Word: dietrichs
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Shanghai Express fully justifies its title. For one thing, the action mostly takes place aboard a train of the same name running between Peiping and Shanghai. But more important, it is a film full of violence, some intrigue, snappy dialogue, and Marlene Dietrich. The last asset is generally enough to make any film worthwhile. This particular one, made when techniques were beginning to reach their present excellence, and way before Miss Dietrich became the least touch faded, shows her a really lovely woman. Every once in a while director Joseph von Sternberg took lengthy close...
When the camera is not particularly concerned with demonstrating how nice Miss Dietrich looks in all types of lighting, it is busy recording a fairly exciting story, and, more important, showing a wide variety of interesting people. The hero is the type of terse, firm-chinned British officer that has been holding down forts against irresistible odds for generations...
Among the other passengers is a half-caste rebel leader whose troops hold up the train, at which point he begins to work his sweet, if greasy, will upon Miss Dietrich and her Oriental business colleague, Anna May Wong. Miss Dietrich's trade name is "Shanghai Lily," indicating what sort of business...
Musicians-as musicians-will little note nor long remember Columbia's LP Album No. ML 4975. It will neither change the hit-parade standings nor set hi-finatics atweeting and awoofing. For the most part Marlene Dietrich at the Cafe de Paris is little more than a collection of musical memories, taped directly from the floor amid the tinkle and clatter of a London nightclub performance almost a year ago, and sung, not always on key, by a middle-aged entertainer who has been around for some time. Yet, here, in the familiar laryngitic murmur of a voice...
...Dietrich magic lingers-far more persistently than the whiff of Lanvin's Arpege with which Columbia has obligingly scented the first 5,000 albums...