‘Shanghai Express’ or — Once Upon a Time In China?
At first Joseph Von Sternberg’s ‘Shanghai Express’ (1932) reminded me of ‘Horror Express’ (1972) when it started: a train packed with various sundry characters travels across a vast landscape and carrying a dangerous, possibly lethal, cargo… only it’s not an alien creature that has all the men unnerved but the presence of Shanghai Lily, a woman who “lives by her wits”, if you know what I mean. And she’ll need those wits as this express is filled with all sorts of unsavoury types from snooty colonials, ex-lovers, men of the cloth, women of the night and rebellious spies, all of whom seem to want her off the Shanghai express. What has this poor, beautiful woman dressed entirely in black done?
And so the train, filled with its various characters with various secrets, departs Peking for Shanghai. Yet China is a country convulsing in political turmoil so god knows what could happen along the way either from forces onboard or off, and with such confusion will it be possible to discern friend from foe? And just what is the deal with Shanghai Lily?
To be honest, it doesn’t quite matter as von Sternberg is less interested in what Shanghai Lily does rather than how she does it. This is a film about transitions and moments, how they merge and form in and out of each other. For example — notice the way Lily’s fingers stroke the shaft of the engine’s column of black smoke in the middle of the night or the way Dietrich vibrates with sexual tension as she leans against a door after seeing her lover, the pounding locomotive augmenting her quivering (she has a very intimate and physical relationship with this train).
It is also how Dietrich moves through the train, usually by a series of screen and windows allowing her to cut up space and the screen. There’s a scene when Anna May Wong is left alone in her carriage, none of the British officers wanting to share a compartment with that sort of woman. Dietrich marches in without a care (two sisters together?) and pulls down the blinds behind her. It is both an act of defiance and one of power. Screens, windows, partitions all become important in this film and are even used to imply torture such as when an interrogator slices through a silk-screen with a red-hot iron, demonstrating to his prisoner that the same will soon be happening to his flesh. A screen can be opened to reveal a lover or closed to hide screams of pain but there is always a sense of power for those who know how to use them.
The world outside of the train is something to behold too. There is a shot early on when the express is leaving Peking, slowly steaming straight towards the camera and pushing itself through preposterously narrow streets, forcing itself through countless banners, lanterns and chickens; the image is that of a machine disrupting the very fabric of the city itself. Yet this city is a complete illusion, the teeming Oriental metropolis manufactured on a back lot in California. It’s an incredibly detailed and evocative depiction of an exotic location that had me thinking of Ridley Scott’s ‘Bladerunner’ in terms of just how much visual information Sternberg packs into the screen. If this is China then it is China that dwells in the realm of the fantastic.
It’s not just with the visuals that Sternberg pushes the style but also with the sound. The director pulls nearly all the musical soundtrack out leaving us with only the noise of the locomotive for most of the movie, the chugging and pounding sometimes turning almost into music (can you not see Dietrich almost foxtrotting to the rhythm at one moment?). Watching the express come out of the landscape, travelling up that railtrack that disappears back into the infinite as the sounds of the train punctuate aural space I did find myself wondering if Sergio Leone had seen this movie as all the ingredients are here, maybe just mixed up in a different order, to his opening of ‘Once Upon a Time in The West’ (1968).
‘Shanghai Express’ is great. Sure, the story is simply there to hang all that style off but, as they say, what style! As Sense of Cinema said of the film — it’s “a riotous exercise of excess in every area”, and that is most certainly the case. I can’t think of another film where black and white cinematography captured a woman in such luminous beauty. Actually I can, and that’s the film Sternberg and Dietrich would make a couple of years later when rather than controlling a single locomotive Dietrich would be controlling an entire empire.
