The Kalends of Anna May Wong: Shanghai Express

Note: To take a break from Perry Mason, this Happy New Year season we look over a couple of movies with Anna May Wong. In this one, Wong, a woman named Hui Fei, shares a train compartment with fellow fancy woman Marlene Dietrich. The keeper of a Shanghai boarding house Mrs. Haggarty (Louise Closer Hale), remarks pointedly to Hui Fei “I’m sure you’re very respectable, madam?” Hui Fei answers, “I must confess I don’t know the standard of respectability that you demand in your boarding house, Mrs. Haggarty.” Nor, implies her tone as remote as Mount Tai, does she care.

Shanghai Express
1932 / 1:22
Tagline: “Grand Hotel on a Train”
[internet archive]

A surreal dream with train whistles – could a movie-goer like me who grew up three blocks from a train yard want anything more nostalgic? Director Josef Sternberg doesn’t care about plot or character - he’s chasing atmosphere like an artist who wants us knuckle-walkers to see the ultimate, intrinsic nature of reality as it truly is, beyond our judgments, concepts, or stories. Smoke, shadows, banners of Chinese characters, silhouettes that look carved out of fog. It’s all about the images beautiful dreamers half-remember after waking: aisleways, windows, shades sliding up and down, a machine gun spitting fire from a train carriage.

For buffs, there’s plenty to chew on. Train fetishists will swoon over the haunting shots of locomotives and carriages, while we tourists get a front-row seat to Peiping and Shanghai crowds, filmed with Sternberg’s obsessive eye for movement and texture. It’s a world where train wagons graze storefronts and humanity swirls in clouds of steam. Sternberg loved crowds.

Pre-Code fans will grin. Marlene Dietrich smolders as Shanghai Lily, a woman who ruins men out of sheer laziness, while Anna May Wong turns smoking into a sacrament. Their scenes together make tobacco look like the most sensual pastime on earth. Wong’s Hui Fei is pure steel - her “I’m Unbeatable Even if You Beat Me” look could stop a runaway train. When she murders a man and pockets twenty grand, the movie barely blinks. Moral ambiguity was never so hip.

Critics carp about thin characterization, but that’s missing the point. Sternberg isn’t telling a story; he’s staging a dream. The characters are pawns of chance, drifting through a world where everyone – those who wear pants included - is vulnerable. Dietrich’s praying hands, Wong’s icy poise, Eugene Pallette’s racist buffoonery - they’re fragments in a cinematic collage. Transience – soon it’s all dust, we’re all dust – the movie-goer can tell Sternberg read his Marcus Aurelius closely.

The film’s hostility toward missionaries and moralists is deliciously Pre-Code. The English surgeon gets scolded for being a “materialist,” which was morse for “atheist” back then. Meanwhile, the gamblers and fallen women seem more alive than the pious crowd.

In the end, it’s not about who gets the girl or whether the revolutionaries succeed. It’s about the look and feel: smoke curling like a question mark, shadows creeping like rumors, and two women who make convention look like something only squares worry about.