1930s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, Romance, Thriller

Shanghai Express (1931)

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenwriter: Jules Furthman

By Roderick Heath

Josef von Sternberg’s collaborations with Marlene Dietrich perhaps come closest of all the products of classic Hollywood film to embodying an oft-conjured pop-art fantasia of what popular cinema once was like. Theirs was a cinematic world of glamour-touched amazons blazing in photogenic glory against backdrops that persist amidst dreamlike textures and expressionist shadows, a world forged on soundstages as Sternberg rejected realism in cinema in favour of generating his own, stylised pocket universes and exalting the notion that cinema was above all a foundry of dreams for a dull and seamy world gripped by Depression and war and other chaotic turns. The sort of thing more recent filmmakers and pop stars try to create pastiches of when referring back to that era’s cinema. Dietrich was the fetishised linchpin, the preeminent and eternal exemplar of Sternberg’s actress-sphinxes, transformed through both filmmaking technique and an array of carefully worked narratives into a confluence of female archetypes that blur the feminine illusion and the cinematic kind and merely become everything alluring and untouchable. Sternberg discovered Dietrich whilst making a sojourn to Germany to recover from commercial disappointments in Hollywood. Their first collaboration The Blue Angel (1930), was a variation on one of Sternberg’s favourite themes, of a man destroyed by his own obsessive streak, but this time with heavy emphasis on the saucy, amoral seductress who almost incidentally breaks down a cultured professor.

Dietrich and Sternberg’s first film in Hollywood, Morocco (1930), partly inverted that template, casting Dietrich as a nightclub performer who eventually discovers the mortifying bliss of selfless passion. Lucky perhaps for Dietrich and Sternberg that Morocco came out in America before The Blue Angel, establishing Dietrich not as a femme fatale but a romantic hiding within a sensual cynic, essentially the persona that would drive the next thirty years of her career. By the time of The Scarlet Empress (1934) Sternberg was charting the ironic shifts of the collaboration and their off-screen relationship, the gawking naïf eventually replaced by the imperious, cuckolding hedonist, and finally the all-sweeping conqueror who can only be regarded in awe and fear. Shanghai Express was Sternberg and Dietrich’s fourth film together, in a string of movies that moved purposefully between intensely imagined far-flung locales. It also represents another stream within Sternberg’s oeuvre, forming the first part of a loose quadrilogy that could be described as Sternberg’s Orientalist phase, followed by The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Macao (1952), and the actually made-in-Japan Anatahan (1953). Something in Sternberg’s imagination was set loose by such settings. Undoubtedly, this was partly sparked by proximity to exotic aesthetics and the promise of different ethical and cultural prisms, both things he was ineffably fascinated by in his ongoing rebellion against tepid mainstream aesthetics and mores, just before both public taste and Hollywood regimes would turn against what he was doing.

Sternberg, despite his mock-aristocratic airs and appended “von”, had come up the hard way, both as an Austrian Jewish immigrant and a Hollywood player. Sternberg was born out of wedlock in a Vienna to which he remained permanently, nostalgically attached, scion to a bullying father who was disinherited for finally, actually tying the knot with his mother. He recalled his family’s passage through Ellis Island and being inspected like cattle. He was a troubling youth, intermittently homeless and oscillating between Europe and America in a long and desperate search for something like a home. He dropped out of high school determined to teach himself, and changed his name from Jonas to Josef to please himself. He first started working with film during World War I when he made training films for the US Army, and afterwards rode a motorcycle around Italy to try and see all the country’s churches. Even the roots of his appended “von” are hazy, possibly handed him by a studio, or adopted as a tribute to his hero Erich Von Stroheim, whose favour he lost after he agreed to help MGM reedit the master’s The Merry Widow (1926).

