Shanghai Express (1932)

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong survive a train hijacking. One by bargaining with a warlord, the other by stabbing him. That Shanghai Express.

[00:00:10]Don't you find respectable people terribly dull?

[00:00:15]Dietrich plays Shanghai Lily, a woman whose reputation precedes her everywhere she goes. On the same train is her former lover who still wants her and still judges her. Then there's Anna May Wong as Hui Fei, quiet, mysterious, and very observant. The train gets hijacked and everything shifts. What follows is less a romance and more a pressure cooker. Desire, judgement, survival, and control all trapped in the same moving space. And somehow it's one of the most visually beautiful films of the 1930s.

[00:00:43]Next up, Greta Garbo in a royal romance where power, identity, and desire become their own kind of battlefield.