Word: sternbergs
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...direction of Von Sternberg is as usual obvious because of its elusiveness. His China is unbelievably like the China we had always hoped to see; and once we have watched the Express crawl between the overhanging rafters of an ancient city, chasing foolish chickens before, it is difficult to accept a more prosaic film. To have seen Shanghai Lily looking like a caged imperial tiger as her black gown swirls about her is to have seen a figure that spoils one for lesser women...
...atmosphere which Director von Sternberg cleverly built up through the slow beginning of the picture and the brilliant photographic effects achieved by his camera man, Lee Garmes, have effect of giving this melodramatic cliché a reality which it could not possibly achieve in a medium less persuasive than the cinema. Because the cars, the engines, the soldiers, the flags and noises of cities through which the Shanghai express passes are thoroughly realistic, the villainies of Mr. Chang and even the curiously elaborate speeches written for Clive Brook seem real also. Miss Dietrich's legs are not so evident...
...Dissatisfied because the cinema failed to impeach similarly, Dreiser tried and failed to secure an injunction against its showing. But there are other and more important qualities which Dreiser got into his book and which Adapter Samuel Hoffenstein, light-versifier and onetime theatrical pressagent, and Director Josef von Sternberg failed to get into the picture...
Director von Sternberg, neither creator nor translator, had the insoluble problem of duplicating a masterpiece in a medium which it was not meant to fit. The string of hasty sequences with which the picture replaces the first volume of the novel fails to make Clyde Griffiths excitingly alive, "unless the spectator remembers the novel well enough to fill in the gaps. Titles, gloomily printed on a background of waves, interrupt the action more than they elucidate it. Phillips Holmes plays Clyde Griffiths in perfunctory fashion. He experiences every human emotion without varying his expression except by a toothy smile...
Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Morocco...