Sternberg’s fascination for places and cultures meeting at points of flux in multicultural melting pots had then a persuasively autobiographical meaning. For Sternberg aesthetics weren’t just decoration, but the actual stuff of life, evoking the jostling mass of impressions and conventions and signifiers woven together to create an illusion of society, his cinematic frames points of converge for myriad signs and tropes and ideas. In none of his films is this more vital than with Shanghai Express, which might not be his greatest film, but is nonetheless perhaps his most essential and representative work. That’s in part because it’s one of his Dietrich vehicles, and also a sublime balancing act at once delirious and exacting, surreal and tactile, sarcastic and sincere, old-fashioned and fiercely modern. The basic material is harvested from some well-worn texts revolving around the ever-mythologised figure of the fallen but essential decent and redeemable prostitute, pinching the basic plot of Guy De Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif,” (which would also serve a few years later as a template for John Ford’s Stagecoach, 1939), with a little of W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Rain” and novel The Painted Veil thrown in for good measure.

The official basis however was a story by Henry Hervey, inspired in turn by a true incident that occurred in 1923. Known as the Lincheng Outrage, that incident saw a warlord out of Shandong capture the Shanghai-to-Beijing express and take everyone on board hostage, including twenty-five westerners, amongst them Lucy Aldrich, aunt of future filmmaker Robert Aldrich. After being held for two days, a ransom was paid and all the captives freed. Shanghai Express posits other reasons for such a waylaying. Warner Oland, the Swedish actor then very famous and popular for playing Chinese characters including the prototypical supervillain Fu Manchu and detective character Charlie Chan, is cast as Henry Chang, aka Number One, the leader of a revolutionary army who has mixed Chinese and European heritage, a detail Sternberg seems to have introduced in part to express scepticism with being saddled with Oland’s yellowface act, but also using it purposefully to meditate on the theme of divided identity in a film otherwise driven by clashing binaries. Chang becomes one of many projection figures for Sternberg as a portrait in will, a man who declares “I live by my own code,” and operates his army less as an organ with political aims than as an extension of his own will and ego, much like Sternberg’s approach to filmmaking.

Structural affinity here with disaster movies, and Shanghai Express is one, after a fashion, whilst also resembling the film that beat it out for 1932’s Best Picture Oscar, Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel, which similarly threw together an array of archetypes into a microcosmic setting that begets odd new realities. Where Grand Hotel is nascent soap opera wrapped in art deco chic, Shanghai Express is more classical melodrama, and a consequential hit of early sound cinema, establishing some stock situations and archetypes that would pervade the next twenty years of Hollywood product. Even Casablanca (1942) can be described as a variant. Furthman would recycle elements of his script for this for the likes of Tay Garnett’s China Seas (1935) and eventually for Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and as different as Sternberg and Hawks were, they had a point of intersection that Furthman helped draw out, in their fascination with characters who learn to live entirely by their own compass. Furthman would also recycle and amplify some of it, like the “To buy a new hat” joke made by the footloose heroine when questioned by pompous creeps about her reasons for travelling, in Hawks’ To Have And Have Not (1944). More immediately Shanghai Express sparked a wave of films set in then-fractious China, films like Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), Lewis Milestone’s The General Died At Dawn (1936), John Farrow’s West of Shanghai (1937), and Sidney Franklin’s The Good Earth (1937).

Sternberg opens with a rigorous sense linearity in tethering narrative to the train itself, depicting labourers making the train ready for is journey out of Beijing Station, or Peiping as it’s referred to here as per outmoded transliteration. Sternberg offers a brief montage of an engineer oiling mechanisms and a coolie washing windows, before the passengers begin to arrive. Some servants carry an opulent litter up to the train and out climbs Hui Fei (Anna May Wong), presented as an exemplar of Eastern status but also the first of the film’s two crucial women apart, granted prosperity and a measure of imperious independence at the expense of being considered socially unacceptable. Meanwhile the representatives of the West buy their tickets in a queue: old biddy Mrs. Haggerty (Louise Closser Hale) hands out cards for her boarding house in Shanghai and dotes over her dog which she smuggles into her compartment in a hamper, only to suffer his being stashed away in the baggage car. Bulbous businessman Yankee Sam Salt (Eugene Pallette) wears his wealth literally on his sleeve in the form of diamonds, only for these to prove to be phonies, the real ones never leaving his safe. Skinny old traveller Eric Baum (Gustav von Seyffertitz) brings a whiff of decadence and neurasthenia aboard: he calls himself an invalid and is grouchily insistent on avoiding all drafts, forcing windows to be kept shut and ventilators turned off. Major Lenard (Émile Chautard) is a French military man in full uniform, making his pleasantries to all but barely speaking a word of English. Missionary Reverend Carmichael (Lawrence Grant) comes aboard charged up with seemingly scornful passion for virtue. And there’s Chang, biding his time and playing the gentleman but always barely concealing his mordant and fatalistic vision.

