"The Devil is a Woman" - Josef von Sternberg (1935)

The Devil is a Woman (1935) was the seventh and final film of the legendary screen collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and his alluring star Marlene Dietrich.  Like the greatest of those earlier films, The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), The Shanghai Express (1932), and Blonde Venus (1932), this film’s focus was entirely on how love can overpower a reasonable person’s mind and compel him or her to submit completely to its demands. And while all those earlier films pushed the limits of believability concerning what love can do, in some respects The Devil is a Woman went the furthest in this direction.

Romantic films typically have two narrative streams – a dramatic outer narrative that involves goals and threats in the external world and an inner, relationship-oriented narrative involving the main characters.  However, in the case of this film, the relationship narrative is pretty much everything.

The Devil is a Woman was scripted by John Dos Passos and was based on the French novel La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet, 1898) by Pierre Louys.  That novel also served as the basis of several other films, including La Femme et le Pantin (1959) directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Brigitte Bardot, and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) directed by Luis Buñuel; but those films are all different in style and substance.  Interestingly and uniquely in the case of The Devil is a Woman, the two main characters appear to have been specifically sculpted to correspond to the real personalities of von Sternberg and Dietrich, whose offscreen relationship was the subject of much speculation and which I will briefly discuss further below.

Although I have identified the relationship narrative as the dominant theme in this film, the most memorable aspects are not so much the specifics of the story but rather the expressionistic dreamworld that von Sternberg conjures up to tell it. As usual for a von Sternberg film, everything was shot in the studio, where von Sternberg had complete control of every last detail and where he could carefully set his lights to fashion scenes with the chiaroscuro that made the entire environment  contribute to and reinforce the mood of the storytelling. For von Sternberg the visual context of his action was so important to the storytelling that it was occasionally intentionally staged to obscure the activities of the principal characters under view. Von Sternberg’s dreamscape was further enhanced by the contextually-supportive musical score, which was adapted from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Spanish Caprice and some classic Spanish melodies, including one of my favorites, Enrique Granados's Danza Espanola, No. 5.

Von Sternberg’s love stories invariably involve three principal and entangled characters:

• A beautiful, passionate, and bewitching woman whose mind and future directions are ultimately unknowable.  Marlene Dietrich played this role for von Sternberg during their time together, but there had been others, too, such as Evelyn Brent in Underworld (1927) and The Last Command (1928).
• A young, studly and prepossessing male who is used to having his way with women.  This person is often thoughtlessly narcissistic but not malevolent.  The beautiful woman usually finds him irresistible.
• An older more sensitive and reflective male who selflessly offers his love to the beautiful woman.  This person is more introverted and less confident, but his personality and character are richer, and his amorous commitment is deeper than that of the competing lover.

In The Devil is a Woman, whose story is set in Spain around the turn of the 20th century, these principal characters are present, and in fact there are really only four characters of any significance in the whole story:

• Concha Perez (played by Marlene Dietrich) is a beautiful and capricious young working woman. 
• Antonio Galvan (Cesar Romero) is a young, handsome republican revolutionary who is on the run from the government police and is getting ready to flee to Paris.
• Captain Don Pasqual Costelar (Lionel Atwill) is an aristocratic officer in the Spanish military.  He is the older and more refined figure of Sternbergian dramatics who has a mad infatuation with Concha.
• Governor Don Paquito (Edward Everett Horton) is the androgynous, yet ridiculously despotic, authoritarian commander of Sevilla who is trying to maintain order during a festival season. 

The film’s narrative is structured roughly into four sections, the second of which is a lengthy flashback period that takes up more than forty percent of the overall running time.

1.  A Meeting During the Spanish Carnival
At the film’s outset the viewer is plunged into the lavish spectacle of Sevilla’s Spanish Carnival festival, which is an extended celebratory fiesta just prior to the Roman Catholic Lent period.  There are masked parades, masquerade balls, and continuous scenes of merriment, all of which is brilliantly evoked by von Sternberg’s expressionistic staging.  Collectively, they remind me of the masked ball scene from von Sternberg’s Dishonored (1931), though these are perhaps even more flamboyant and colorful.

During a parade Antonio Galvan, who we will soon learn is ducking the police, is masked like all the others and enjoying the festivities.  He spots a beautiful woman, Concha, riding on a street float, and manages to catch her attention by making eyes at her.  Concha is a coquette and runs away, but before disappearing she has a note passed to him that he can meet in the evening when she normally goes for a carriage drive down a particular street.

2.  Don Pasqual’s Story

At a café, Galvan runs into an old friend, Don Pasqual, whom he hasn’t seen for years.  When Pasqual is asked if he knows anything about Concha, he launches into a lengthy account of his unhappy experiences with the woman, whom he first met five years earlier. This story-within-the-story of how this woman played with his affections and tortured him has five episodes.  In each of these episodes, Concha leads Pasqual on and then rejects him, leaving him in the lurch.

1. Captain Pasqual first saw Concha on a train trip, during which the cheeky girl precipitated an onboard fight that Pasqual intervened to stop.  He was attracted to the girl, but she indicated to him that she was not an easy pickup, and when the train stopped, she departed alone.
    
2. Sometime later, while investigating a cigarette factory, Pasqual sees Concha working there and is again attracted.  After giving her a valuable gold coin, she invites him to her home where she lives with her widowed mother.  After the two women ply him for more money, Concha kisses him, but she resists his natural response.  She tells him that she kissed him because she loved him – for a minute – but she will not let him kiss her without him loving her.  She claims (probably correctly at this point) that she merely pleases him and amuses him, but he doesn’t love her.  These remarks spotlight a key theme to the film – how deep is one’s love?.  Anyway, shortly thereafter Concha and her mother disappeared from town.
    
3. Three months later Concha appears again and seductively tells Pasqual that she can no longer live without seeing him.  Again he is infatuated and immediately offers to marry her.  But after accepting a considerable amount of his money, she disappears from his life again.
    
4. Months later Pasqual is sent down the coast on assignment and encounters Concha singing in a rowdy nightclub. Of course, we expect to see a song from Marlene Dietrich at some point in this film, and she delivers with her naughty “Three Lovers” song, which probably accurately reflects Concha’s amoral attitude about romantic fidelity. The two fo them repair to her dressing room, where Pasqual again professes his desperate love for her, and she seems to respond. But it is soon apparent that Concha is also having an affair with a handsome young bullfighter, Moreno.  When Pasqual breaks in on one of their trysts, he loses all control and gives her a beating (off-camera), thereby presumably ending their relationship.
   
