Plot Intro
China, in the middle of the civil war. A country rife with unrest, corruption and fighting. A group of people board a train bound for Shanghai. There’s two mysterious femme fatale-like women (Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong), a terribly British captain (Clive Brook), a Christian missionary (Lawrence Grant), prim keeper of a boarding house (Louise Closser Hale) and a Eurasian man with secrets (Warner Oland), amongst others. Will they survive the 3-day journey?
Hollywood actresses don’t come more unique than this. Dietrich’s idiosyncratically gender-bending look, her sultry European accent, her graceful feline movements all made her one of the biggest stars of not only movies but in the sexy, rebellious world of cabaret too. Remarkably, she only received one Oscar nomination throughout her whole life (for a film called Morocco) but she is evidence that Oscar recognition matters not because she is a household name, she is placed ninth on the AFI’s best actresses ever, and she’s even been imitated successfully on RuPaul’s Drag Race (a sure sign of an everlasting legend).
Born in Berlin in 1901, her stage name “Marlene” is a combo of her actual first two names, Marie and Magdalene. She practised various performing arts from childhood and had a substantial career in musicals throughout the '20s. Her big break was in 1930 in The Blue Angel. It was directed by Josef von Sternberg who would make five more successful films with Marlene up to 1935, making it one of the most prolific director-actor partnerships in Hollywood history (until Tim Burton over-exposed Johnny Depp to us). It was Von Sternberg who lit her for some of her most iconic shots and stills and therefore he is often credited with discovering her and accelerating her fame.
Shanghai Express is one of those movies and although it sets itself up to be quite an adventure, it’s a bit of a let-down. It’s exemplary of Marlene’s acting and the characters she usually plays, but the plot moves forward in a lacklustre way when we realise who on board the train is a bad guy, then it climaxes about three-quarters of the way through, then limply carries on to the finish line. It doesn’t have quite the impetus and climactic confrontations of that year’s Best Picture winner, Grand Hotel, or a very similar film of the time, Stagecoach. In hindsight, I would have rather watched Morocco or Blue Angel but Shanghai Express had the more interesting-sounding plot. Nonetheless, Marlene’s great to watch and I do enjoy (even on a superficial level) these big-budget ensemble adventure movies that you get in the '30s.
It’s also (and this is no surprise) pretty racist. The Chinese characters have lines and action in the plot, admittedly, but they are still lumbered with the stereotypical “mysterious and secretive Asian” archetype. There is no reason why Anna May Wong and Marlene couldn’t have swapped roles other than white people putting themselves into the Hollywood limelight.
The late '30s, however, were less kind to Marlene and she was eventually named “Box Office Poison” along with virtually all other actresses in Hollywood.
But the war years are the most interesting of Marlene’s long life. She was extremely active in performing for soldiers on the front lines (sometimes accompanied by Patton himself), and selling war bonds for the American war effort. During her act, she sometimes did a mind-reading trick, claiming to be able to explain the thoughts of any soldier who came up to her. When they did, she pretended to read their minds and say something like “Oh I couldn’t possibly talk about THAT!” Most interestingly of all, after the war she reunited with her only sister, and her sister’s husband and child and helped them escape being accused of being Nazi collaborators. But after that, she omitted any mention of them from her life and claimed to be an only child, suggesting that her sister was exactly what Marlene despised. She eventually received the Medal of Freedom in 1947.
Marlene did a handful of films throughout the '50s and early '60s, some of which achieved success such as Billy Wilder’s Agatha Christie adaptation Witness for the Prosecution and the Oscar-winning Judgement at Nuremberg. But it was during this time that she became best known for cabaret for which she was paid well and achieved great success. She would often perform the first half in body-hugging dresses, and the second half in her famous top-hat-and-tails look. She became very adept at lifting her face with tape and using make-up, wigs and stage lighting to disguise her ageing.
She remained, however, a controversial figure amongst some groups of West Germans who felt she betrayed her homeland by hiding in America during the war. Her cabaret tour there, though financially and critically successful, was nonetheless met with protests. East Germany and also Israel were more accommodating.
Throughout her life she had a wide range of overlapping affairs with all sorts of actors, writers, and artists both male and female. But she did marry once to a man called Rudolf Sieber and they remained married from the '20s to his death in 1976, producing one daughter, Maria Riva who is still alive today. Although we do not know for sure, it seems like their marriage was a loving and potentially polyamorous one (it seems impossible to me at least that Rudolf spent all those years not knowing about Marlene’s extensive relationships).
She worked hard up until 1975, when, after surviving cervical cancer and fracturing a couple of bones, she decided that 74 years old was a bit too old to be doing this. She lived the rest of her life in Paris away from public eye until her death in 1992 aged 90. Her funeral was an almost state-funeral affair, with large numbers of mourners in both Paris and Berlin (where her body was flown to be buried on her wishes).
This was my first exposure to Marlene’s acting and I was pretty captivated by her. She oozes charisma and I can see why she did so well playing heroic but dangerous women. It was an archetype that had huge popularity in a decade where rebels against society and rebuilding of moral codes were all the rage post-Wall Street crash.
The presentation of Chinese characters is problematic. Anna May Wong is very good and admittedly she gets action in the plot (which is more than I expected) but it’s a one-note, stereotypical character and she deserved better. See our write-up of 1937’s The Good Earth to find out more info about her.
Yay Marlene! Granted I only really know about her from Sasha Velour’s exceptional Snatch Game imitation and Jessica Lange’s ‘influenced by’ role in American Horror Story: Freakshow. But she’s such a name that when she appears in La Vie En Rose, the actress playing her is given real screen priority for what is a thirty second cameo.
This was quite a dull film to be honest, I found myself not very engaged from the beginning, with a plot that seems to give up half way and a bunch of interesting characters who never really get utilised. A shame!
But for me it was a chance to see not only Dietrich but also Anna May Wong, who famously was shafted to play the lead role in The Good Earth by Luise Rainer who excruciatingly did yellow-face and won the Oscar. Hollywood, y’all fucked up.
Wong and Dietrich are women travelling alone and aren’t really given much to work with here. Dietrich is all sensual softness, delivering speeches to the man she’s still in love with as if she were a purring cat, or leaning against walls while a soft focus camera slowly zooms into her face. She’s very elegant but I have to admit I was left slightly underwhelmed. I think Dietrich played this role of sensuality well, but I wasn’t very engaged at any point.
It was sadly the same with Anna May Wong, who seemed to be doing silent acting in a talkie film. Lots of dramatic looks, and a moment when she kills a man was almost laughable as she pounced about in the shadows. I imagine this is mostly the fault of the script and director but the desire to ‘other’ her seems to have been prevalent as she’s not given any real chance to emote or be an actual character.
Shanghai Express certainly didn’t deserve any awards, but neither do the two leading actresses who deliver very template performances. But I can’t bring myself to dismiss either of them, knowing what we do about their careers. It may well be that we do not have any films left of Wong acting to her full ability, but that’s Hollywood’s fault for not even letting her have films she was made for (re: The Good Earth).
Marlene on the other hand, I think was more an icon for her general mystery and glamour. And she gives us that here, but there’s nothing more. And I think nowadays we want our best actors and actresses to have real acting ability (see Olivia Colman or Cate Blanchett or Octavia Spencer) rather than just an air of something else.
I liked the train scene when Dietrich and her ex-lover sit dramatically on an outside terrace as they trundle through China, before launching into a very overdone snog. It was ridiculous and I enjoyed it.
Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich don’t really seem to shine and it all feels a bit B-movie to me.
Mark
2/10
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