Two other passengers of consequence also board the train: Captain Dr Donald ‘Doc’ Harvey (Clive Brook), a military surgeon being shuttled to Shanghai to perform an urgent operation on the governor-general of Shanghai, and Madeline, known to all and sundry by her nom-de-guerre Shanghai Lily (Dietrich). Lily is dropped off in the up-to-date equivalent of Hui Fei’s litter, a shimmering black Rolls Royce. She enters station, film, and our dreams, dressed as a fantasy vision, wearing a dress made of black feathers and a black mesh veil. She’s rendered a dark angel, a looming raptor, a creature of the night, every inch the maneater she’s characterised with by Harvey’s army chums and the fuming moralists aboard the train. Word of Lily being aboard is an instant topic of gossip and amused speculation, and Donald is forewarned to his affectations of sardonic disinterest and bewilderment as he’s told of this “notorious coaster.” When he asks what that is, he’s told, “A coaster’s a woman who lives by her wits along the China coast.” A high-class prostitute, in short. Donald maintains a level of cool detachment in the face of such notoriety close at hand, until he actually encounters Shanghai Lily and realises she’s actually Madeline, his former flame, the woman whose photo he still keeps a photo of in his watch case. “Married?” Donald asks, to Lily’s famous reply with its faint note of bitter humour and perverse pride, “No. It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.”

Even as he was adapting well to working with sound, Sternberg was a born silent filmmaker, who instinctively laboured to communicate through images. In true form, Sternberg condenses his metaphor for the world he’s portraying in Shanghai Express into a shot of the train rolling down a narrow Peiping street festooned with banners and crowded with shoppers and vendors, with the train it finally forced to halt because a cow has taken up station on the tracks, his aged owner in no hurry to move on for this chugging, blustering, smoke-spewing machine of modernity and its cargo of the rich and white. During the halt for the cow to be urged on Harvey and Lily meet and square off in the sharply divided image of a carriage window, shifting postures and attitudes, Lily framed with the edge of a bold and hard-edged Chinese banner, Harvey with a more tattered and discoloured standard, even as his trim, contained figure in uniform counters the inky wash of her black feathers. Once the train is allowed to creep onwards again, the contingent of soldiers riding atop the train lean over to spear food on the vendors’ stalls with their bayonets, in a sublimely cynical vignette that encapsulates with equal efficiency Sternberg’s opinion of military power and its part in this drama. Soon the Reverend Carmichael gets wind of the wicked ladies aboard the train, peering in on them like a bespectacled stork, and then warns Harvey, “Those two women are riding this train in search of victims…For the last fortnight I’ve been attending a man who went out of his mind after spending every penny on her.”