   As we return momentarily to the “present”, Pasqual tells Galvan that this time he was really through with her.
    
5. But the next day Concha comes to Pasqual and surprisingly tells him that she loves him.  He pays out more of his money to buy her out of her nightclub contract, but immediately afterwards she abruptly departs on a week-long trip with the bullfighter Moreno.  Pasqual is again humiliated.

Pasqual tells Galvan that his affair with her became public, he was scandalized, and he had to resign from his commission.  After Pasqual summarily points out that she ruined many men – indeed, the bullfighter she ran off with later killed himself because of her – he gets Galvan to swear he will not go near the demonic temptress.

3.  Galvan and Concha

Pasqual and Galvan shake hands and depart, but Galvan still can’t resist going out that evening to meet Concha when she takes her carriage ride. He does so, and she soon brings him to a private room in a nightclub, where she listens to his accusations about ruining Pasqual. In the middle of this, however, she receives a hand-delivered letter from Pasqual declaring his undying love for her, which she reads aloud to Galvan.  He is angry, but he cannot resist the temptation of her beauty, and he kisses her.

Just then Pasqual shows up to their private room, angrily accuses Galvan of breaking his vow, and swears he is “not going to lose her’.  At this, Concha, now on the side of Galvan, continues to humiliate Pasqual and dismissively says, “how could you lose what you never possessed?”

The posturing between Pasqual and Galvan escalates, until Pasqual slaps Galvan in the face,  symbolically inviting a duel.  After agreeing to a formal duel to be held the next morning, Pasqual menacingly fires his pistol at distant target and demonstrates that he is a crack shot. 

With the sound of gunfire, everyone disperses in panic before the police arrive.  Concha finds Galvan in his room and declares her love for him – she promises to run away with him to Paris.

The next morning at a secret location in the woods, the duel is held.  This is a brilliantly staged dark scene set during a pouring rain storm and evoking the utmost in expressionistic gloom. Concha, worried now about hew new love, Galvan, accuses Pasqual of trying to “kill the only man I’ve ever cared for.” The duel is then held, and Pasqual, surprisingly refusing to fire his pistol, is gunned down by Galvan.  The police then show up and jail Galvan.

4.  Escape
Concha still has some cards to play, though.  She goes to Governor Paquito and with her flirtatious charm seduces him into authorising Galvan’s release from jail and providing them with two fake passports so they can escape to Paris.  She also goes to the hospital to see that Pasqual is still alive, barely.  Pasqual, though at every turn he has been defeated, he is always honest: he tells her he didn’t shoot Galvan because of his total love for her.

Concha and Galvan pack their bags, get through passport control, and get ready to board the train for Paris.  At the last moment, though, Concha baulks and says she has changed her mind.   She is going back to Pasqual.


Your overall understanding and appreciation of The Devil is a Woman will probably depend on how you interpret that last action of Concha’s.  Most people, it seems, view with a cynical eye Concha’s final refusal to get on the train with Galvan and return to Pasqual.  From this perspective, Concha is seen as realizing her passion for Galvan is ephemeral and will soon run its course.  She prefers not to give up her role as the puppet master, knowing that she has a helpless slave in “Pasqualito” that she can perpetually use and torment to her heart’s desires.  People who hold this point of view see the film as a black comedy that scoffs at the hopeless naivete of the unrestrained human heart that often actively seeks its own ruin [1].

But one could alternatively interpret Concha’s last action as a commitment to true love.  According to this interpretation, she finally realizes that she has found a man who truly loves her (since he is willing to die and let her run away into another man’s arms).  When she earlier accused Pasqual of only being dazzled by her charm, she was probably thinking of all the otoher men who were blinded by her glamour but didn’t truly love her as a person.  Another point in support of this interpretation is that Pasqual at this point is a man whose career has been ruined.  She is not returning to a privileged man, but to a man whose position is now considerably diminished.  The prospects of treating such a man as a puppet would then not seem to be a major attraction for even a selfish flirt.  So according to this second interpretation, Concha and Pasqual are united in true love in the end.

Of course, some people might want to overlay their interpretation of the film with their understanding of the relationship between Dietrich and von Sternberg. Certainly von Sternberg crafted Dietrich’s screen image and made her a star – their relationship has been variously compared to that of Svengali and Trilby and of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.  However they got started, though, it is generally understood that had a love affair during their period together.

In addition the suggestion that Concha’s character matches well with Marlene Dietrich’s real-life persona is given support by Dietrich’s own comments that her role in this film was her all-time favourite [2].  She was known to have been an amorous butterfly with an unending stream of brief love affairs with both sexes.  So in real life, Dietrich was perhaps just as capricious as Concha in this film.

Although such speculation may be spicy, I think it is best to focus on the work as it stands by itself.  Looking at just the film as it is, it is still a work of amazing splendour.  Nevertheless, I perceive some weaknesses when comparing it to von Sternberg’s greatest films. 

• Lionel Atwill’s performance as Pasqual is so reserved and militarily tight-lipped that we never get to see the two of them (Pasqual and Concha) interacting in a spontaneous and vital way. There is never any real electricity between the characters, and there relationship does not appear to evolve or progress.
• Marlene Dietrich’s behaviour is, virtually throughout, artificial.  The passionate, emotive glances that she sometimes gave in other von Sternberg films are missing in this one.  Her phoney unnaturalness here extends even to her heavy makeup, which featured extravagantly artificial eyebrows that were drawn inches above her physical brow ridge.  As a consequence of this artificiality, she, never evinces even hints of any convincing, true ardour for anyone in this film.

Perhaps, however, we should not really be looking for realism at all in this particular arena.  This film, after all, is really von Sternberg’s grand harlequinade, in which the outlandish characterizations are another aspect of the moody, atmospheric spectacle.  It is all part of an expressionistic masque under the control of the master marionettist, von Sternberg.

So all my previous reservations notwithstanding, I go back to my appreciation for von Sternberg’s aesthetics. What he presents are all-consuming love stories. I don’t know about you, but I hold to the second of the two above interpretations of this film.
★★★½  

Notes:

1. Andre Sennwald, “The Devil Is a Woman (1935)”, The New York Times, (4 May 1935).
2. Charles Silver, “Josef von Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman”, Inside/Out, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, (16 November 2010).

