Shanghai Express
Composite Score: 82.4
Starring: Marlene Dietrich, Clive Brook, Anna May Wong, Warner Oland, Eugene Pallette, Lawrence Grant, Louise Closser Hale, Gustav von Seyffertitz, and Emile Chautard
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Writer: Josef von Sternberg
Genres: Adventure, Drama, Film-Noir, Romance
MPAA Rating: Approved
Box Office: $8.07 million worldwide
Why should you Watch This Film?
Shanghai Express is a film-noir about a diverse group of passengers travelling on the train from Peking to Shanghai in the midst of a fictionalized version of the Chinese civil war. It features Marlene Dietrich as its leading lady, nicknamed “Shanghai Lily”, who notoriously travels the route looking to prey on wealthy bachelors. The supporting cast features a diverse array of characters from Britain, Germany, and China as they make the risky journey across the war-torn nation. The film’s blend of romance, suspense, and historical anachronism make it a solid stand-by of early film-noir, though its lack of a truly villainous femme-fatale might leave some disappointed. Ultimately, the film’s casting choices and story choices make it a classic worth revisiting that has aged fairly well, given the circumstances.
Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?
For a film set in China that was made in the 1930s, the amount of racist stereotyping and white people cast as Asian characters in this film is surprisingly limited. That being said, the film’s primary antagonist is a white Swedish man playing a Chinese revolutionary leader with a questionable accent. The actor – Warner Oland – was in fact famous in the 1930s for his portrayal of Asian characters and rarely played anything else. In addition to the questionable casting and performance, the character himself represents a blatant lack of knowledge about what was actually going on in China during its civil war, which was a present occurrence at the time of the film’s production. Oland plays Henry Chang, a mixed-race revolutionary leader of the forces opposing the Chinese Nationalist Army. He is portrayed as a greedy elitist and abuser of women with no real motivation for his villainy/opposition other than his distaste for “the West.” In reality, the opposition to the Chinese Nationalist Army was led by Mao Zedong, a far more interesting and complex character than the one portrayed as the villain in this film, so on that front, topping off the problematic casting, the villain is disappointing all around.
So wait, why should you Watch This Film?
Historical inaccuracies and questionable casting aside, Shanghai Express holds up really well as a film-noir and a romance. In particular, its female characters – Shanghai Lily and Hui Fei – exhibit a remarkable amount of agency for a 1930s film, right on the cusp of “the Code”. Both are implicitly “women of the night” or something similar, and both are the main heroes of the film, working to save their fellow passengers as only they are able. Even the other characters, who at the start, view the two women with disdain, come to appreciate and thank the women for their contributions with no hard indication of any kind of personal change on the part of Lily and Hui Fei. As often as early films get held up as examples of how not to utilize their female characters, this film does an exquisite job exhibiting just how to create strong, endearing female characters without conforming them to any type of societal norms in the process.
I also found Marlene Dietrich’s performance as Shanghai Lily to be particularly compelling. Her allure and charisma fit the mold of a classic femme fatale so well, and in a sense, she does serve as a man’s downfall, but her performance is more morally gray than your typical femme fatale. She is able to exhibit true “moral fiber” without it feeling forced or compromising. She maintains a strong presence even as she morphs from potential “black widow” into the company’s savior without ever betraying the power of her character. Even in her romance with Clive Brook’s Captain Harvey, she delivers a performance that never feels damsel-esque and clearly would be able to survive the harshness of life with no man at all. For me, this will be a performance that sticks around for a while.
Shanghai Express benefits from a strong leading performance and uncharacteristically progressive treatments of its female characters on its way to becoming a classic film-noir and a film deserving of a place among the Greatest Films of All Time. Its flawed and anachronistic choice of actor and character for its villain reminds the audience of its place in time but only slightly detract from the overall takeaway from the film. This one is not currently available to stream anywhere, but if you find it, I highly recommend checking it out.