Whilst nominally a thriller and adventure movie, Shanghai Express is barely interested in that sort of thing, instead playing out as a series of entwined confrontations that all explore aspects of personal morality, finally winnowing it all down to a romantic quandary, being the fate of Harvey and Lily’s relationship. Both are still obviously charged with profound attraction from their first reunion and all the fluctuations that befall them. It’s a stock situation of course, cornball in almost any other hands, except for the way Sternberg frames it as only a slightly exaggerated take on the basic problem of men and women. It becomes clear during their many, angular conversations, filled with wordings and phrases that suggest some sort of elaborate semaphore, that whilst they were once engaged, Lily decided to test Donald’s faith in their love by provoking his jealousy, but the gesture backfired as Donald immediately left her. The push and pull between passion and disquiet, trust and suspicion enacted between Donald and Lily is the crux of all, with love posited as a form of faith as vital as, if not moreso, the religious kind. In that context it’s Donald rather than Lily who is the fallen figure, although at the same time he has a potency of will that distinguishes him from the men who go out of their mind after spending every penny on her. It’s easy to imagine Sternberg smirking more than a little when the film builds to the crucial moment when Lily prays for Donald’s safety in an apex of Hollywood cheese, and yet he deals with it with fierce earnestness, in part because of the heady power in that convergence of kinds of faith and, more importantly, in the images springing from it. Where Morocco found its famous zenith in the image of Dietrich striding off into the desert, facing a kind of degradation but also transcendence that took her to the verge of the mythic, Lily faces a similar pivot in which she offers her proof of faith in the most literal manner possible, with her body.

Sternberg couches this against the backdrop of the titular Shanghai Express, which is for the most part a moving stasis chamber for European sensibilities, drilling its way through a land in turmoil with its own ways of thinking and seeing and feeling. China at the time was a very different country in 1932 to the one we know today, notoriously beset by civil strife, regional warlords, clashing political factions, and overbearing Western influence. In the same year Shanghai Express was released Japan annexed Manchuria, and two years later Mao Zedong would lead the Long March. Not that Sternberg is interested in such political reality, although he and Furthman still arrive at a pretty sharp metaphor for a variety of petty, revanchist nationalism as embodied by Chang. Chang and Hui Fei are the only locals travelling in the first class compartment. Petty irritants proliferate, including Baum’s demands the ventilators in the dining car be shut off, but contain the seeds of awful consequence; big objections, like Carmichael’s complaints about the two hookers on the train, eventually prove negligible. At one point the train is stopped by government soldiers who inspect every passenger’s passports and papers, a sort of legal-official version of what Chang does more exactingly later when he scours every passenger for lies, deceptions, delusions, and hidden motives. During the sweep a tall Chinese passenger is arrested and spirited away by the soldiers: the arrested man is an agent of Chang’s carrying important information, and his loss provokes Chang to send a coded message to his soldiers up the line to wait for the train at the remote station of Te-Shan and be ready to capture it. The lush language of Chang’s coded message (“Blue Lotus lost – must have red blossoms at midnight.”) offers a flash of incidental poetry wrapped around dark meaning, and sarcastically mirrors the interplay of social codes and expressions that dance around the meat of each matter, including the way Donald and Lily’s speech waltzes around exact expressions of their feelings.

As the two fall into talking again on the carriage balcony, eventually resurging passion gets the better of both as Lily draws Donald down for a kiss, whereupon Sternberg cuts wittily to a shot of the loop on a mail pouch being held for a porter on the train to snatch as it rushes by: the old snare draws tight. “I wish you could tell me there were no other men,” Donald declares in exasperation after as he abruptly releases Lily, who retorts, donning his uniform cap in ironically subsuming his captaincy: “I wish I could too Doc, but five years in China is a long time.” When Donald glumly recites the life they should have had together and notes the things he wouldn’t have done if all that had transpired, Lily responds the only thing she wouldn’t have done was bob her hair. Delivered a telegram and asked by Donald if it’s from one of her lovers, she says no, and after she extracts a promise of belief from Donald hands him the telegram, which is indeed from one of her male admirers awaiting her arrival in Shanghai eagerly. Lily delivers the killer blow for both of them: “When I needed your faith you withheld it, and now that I don’t need it, and don’t deserve it, you give it to me.” The contrast in affect between the two, Donald’s glumness and Lily effervescent, accepting humour, betrays radically different ways of surviving an event that did damage to them both, suggesting that when Madeline became Shanghai Lily it was with a kind of heroic determination.