"The Docks of New York" - Josef von Sternberg (1928)

Josef von Sternberg’s penultimate silent film, The Docks of New York (1928), was one of this master visual stylist’s most moody explorations of romantic fatalism.  Set on the New York dockside in the early 1900s, it tells the story of two aimless, disconnected souls who manage to make an unlikely connection.

The film’s story, written by Jules Furthman, who would collaborate with von Sternberg on seven later films, is relatively simple.  What makes the film last in one’s memory is its evocation of loneliness and isolation among characters whose dark-world horizons only extend to the next day.

Von Sternberg’s cinematic skills are conspicuously on display here, and they encompass more than his well-known virtuosity in the display of light and shadow.  There is also here a wonderful manipulation of dramatic pacing, whereby some moments are drawn out with melancholy languor, which are  punctuated by brief, explosive moments of dramatic violence.  Such is the way, we are led to believe, of life among the lower depths.

The Docks of New York's narrative passes through five successive stages concerning the improbable relationship of the two main characters.

1.  A Meeting by Happenstance
The beginning images show a steamship docking at New York’s harbor.  The fact that this film’s story is set probably at least twenty years earlier than its time of production is important for two narrative purposes.  Most shipping at that earlier time was still powered by coal-driven steam engines, whose furnaces were constantly fed by dust-covered, grimy coal stokers.  It is hard to imagine a more miserable occupation than having to work hard in such squalid conditions.  Also, the film is set in the years before US alcohol Prohibition [1], so the film’s audience was offered the titillation of seeing the working class engage in one of their limited opportunities for reckless indulgence.

The steamship docks at the waterfront, and the coal stokers are given leave to go ashore, with the stern, but probably fruitless, warning from the ship’s third engineer Andy (Mitchell Lewis) not to come back drunk.  The scene then shifts to a dockside bar, The Sandbar, where Andy and the stokers intend to spend their limited free time.  There Andy runs into his estranged wife, Lou (Olga Baclanova), whom he had abandoned three years earlier, and it is evident that there is no love lost between the two of them. 

Meanwhile stoker Bill Roberts (George Bancroft)  notices just after having disembarked from the ship that a young woman has made a suicidal dive into the harbor. He jumps in and rescues her, and then he carries the still unconscious girl over to an empty boarding room above The Sandbar. The establishment’s belligerent proprietors object to Bill Roberts’s peremptory possession of one of their rooms, and they summon one of their bouncers to oust the two intruders.  This is where we get an example of von Sternberg’s disjointed pacing.  Up to now (and in fact throughout) Roberts is shown to be a man of few words, and he does not initiate conflict.  But when the bouncer attempts to throw out Roberts, the powerful stoker throttles him in seconds and returns to his business.

Lou, who also occupies a room above The Sandbar, hears the ruckus and comes over to where the young woman, who will be revealed as Mae (Betty Compson), is lying.  She attends to the girl and orders Bill Roberts to go downstairs and get her a hot drink.

2.  Bill Attends to Mae
Bill goes down to the bar, where some more tough guys try to muscle him, but Bill throttles them in seconds, too.  He brings back a “hot toddy” and sees that Mae is now revived – in fact, unrealistically so, since her hair now looks beautifully coiffed as if she had just emerged from a salon.  Such is von Sternberg’s expressionistic dreamworld. Learning that Mae doesn’t have any clothing aside from her soaked dress, Bill goes down to a shuttered clothing store and pilfers some items to take back to Mae’s room. 

Mae is still despondent and suicidal.  She tells Bill, “you could of saved yourself the trouble an let me die”. Bill doesn't think that way. Although Mae seems to be a woman of “easy virtue”, she is beautiful, and Bill is instantly attracted.  He tells her that all she needs is a good time to cheer her up.

3.  The Party at The Sandbar
Bill and Mae go the crowded bar, and Bill quickly gets very drunk.  When Bill’s boss Andy sees Mae, he is immediately attracted and tries to push Bill aside; but he gets punched out for his efforts – noone pushes Bill around.  A ruckus ensues, and only the efforts of Lou and Mae manage to calm things down. 

Bill, now feeling his oats, announces to everyone in the bar that he intends to marry Mae (whom he calls “Nell”) immediately.  Mae happily agrees. A preacher (Gustav von Seyffertitz) from a nearby mission is summoned, and the next ten minutes of the film feature a raucous, drunken marriage ceremony. Again von Sternberg varies the pace, though, and when the marriage vows are exchanged, everything slows down while Mae solemnly promises to be a good wife.  The contrast between Mae’s concession to her interior innocence and the cynical surroundings of the drunken bar revellers is another von Sternberg touch that is likely to leave a lasting memory with the viewer.

4.  The Next Morning
But, of course, Bill was drunk that night and scarcely knew what he was doing.  After having spent the night with Mae, he intends to return to his ship and sail away.  While she is still sleeping, he leaves a “tip” on her night table and sneaks out of her room. 

When Andy learns that Bill has abandoned Mae, he quickly goes to her room and tries to have his way with her.  But Lou follows him into the room, and soon shots are heard (von Sternberg’s camera remains outside, and the gunshots are evoked by showing birds rustling form their perches). Hearing the gunshots and seeing the police come, Bill returns to Mae’s room, where Lou confesses that she was the one who shot her husband. 

Now alone again in Mae’s room, Bill confesses that he is incorrigible and never really meant to fulfill his marriage vows.  His ship is leaving in one hour, and he tells her,

“I never missed a ship in my life.”
 . . .
“You knew I was just a dirty stoker.”

Their parting is sad.  Mae offers to mend Bill’s torn shirt before he leaves, but her eyes are so teary she cannot even see well enough to thread her sewing needle.  Finally she loses her temper and angrily orders Bill out of her room.

5.  A Change of Mind
Bill is back on the ship stoking coal as it sets out in the harbor.  Andy is there, too, barking out orders to the stokers. Living in this loathsome routine and environment again, Bill finally takes action.  He jumps ship, swims ashore, and finds his way to a courtroom, where Mae has been charged for stealing the new clothes she is wearing. She has just been sentenced to thirty days in jail, but Bill interrupts the proceedings, asserting that he is her husband and that he had stolen the clothes. The unsympathetic judge orders Mae released and sentences Bill to sixty days in prison for his impertinence. As he is being led away by the police, Bill turns to Mae and tells her that if she waits for him, he will never leave her again. Mae smiles hopefully and says she will wait forever.

