic” locale, featuring a central romance given extra spice thanks to a political thriller subplot. There’s a mixed bag of characters played by first-rate actors, anchored by Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong and accompanied by reportedly 1,000 extras. Most importantly, the magicians of Hollywood manage to make you forget that any footage involving the central characters was shot in California.* And did I mention that much of the action takes place on a train?
On the down side, there’s no doubt that this film takes place in Hollywood’s China, as signaled by title credits being presented in a chop suey font and accompanied by a bombastic pentatonic-twinged score. One of the central characters is played in yellowface, and that character’s cruelty and lust plays into the worst stereotypes of so-called “Oriental barbarism.” Despite the story being set during the Chinese Civil War, Shanghai Express is mainly interested in how that war affects Europeans and, most importantly, the love lives of two of them. There’s a heavy dose of misogyny expressed by some of the train passengers as well, although the plot does its best to contradict these negative judgments through the observable actions of the central female characters.
It’s 1931 and a motley crew of passengers is taking the train from Peiping (Beijing) to Shanghai. These include the upright British Captain “Doc” Harvey (Clive Brook), opium dealer Eric Baum (Gustav von Seyffertitz), the Reverand Carmichael (Lawrence Grant), snooty boarding-house manager Mrs. Haggerty (Louise Closser Hale), jovial gambler Sam Salt (Eugene Pallette), mysterious Eurasian Henry Chang (the Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, also noted for playing Charlie Chan), and two “coasters” (sex workers): Shanghai Lily (Marlene Dietrich) and Hui Fei (Anna May Wong).
Harvey and Lily used to be an item but broke up, and the most Hollywood of several plotlines concerns whether they will get back together. Personally, I don’t care: I’m more interested in who Henry Chang is and what will happen when the “rebels” (presumably members of the Communist faction led by Mao Zedong) take over the train. I’m also more interested in what Anna May Wong can do with a role that places her clearly secondary to Dietrich yet allows her to be more active in a literal sense. Spoiler alert: this may be Wong’s best role, and she delivers a masterclass in how to express that you have been raped without saying so.
Shanghai Express is the kind of film you watch with an understanding of the conventions of the time when it was made (and of course, that business is business), or you’re better off giving it a miss. Had I seen it as a kid, I would have been all in with the suggestions of a big world I had yet to explore. Today I see it as a movie that employs the stereotypes of the day but manages to do something interesting with them within an otherwise conventional (but well done) Hollywood movie, and find it worth suffering through the cringe moments to enjoy the good ones. | Sarah Boslaugh
*Some shots of China, courtesy of James Wong Howe, were also incorporated into the film.
Spine #: 933
Technical details: 82 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD
Extras: video interview with film scholar Homay King, who discusses the film’s Orientalism and the character played by Anna May Wong.
Fun Fact: Harry Hervey, on whose short story Shanghai Express is based, has 17 writing credits in the Internet Movie Database. He seemed to have specialized in lurid and exotic tales, as evidenced by his first credit, for the story for the 1927 film The Devil Dancer, whose plot is summarized as “An English explorer disturbed by the practices of an isolated tribe attempts to rescue a native girl with whom he has become fascinated.”
Parting Thought: Shanghai Express has been remade twice, as Night Plane from Chungking (1943) and Peking Express(1951). Could it be successfully updated for modern tastes, given our increased sensitivity towards representation as well as our somewhat surprising squeamishness toward women who own their sexuality?