That determination shines out from her earliest scenes, as Lily is ensconced in her apartment with Hui Fei, the two hussies of radically different backgrounds and temperaments nonetheless obliged to meet in solidarity and silently indulge each-other. Lily has a gramophone from which she lets blare saucy jazz. When Mrs Haggerty comes around soliciting their custom for her boarding house with the promise she only allows the most respectable people in, Lily questions as she twiddles Haggerty’s card, “Don’t you find respectable people terribly…dull?” When Haggerty reiterates that she keeps a boarding house, Lily makes a play of mishearing her and alluding to the possibility she keeps a bawdyhouse, whilst Hui Fei comments that she doesn’t quite grasp Haggert’s definition of respectability. The sarcasm of the two women repels her and Carmichael, even as Donald, Lenard, and Salt are in their individual and worldly ways more gentlemanly: “Time to put on the nose bags!” Salt quips as he passes the women on the way to the dining car and gives Hui Fei a chummy squeeze of the shoulder. Palette is ingeniously cast as Salt, exploiting his bullfrog chin and croaky voice to embody a certain kind of stolid American canniness, sporting his showy jewels that declare his wealth, only to be forced to give them up, and then reveal they were fakes all the time: “The real ones are in a safe in Shanghai.”

Chang meanwhile tries to corner Hui Fei in her apartment, seeking an easy conquest from the courtesan. Sternberg films this crucial moment in one deadpan shot utilising the sliding compartment doors as an element of staging, as Chang slides shut a door with a curtained window as a screen, before drawing Hui Fei to him for a moment of shadow-play, only for her to resist and slide the door open again, shoving Chang back into the hallway and delivering harsh rebuke in Mandarin. When the train reaches Te-Shan, Chang’s hidden soldiers gun down the government troops protecting it in an interlude of pure Expressionist style, and gather the first-class passengers in the station building, a run-down and eerie locale hastily repurposed as Chang’s headquarters. Chang takes over an office and bunkroom and one by one summons the passengers up to be variously interrogated and robbed, and, when Chang thinks it proper, to be punished for their slights and injuries to him. In the process Chang ruthlessly exposes rips away all false guises including his own, becoming a kind of judge and also an authorial figure, ending the games played aboard the train and forcing a dramatic crisis. Chang robs Salt, prods Baum with the truth that he’s an opium merchant, and utilises Lily’s translating skills to extract Lenard’s confession that he’s been drummed out of the French army but still wants to maintain the illusion he’s a soldier for his sister’s benefit when he reaches Shanghai. Hui Fei is bundled into his rooms, raped, and kicked out again, dishevelled and dizzy. He even nimbly extracts from Donald the facts of his mission to Shanghai, presenting him with just the right point of leverage to force his agent’s release and return.

Chang waves a red-hot iron plucked from a brazier at Baum and using it to scorch through a hanging mesh veil as a grim promise of his intention towards the rude old man: “I’m not punishing you because you deal in opium, but for your insolence to me on the train.” The station is festooned with many such veils, creating a kind of spider’s web as well as exacerbating the dreamy atmosphere. Chang burning the veil also serves as an arresting visual metaphor for Chang’s function in burning away the veils around the other characters, and a note of authentic brutality that gives special urgency later when Chang makes even worse threats against Donald. After Lily aids Chang in translating for Lenard, Chang lets her take a nap in a bunk in his office, and then proposes that she come be his guest-cum-concubine for a spell. Lily however declares that she’s reformed, and when Chang becomes physical, Donald, waiting out his hostage time in a neighbouring room and overhearing, kicks down the door and wallops the warlord. In payback, even after his agent is returned by the government in a special train, Chang plans to burn Donald’s eyes out. Lily, worried when she’s thrown out of Chang’s rooms whilst Donald is held, is so desperate she asks Carmichael if he can do anything: Carmichael tells her the only thing she can do is get down on her knees and pray, and when Lily admits she might as well “if God is still on speaking terms with me,” Carmichael declares, irritably but also earnestly, “God is on speaking terms with everybody.” Carmichael then catches a glimpse of Lily retreating into a darkened compartment and praying.