Von Sternberg’s films are often situated in exotic, fantasy-laden settings – Morocco, Spain, Shanghai, Imperial Russia – where the surrounding circumstances are (to the viewer) mysterious and threatening.  Note that von Sternberg never travelled to these places; he conjured up everything inside the studio, where he could shape the shadow-laden atmosphere of his imagination without concern for documentary reality.  The principal characters in these stories are not given much psychological grounding (they rarely articulate what they are thinking or intend), but we empathize with them anyway.  As such, these films are prime examples of film noir，despite their exotic settings. The characters’ backgrounds are unknown and unimportant; and their futures are dim.  As Andrew Sarris said [2],

“His [von Sternberg’s] characters generally make their entrance at a moment in their lives when there is no tomorrow. Knowingly or unknowingly, they have reached the end or the bottom, but they will struggle a short time longer, about ninety minutes of screen time, to discover the truth about themselves and those they love.”

In these films, there is often an outer story of external action and an inner story concerning the relationship between the man and the woman whom fate brings together.  The outer story is often a war, or a revolution, or a spy mission, and this can serve up some excitement.  But von Sternberg ultimately brings our attention to the inner story, where the real action takes place.  In The Docks of New York this is taken to an extreme, since there is virtually no outer story; everything is the inner story in this film.

It is interesting to compare The Docks of New York with two other films that share some similarities with it: Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Ingmar Bergman’s Port of Call (1948).  Carné’s film has the noirish features of a dark, gloomy seaport and lost souls, but the outer story is relatively complicated and dominates the story.  Bergman’s film, on the other hand, has even more direct similarities with The Docks of New York, since it is also about a seaman who eventually falls in love with a woman who has just suicidally thrown herself into the harbor waters when he had just come ashore. But Bergman’s film is more psychologically motivated than von Sternberg’s. The viewer is given much more information about what the character’s are thinking about in Bergman’s film. This might suggest in the reader's mind that the acting is less significant in von Sternberg's film, but that is not true.  The performances of the two main characters in The Docks of New York are nuanced and effective. We don’t think about the characters shown, instead we feel for them directly and immediately.

For example, George Bancroft’s’ Bill Roberts character is a ruffian used to getting his way with his fists.  And yet he often pauses in reflection and seems to contemplate his surroundings with  a wry smile.  He seems to be fair-minded, at least within the limitations of his own moral universe, and in the end he vows to do the right thing.  

Of course, as is usually the case in von Sternberg’s films, the affective focus is on the woman.  Betty Compson’s Mae character is interesting, because although she portrays a person who seems to have been hardened by circumstances, she evinces sensitivity.  Inside her sometimes caustic exterior, Mae is revealed to be an innocent young woman in search of love. And von Sternberg artfully reveals this interior, not with words, but by means of her emotive glances gorgeously ensconced in his chiaroscuro-sculpted cinematography. 

Von Sternberg intuitively understood that the film medium had the unique capability of evoking in the viewer not only a narrative understanding of how events progress in the world, but their emotional feelings, too. 

At the end, in that final shot, Bill and Mae have so little that they can actually count on for the future. But perhaps that is all we ever really have.

★★★½

Notes:

1. “Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution”, Wikipedia, (20 April 2015).
2. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, Directors and Directions 1929-1968, (1968), E. P. Dutton, New York, p. 76.

"The Last Command" - Josef von Sternberg (1928)

In 1927 Paramount Pictures had already signed up renowned German actor Emil Jannings to work in Hollywood and also had in their corral the up-and-coming director Josef von Sternberg, fresh off his first box-office hit, Underworld (1927).  So it was natural for them to hook up these two agents of German Expressionism for their next production. This turned out to be The Last Command (1928), which was also a hit with the public.

The basic outline of the story concerns a Russian general who had fled the 1917 Russian Communist Revolution with just the clothes on his back and had managed to get to America.  Ten years later this now poverty-stricken man gets hired for a bit part in a Hollywood movie as a Russian general. This may sound like an extremely contrived plot scheme, but it was apparently inspired by some real circumstances.  Film director Ernst Lubitsch once mentioned that he had met a former general from the Imperial Russian Army, Theodore A. Lodigensky, who had turned up in Hollywood looking for work as a movie extra [1].  Of course this idea of a once-powerful man reduced to self-parody is perfect for the Hollywood grist mill.  But von Sternberg took this basic scheme and crafted something even more darkly romantic and interesting (as he also did in connection with his subsequent film featuring Jannings, The Blue Angel).  As The Last Command unfolds, the viewer is presented with two narrative scenarios – an outer, framing story and an inner flashback story– and each is sufficiently compelling that it could almost stand on its own.  What makes things even more interesting is when we consider the thematic elements of those two scenarios together.

The narrative of The Last Command can be considered to have five acts – acts 1 and 5 belonging to the outer narrative, and acts 2-4 belonging to the inner narrative.

1.  Hollywood, 1928

At the outset Hollywood film director Leo Andreyev (played by William Powell) is looking to hire some people as extras in a film about Russia.  For the poor and unemployed, getting a job as an extra has few requirements, so a job call attracts a mob of the desperate.  Among those applying for work is a middle-aged Russian man, Sergius Alexander (Emil Jannings), who claims, to the disbelief of all who listen, that he was once the supreme commander of the Imperial Russian Army.  Andreyev hires him to play the role of a Russian general, and Sergius is shown scrambling with the other, peon-like extras to get his assigned uniform that he will wear on screen.  But Sergius is clearly a shattered and enfeebled person who is barely able to look after himself.  While putting on his makeup, he looks at himself in a mirror and lapses into a flashback revery of what he was doing ten years earlier.

