Shanghai Express

The lightweight plot - an evacuation by train from Peking to Shanghai - is merely the pretext for one of Sternberg’s most successful pieces of stylization, a fruitful collaboration with cinematographer Lee Garmes (and an uncredited James Wong Howe), and writer Jules Furthman. Dietrich plays Shanghai Lily, a ‘coaster’ (a woman who lives by her wits along the Chinese coast) whose scandalous lifestyle is summed up in the films now classic line, ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily’. Clive Brook’s plays Dietrich’s love interest Captain Donald Harvey, a stuffy Englishman who knew Lily before her infamous lifestyle and is still hurting from her having previously run off on him. Sternberg uses the stop-start cadences of the narrative as a means to evoke the rhythm of the train, while functioning as a kind of time machine confronting the motley group with their pasts as it carries them to their respective fates. However Sternberg’s main point of interest is Dietrich whose status in the film takes on fetishistic proportions, while being gloriously framed and lit in every scene. Cast includes Anna May Wong, Louise Closser Hale, Eugene Pallette, Lawrence Grant. (Awards: Winner, Best Cinematography- Lee Garmes, Academy Awards, 1932)