2.  Grand Duke Sergius Alexander

The time is 1917 and Russia is engaged in a devastating war with Germany and also threatened by a revolutionary insurrection from the Communists.  The authoritative, robust, and super-confidant Grand Duke Sergius Alexander, the commander of the entire army and a cousin of Czar Nicholas II, inspects his troops.  In addition to fighting the war, Sergius’s army is in charge of arresting “revolutionists” (the term for communists in this film), and he is informed that two people working as theatrical performers to entertain the troops are suspected of being such revolutionists.  The two suspects are Leo Andreyev (who we know will later become a Hollywood film director) and his companion, Natalie Dabrova (Evelyn Brent), who is said by a staff officer to be “the most dangerous revolutionist in Russia.” When Sergius is shown pictures of the two, he takes an interest in interviewing them and summons them to his office. When they arrive he haughtily dismisses Leo as an unmanly artiste and a coward for not serving in the armed forces. When Leo contemptuously responds that “it doesn’t require courage to send others to battle and death,” Sergius beats him with his whip.  Leo is sent to jail, but Sergius is attracted to Natalie’s beauty and treats her with respect.

3.  Sergius and Natalie
This next and most interesting section of the film shows the growing relationship between Sergius and Natalie.  Sergius is charmed by Natalie and treats her like a princess, inviting her to join him in the staff officers’ quarters, in the face of which Natalie responds with coy smiles.  But we know from earlier shots that she really is a revolutionist, so she must be play-acting here.

At a sumptuous dinner with Natalie and his general staff present, Sergius is interrupted by an order that the Czar wants to see an attack launched the next morning.  To everyone’s amazement Sergius defies the Czar and refuses the order, because his troops are not in condition to stage such an attack.  To do so would just provide “fuel for the revolution,” he says.  His defiance of the Czar impresses Natalie, and he tells her that he acted so strongly, because he loves his country.

Natalie: “Then why do you continue this stupid war?” 

Sergius: “We must have victory! Defeat means revolution and the collapse of Russia!” 

Natalie: “Then you love Russia so much?” 

Sergius: “I would gladly die tonight if it would help Russia.”

At this, Natalie becomes warmer to Sergius and invites him up to her room.  But this is quickly seen as a pretence, inasmuch as prior to his entry to her quarters, she prepares a gun to use to kill him.  When Sergius arrives, they kiss.  He soon spots the gun under her quilt, though, but pretends not to notice and turns his back on her so that she can shoot him.  There is an interesting camera pan which (a) starts with Natalie in frame drawing her gun to shoot and then (b) pans over to Sergius with his back to her, but fatalistically watching her in the mirror as she is taking her aim. 

But she doesn’t shoot.  She collapses and drops her gun (presumably now expecting that she will be executed).  He asks her why she didn’t shoot, and she says,

“I suppose it was because I couldn’t kill anyone who loves Russia as much as you do.”

They then embrace in mutual confession of their love for each other.  So Natalie had been play-acting about being charmed by Sergius, but gradually she started really falling in love with him.

4.  The Revolution

With Sergius, accompanied by Natalie, heading out on a train to supervise the troops at the war front, the Russian Revolution is coming to a head.  Leon Trotsky is shown preparing for the takeover, and a signal event will be the capture of the train Sergius and his officer staff are on. At a stop along the way, the train is duly overrun by an angry revolutionary mob, and all the officers are dragged out.  The mob looks like they will tear Sergius to pieces, but Natalie jumps out and becomes a fiery revolutionist again. She grabs a revolutionary flag, mocks Sergius in front of the crowd, and tells them that it would be best first to subject him to extreme humiliation before killing him. So she convinces them to make him stoke the locomotive engine all the way to Petrograd before he is to be executed there.

The train sets out with Sergius stoking the engine.  Along the way, Natalie sneaks to the engine cabin and tells him that she still loves him – she only called him out to save his life at that moment.  She gives to him the pearl necklace he had earlier given to her so that now he can use it to bribe his way out of Russia. Then Sergius jumps from the train and watches from the ground as it steams away from him.  But in the distance, he sees the train crossing a railway bridge that collapses, killing all on board, including his beloved Natalie.

5.  The Hollywood Film Shoot

Sergius’s flashback is over, and we return to the present on the film stage.  The director Leo Andreyev is inspecting his army-costumed extras just as haughtily as Sergius used to do. When Sergius sees Andreyev, he finally recognizes him for the first time.  Now it’s Leo’s turn to lord it over Sergius.  A studio scene has been setup to show a Russian army charge to be led by Sergius.  Leo establishes the atmosphere for the shoot by having the Russian national anthem played (remember this is a silent film, so this is to inspire Sergius), turning on the wind machine, and having the stage dramatically lit. This atmosphere turns out to be too real for the mentally scarred Sergius, and he starts believing that this is a real battle. With the cameras rolling, his passion and fire come back to him, and he dramatically leads what he believes is a real charge. The strain, though, is too much for him, and he collapses and dies of a heart attack. The assistant director, amazed at Sergius’s performance, notes sadly that he was a great actor. Leo responds reflectively by saying he was more than that, he was a great man.

Von Sternberg cinematically tells the story of The Last Command with his expressionistic techniques.  These include many dramatically lit, in-depth camera compositions that establish the desired context and mood.  Almost everything takes place at night, when shadows loom. Further colouring the proceedings was the use of cigarette smoke. The main characters, particularly Powell and Jannings, are almost constantly shown puffing on cigarettes and enshrouding themselves in billowing smoke. These often smoky, in-depth establishing shots were punctuated with dramatic closeups that conveyed the characterological developments. Although Jannings was a veteran of conventional silent screen aesthetics and liked to make exaggerated dramatic gestures, von Sternberg kept these relatively under control and got more out of the moody, expressive closeups of both Jannings and Evelyn Brent.

With these expressive techniques, von Sternberg essentially wove together two stories, each with its own theme:

• The outer story of Sergius’s fall from power and his “last command” in Hollywood.  This story is basically told in acts 1, 2, a piece of 4, and 5.  The theme for this narrative is basically dignity.
• The inner story of Sergius and Natalie.  This story is told in acts 3 and 4.  Here the theme is love.

Sergius’s Fall

The outer story is the one people usually talk about in connection with this film and is about Sergius’s loss of status and reduction to an impoverished state.  But in the final scene he is thought to have achieved some sort of redemption. The underlying theme for this scenario may be referred to here as dignity, although that particular term is fraught with misunderstandings. I basically agree with Arthur Schopenhauer, who correctly dismissed the notion of dignity as “the shibboleth of all perplexed and empty-headed moralists” [2]. In fact this fabricated pseudo-concept (I say “pseudo” because there is no common agreement on what it means) is, rather than a human right, often evoked simply to justify violent acts of vengeance that obliterate human rights, particularly in the Middle East and in Asia. Unfortunately, the idea of dignity was explicitly championed by Kant and was later enshrined in the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights [3], so it does retain some currency today.  Samuel Moyn offers some further useful commentary on this troublesome notion in his article, “Dignity’s Due” [4]. Anyway, although I do not believe that dignity is at all a human right, we might agree that, on the basis of a person’s folk-psychological self-conception, someone might (a) believe that they inherently have dignity or (b) be thought to have it. And in some societies across the ocean from America, maintaining one’s dignity is all-important.  So in the outer story Sergius is shown to have lost his dignity, but (perhaps) to have regained it at the end.

Sergius’s and Natalie’s Love

However, it is the inner story about the improbable relationship between Sergius and Natalie that elevates the film to a high level and shows off von Sternberg at his best. There are clearly paradoxes about this relationship.  How could Natalie fall in love with Sergius, and so quickly? Does she only love him because he loves Russia? Does Sergius have faith in her, or is he fatalistic, when he turns his back on her, knowing that she intends to shoot him?  These questions probably have no answers.  All we can say is that for von Sternberg, love is not rational; true love invariably involves complete surrender to the beloved (and this notion is repeated in many of his greatest films).

Crucial to this narrative theme is the performance of Evelyn Brent, who had earlier starred in Underworld but is even more dramatically alluring here.  To me, she embodies the unique, animated glamour characteristic of the 1920s – a special kind of allure that has only been retained by French women today. She is seen to move from play-acting to authenticity and back with bewildering precipitancy, but she has her heart in it all the way. 

Their love sheds light on what was the real admirable virtue of Sergius. And this is the ultimate romantic message that von Sternberg delivers. Sergius was not a man who loved both Russia and Natalie just for reasons that could be argued logically. He loved them without rational justification or qualification. And whenever he felt he was in a position to do good (even in his final delusional state), he took action with passion.  For this reason he really was a “great man”, although I don’t think Leo Andreyev understood it that way.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Anton Kaes, “Illusions and Delusions”, 3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg, (2010), The Criterion Collection.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality, (1837/2005), Dover Classics, p. 51.
3. “United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights”, (1948), The United Nations
4. Samuel Moyn, “Dignity’s Due”, (2013), The Nation, November 4, 2013.

"Underworld" - Josef von Sternberg (1927)

Josef von Sternberg’s first big commercial success was the silent movie Underworld (1927), which is considered to have launched the gangster film genre. Based on Ben Hecht’s short story about the Chicago gangster scene, the film earned Hecht an Academy Award for Best Original Story [1].  Already with this film, von Sternberg’s complete mastery of cinematic artistry in its many forms is evident.

While Hecht’s story is all about the brutality and fierce codes of honor that reigned in the criminal gang world, von Sternberg introduced a more personal feeling of existential desire and isolation to the story.  Hecht was so unhappy about the changes that he initially (before he became aware that the film would be a hit) wanted his name removed from the credits.  But von Sternberg’s narrative additions greatly enhanced the story.

The film’s story concerns events surrounding the exploits of a notorious gangster, Bull Weed, whose daring, violent robberies seem to be beyond the police’s ability to do anything about them.  In this film, the focus is on individual gangsters and not, as it would be in later gangster movies, on the ruthless extent of the “mob” – seen as some kind of shadowy shape-shifting force with near limitless reach.  Although Bull Weed seems to have a gang of accomplices, you rarely see them in the film.  His principal rival is not the police, but another ruthless gangster, Buck Mulligan, whose “cover” occupation is the operation of a flower shop.

Bull Weed has a beautiful girlfriend, “Feathers”, whose dresses always feature feather adornments. Naturally, her attentions are coveted by rival Buck Mulligan.  Bull Weed also befriends and picks up out of the gutter an alcoholic ex-lawyer, known as “Rolls Royce”, who becomes a de facto member of Weed’s circle. The distinctive character types of these main figures and the interpersonal relations between them provide here for the first time what would be a von Sternberg romantic metaphor across most of his cinematic narratives:

• Bull Weed is the super-confidant and assertive macho male.  He is unreflective and thoughtless, but he is not usually cast as an inherently bad guy.  He is just used to getting his way with women and running roughshod over the more sensitive types of people.
• Rolls Royce is the civilized, sensitive, and more cautious figure, particularly when it comes to romantic situations. This personality is presumably a reflection of von Sternberg’s own persona.
• Feathers is the beautiful, passionate idol – the object of everyone’s desires who must choose between the two men who desire her.

The film narrative runs through four stages of narrative development among the characters.  Note that Hecht’s original story really only covered the last of these stages, or acts, and essentially everything before that final act was added by von Sternberg.

1.  Bull Weed meets “Rolls Royce” (20 minutes)
In the aftermath of a bank robbery, Bull Weed grabs a loitering drunk who might be a witness  and takes him back to his hideaway.  The drunk assures Bull Weed that he is as quiet as a “Rolls Royce”, and that becomes his nickname. Bull Weed and Feathers are later seen at the Dreamland Café, a hangout for the criminal element, where Rolls Royce is now working as an attendant. Weed's rival, Buck Mulligan, is shown as brutal, but his impotent, secondary status compared to Weed is clearly established in this sector.

2.  The Focus on Feathers (25 minutes)
Later Bull Weed takes Feathers back to his hideaway and shows off his accomplishment – he has cleaned up Rolls Royce and made him respectable again. Rolls Royce is now a refined, erudite figure of some class, but he is working for Weed and living at the hideaway. Feathers finds him fascinating, but her appreciation for Weed’s pilfered jewelry shows that she still belongs to the gangster.

They all attend the annual “armistice” ball that is held by the underworld and at which all rivalries are set aside for the evening. Von Sternberg’s visual display of the extravagant goings on here is lavish, and displays his powers of expressionistic presentation. He would offer up further examples of this nature in Dishonored (1931). As the night wears on and debauchery descends to drunkenness, Bull Weed passes out at his table, giving Buck Mulligan a chance to move in on Feathers.  He corners Feathers in a back room and tries to put the make on her.  Bull Weed, however, is revived in time and staggers over to break up the sexual harassment just in time.  Then he chases Mulligan back to his flower shop and shoots him dead.

3.  Jail (19 minutes)
Bull Weed is quickly arrested for the murder and sentenced to hang and thrown in jail.  Now Rolls Royce works to prepare to spring Weed from jail before he can be hanged. With Weed away from the hideaway, though, Rolls Royce and Feathers find themselves mutually attracted to each other, and they consider running away together before guilty consciences make them drop their plans.

At this stage von Sternberg builds up the tension with four parallel theatres of action:
1. Weed waiting in his cell and playing checkers with the guard,
2. the gang arriving outside to try a breakin,
3. Feathers waiting in a car to pick up Weed and take him to safety, and
4. Rolls Royce at the train station as a decoy. 
For unexplained reasons, however, the police get wind of the breakin plan, ambush the gang, and foil the plan.

4.  Weed Escapes (17 minutes)
Weed, thinking that Rolls Royce has betrayed him, manages to break out of his cell anyway and make his way back to his old hideaway. There he finds Rolls’s cigarette case with one of Feather’s feathers in it – further confirmation in his mind of the betrayal. Feathers now returns to the hideaway, unknowingly trailed by the police, who now know they have cornered Weed inside. An intense police machine gun bombardment  ensues, with Weed firing back with his own stock of weapons.  Rolls Royce heads back to the hideaway, too, to see what he can do. This leads to the melodramatic climax.

Although Underworld has themes of loyalty and honor, it is not these elements that make the film stand out.  What is truly memorable about the film is its expressionistic evocation of the dark, relentlessly intense psychological environment of the criminal world – a world of reckless machismo excitement that often ends badly.  This is what makes Underworld one of the great early films noir. 

The acting is expressionistic, too – perhaps more of a necessity in the silent era.  The exaggerated broad gestures of George Bancroft, in the  role of Bull Weed, starkly contrast with the refined, nuanced expressions of Clive Brook, in the roll of Rolls Royce.  And the allure of Feathers, played by Evelyn Brent, is primarily conveyed by her emotive glances in closeup.  The existential presence of personhood is, of course, entirely confined to the underworld element; the police are essentially an abstract, faceless force

What I especially like about Underworld, though, are the various moments of pure cinema that von Sternberg employed to convey the expressionistic mood of the outlaw world:

• The short bursts of violence, which are in the form of robberies, bombing, killings, and police captures, are startingly brief and brutal. They seem to come out of nowhere like a flash of light.  When Weed’s gang is ambushed, it’s all over in seconds.  When Weed breaks out of jail, the viewer barely sees what happens, it’s so quick.
• This contrasts with the slow movement towards intimacy between Rolls and Feathers in the second act.  This is all conveyed by meaningful glances and gestures.
• During the third act there is the remarkable buildup of tension as Weed plays checkers with his cell guard while he waits for his rescue. Time seems to be moving at a snail’s pace.  Then, as mentioned above, his gang is quickly captured in an ambush; and it’s all over in seconds.
• The violent shootout at the end is also spectacular. It goes on and on, and it seems that  the vast horde of policemen shooting at Weed’s upstairs window have the intention of destroying the entire apartment building.  Nevertheless, even in the midst of all this incredible violence, it seems that Weed becomes more human and less of a role player. At the end his narrative journey is as important as those of Rolls Royce and Feathers.

Underworld was a remarkable achievement for von Sternberg, who was at the early stages of his career.
★★★½

Notes:

1. The awards now known as “Oscars” were not yet called by that name then.

"Shanghai Express" - Josef von Sternberg (1932)

Shanghai Express was the fourth, and one of the best, of the seven outstanding films that Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s. Unlike their preceding film, Dishonored (1931), which had more of a historical/adventure spin to it, Shanghai Express was a return to the moody and deeply romantic style that characterized Morocco (1930). The story follows the fate of a group of mostly European travellers who take the train from Peking (which had recently been renamed, “Beiping”) to Shanghai. This was the “Warlord Period” of 20th century Chinese history, and the Nationalist Government at that time only had tenuous control over various warlords and rebel groups that were operating about the country.

Von Sternberg was always a master of cinematography, but this film was perhaps his masterpiece in chiaroscuro and atmospheric lighting. Working in the studio, he again managed to evoke an exotic realm that fires our imagination, even if it may not have perfectly matched the physical reality. Like Wong Kar Wai who came much later, von Sternberg effectively used physical confinement and cramped quarters, often setting his characters behind partially obscuring architectural artifacts in the foreground, to create the crowded, but often lonely, atmosphere of modern urban society. This cinematic style, combined with his stories which featured characters more obsessed about their pasts than their futures, set the parameters that came to make up film noir. Adding to these effects is the fact that this film takes place almost entirely at night and in the middle of a confusing Chinese civil war in which it is difficult to determine who can be trusted.

In fact the question of trust and faith turns out to be the principal theme of the film. The story begins with passengers boarding the first-class compartments of the Shanghai Express in Beiping. We are quickly introduced to a diverse set of these passengers, as they begin to make each others’ acquaintances. Many of them turn out to be misrepresenting themselves to varying degrees. They are

• “Shanghai Lilly” (played by Marlene Dietrich), whose name is really Magdalen. She is a “coaster” – a courtesan who travels up and down the east coast of China “living by her wits”, as they say.
• Captain Donald Harvey (Clive Brook), a medical doctor serving in the British military.
• Henry Chang, an enigmatic half-Chinese traveller.
• Hui Fei, another young “coaster”, but of Chinese ethnicity.
• Sam Salt, a loud, no-nonsense American.
• Reverend Carmichael, a highly moralistic Christian pastor from England.
• Mrs. Haggerty, an elderly American lady who runs a boarding house in Shanghai
• Eric Baum, an elderly German businessman.
• Major Lenard (played by Emile Chautard, a long-time French writer, director, and actor) an elderly French military officer.

As the train sets out, Harvey recognizes fellow passenger Shanghai Lilly as his former lover, Magdalen, whom he has not seen since he jealously broke off their relationship five years earlier. It is clear that they still have strong, though suppressed, feelings for each other. The issue is Magdalen’s status. Five years earlier she had played the game of trying to make the clearly not-very-demonstrative Harvey jealous, but this ploy had backfired when he had angrily walked out. Disconsolate afterwards and without any purpose to her life, she had taken on many other lovers and had become a “fallen woman”. Now, though she admits her foolish mistake, Harvey doesn’t believe her. Reflecting on what she may have been doing during their time apart, he says, “I wish you could tell me there had been no other men.”, and she responds by saying, “I wish I could, Doc, but five years is a long time.” This is the abiding character of Marlene Dietrich in all her films: utter unashamed authenticity about who she is. You must take her on her terms.

Reverend Carmichael certainly doesn’t take her on any terms. He sternly warns the other passengers in the carriage about the “rotten souls” of the two prostitutes on the train. Harvey, the surgeon and man of science, scoffs at Carmichael’s absurd claims, scornfully questioning how Carmichael could ever have acquired the medical knowledge first to identify the location the soul in the human body and then to ascertain its state of rottenness.

The train is soon stopped by government soldiers, and all passengers are forced to leave their carriages and show their documents. One of the Chinese passengers is singled out and arrested. In the commotion Henry Chang goes to a nearby telegraph office and sends a coded message to someone indicating that (a) a top rebel agent has been arrested, (b) that the train must be stopped by rebel forces at an upcoming station, and, by his signed codeword, that (c) he, himself, is the “Number 1" in the rebel warlord organization.

In due course, the Shanghai Express is stopped by attacking rebel soldiers, as Chang had ordered, and after many Chinese government soldiers are killed, all the passengers are again ordered to disembark from the train. Chang now reveals himself as the rebel commander that he is, and he begins examining the passengers in order to identify a suitable hostage that he can use to swap with the government in exchange for his own highly valued assistant now in government custody. When he discovers that Harvey is travelling to Shanghai in order to perform critical brain surgery on the governor general there, Chang knows that he has found his man. Another telegram is sent, and the English persuade the Chinese government to agree to make the trade.

Meanwhile Magdalen, agitated with worry about what might happen to Harvey, urges Reverend Carmichael to do something. He tells her that the only thing she can do is to pray to God, and when she doubts that God would listen to such a sinner as herself, he assures her that God remains on speaking terms with everybody. So she sneaks off to a darkened train compartment and kneels down in fervent prayer.

Later during the waiting for the returned rebel agent, Chang, who has had his eye on both Shanghai Lilly (Magdalen) and Hui Fei, threateningly propositions Lilly, and Harvey intercedes forcefully by punching him. Furious about this loss of face, the ruthless Chang has Harvey bound to a chair and swears to Lilly that he will have Harvey’s eyes gouged out prior to returning him to the government. Distraught upon hearing this, Lilly resolutely decides to sacrifice herself for her love and offers to become Chang’s mistress if he will spare Harvey. Chang accepts the deal and releases Harvey, but Hui Fei, who had earlier been forced to submit to Chang’s sexual demands, stabs and kills the monster when he is not looking. Before the rebels can react, everybody scrambles to get back on to the train, and it pulls out of the station on the way to Shanghai.

Now Magdalen and Harvey are safe, but Harvey knows nothing of Magdalen’s willingness to sacrifice herself for his safety. In his eyes, Magdalen was simply willing to sell herself to another man. And Magdalen never tells him – she never tries to apologise for her past deeds. She offers her love unconditionally and demands the same in return. This is always von Sternberg’s characterisation of true love. Finally, at the Shanghai train station when they appear to be about to separate for the last time, Harvey breaks down and comes over to Magdalen. Confessing his total and unconditional love for her, they finally embrace.

The theme of love and faith overcoming all obstacles has rarely been so exquisitely evoked as in Shanghai Express. Von Sternberg has created in the film a dark, Expressionistic journey down into the depths of Hell and back, with love the only saving grace. Everyone you meet may have some secrets, and sometimes you must simply have blind faith in them. In fact several of the passengers on the train turn out to be not what they seem. Chang, of course, turns out not to be a businessman, but a rebel warlord. Major Lenard turns out not really to be a major; he was discharged from the military, but wishes to conceal that fact from his family. Eric Baum turns out not to be a respectable businessman, but a dealer in illegal opium. Hui Fei appears to be submissive, but she is capable of murdering her assailant. Even kindly Mrs. Haggerty tries to sneak her pet dog past the authorities and into her compartment on the train. And Reverend Carmichael finally recognizes and confesses that the women with the supposedly “rotten soul” is actually worth much more than all the others.

The acting in the film is generally good, but Eugene Palette’s performance as the American Sam Salt is a bit overbearing. Warner Oland, who convincingly played the loathsome Henry Chang, was actually of Swedish descent, but he made a career out of playing Chinese – he was famous for his role as Charlie Chan during the 1930s. The role of Hui Fei was played by Anna May Wong, who was the first Chinese star in American movies. Gustav von Seyffertitz, who had a major role in Dishonored, here played the role of Eric Baum in his usual emphatic fashion. Clive Brooks, though, is excessively wooden and stiff as Captain Harvey. The British stiff upper-lip tradition is taken to such lengths in his case that one wonders if there is any capacity at all for romantic passion beneath that uniform. Von Sternberg had a much more effective British actor in his next film, Blonde Venus, with Herbert Marshall, who had the right combination of reserve and emotion.

Marlene Dietrich, though, makes up for any shortcomings on the parts of the other performances. Dietrich characteristically had the magical persona, as projected by Josef von Sternberg, of always being both direct and demure. She suggests delicacy, but is nevertheless capable of forcefulness. She is authentic, yet she is invariably ironic: she is always composed and resigned to her fate – and there is always a suggestion that there is more to the story than she cares to tell. There are affinities between Dietrich and Chinese actress Gong Li (as directed by Zhang Yimou). Both are physically robust, yet graceful and sensitive. And with both of them, there is the suggestion of strong passion that lurks just below the surface.

What makes the film an outstanding experience, though, is not so much the ironies of the characterizations, but the masterful visual expression of the story. It is a characteristic of von Sternberg’s films to portray the action events in elaborately shot, but brief and fast-paced impressionistic sequences, while the “relationship” scenes are lingering, more fully rounded explorations of human interaction. Von Sternberg switches back and forth in this fashion between (a) the exotic and ominous details of the journey, (b) the colorful and distracting prattle of the expatriate wayfarers, and (c) the anguish felt by the former lovers. This is all punctuated by the visual and aural motif of the steam-driven train relentlessly chugging towards the dark destiny that awaits them all (an effect that Von Sternberg similarly achieved in Morocco, with the legionnaires’ drumbeat incessantly signalling the dark forces pulling Legionnaire Brown away from Amy Jolly). In Shanghai Express it all comes together – a dark, romantic, expressionistic dream.
★★★★