What’s compelling about all this, which seems on the face of things to be a pure sop to Hollywood sentiment and the Carmichaels in the audience busy getting the Production Code imposed on movies, lies in the way Sternberg presents this turn not as an abasement of Lily but rather an apotheosis. Lily makes no appeal for approval to anyone except the Almighty, evincing a personal code just as strong as Chang’s, and it’s she who forces Carmichael to revise his ideas of morality rather than him working upon her. Hui Fei has a similarly rigorous sensibility, with an added lustre of patriotic zeal: when she finally realises who Chang is, she comments that it will “be a great day for China” when he’s captured and executed, and soon is given good cause to do it herself. Later she comments with cold zest, “He repaid his debt to me.” Sternberg had a recurring fascination with tales of redemption, transfiguring events that rescue characters from the cage of their ego, existing simultaneously to and sometimes in commentary upon his other fixation on self-destructive types who finally can’t escape that cage and go mad or are otherwise destroyed instead. The spectacle of Carmichael becoming Lily’s champion imbues the last portion of the film with unexpected new dimension, moving beyond a mere clash between the representative of happily sceptical erotic power and the joyless puritan, or the opposite, the fallen wanton beatifically reformed by the patronisingly virtuous, but with a sense of evolution in both characters and their worldviews: both are linked by their capacity to live up to implicit but difficult, even humiliating aspects of their credos. “Love without faith is like religion without faith,” Carmichael sighs with his customary brusqueness as he admits Lily’s point: “It doesn’t amount to very much.”

Dietrich had a slightly different energy in her early vehicles than she did by the 1940s when her persona had hardened along with her features. Dietrich was older than the usual run of movie ingénues, pushing 30 when Sternberg cast her in The Blue Angel and with a successful stage career already behind her, plus marriage and myriad adventures in Weimar nightlife. So her unique screen presence came ready-loaded with an impression of a personality well-honed, backing up the aura of bulletproof power and sly, provocative humour and pansexual power her characters so often displayed. And yet she was also just young enough to allow glimmers of naivety appear in her characters. Which made it all the more impressive when that veneer breaks down in the course of a movie, as Shanghai Express depicts, not shattered by external forces which Lily is well used to weathering, but by her true self, when faced with consequences for the things she actually cherishes, and the shattering of her veneer is not a loss but a recovery. Sternberg’s most electrifying and carefully crafted close-ups throughout the film portray the stations of this particular cross, as when he has her peer through the window of the Te-Shan station doors, eyes wide and blazing, her blonde bob now a little loose and wild, in the throes of fear for Donald, the spark of wild madness also rapture in the grip of authentic passion.

Wong, today a revived cult figure but one Hollywood sadly never really knew what to do with her in her own time, is just as fascinating a presence despite having a much smaller part. Shanghai Express posits Hui Fei as Lily’s accidental companion but also her fated doppelganger, even a kind of familiar, one who embodies and enacts the darker implications of Lily’s journey. Even more taciturn and self-contained, she’s untroubled by any lost love as Lily is. The mere sight of the two women in their compartment is compelling, the spectacle of their indolence in their detachment from all judgement and opinion outside of themselves, Lily playing her jazz and Hui Fei listlessly playing solitaire and smoking, the netherworld of hazily sensual and amoral delights each has repeatedly and bravely stepped into and still carry about them like a bubble, a state of almost alien exception Sternberg also rhymes with the ideal of cinema stardom itself. Sternberg and costumer Travis Banton present them as visual mirror images, Lily initially swathed in black only to eventually reveal her blazing hair, Hui Fei dressed in light, glossy hues with her black hair sliced in geometric precision. Shanghai Express isn’t exactly feminist in the modern sense, and yet its radicalism in certain regards still startles, viewing these two “fallen women” as the ones who command events on subtle and overt levels, and it’s the male characters who must get over themselves.

Hui Fei is unfortunately also exposed to someone like Chang, who feels no compunction in taking what he wants from her, where he’s more circumspect if scarcely less acquisitive with the Westerner Lily. When Hui Fei resists Chang sees it as a cue to abuse and humiliate, only to find the kind of pride and strength Chang seems to think is his personal province is also shared by the equally, potently vengeful courtesan. There’s also some sense of evil humour in the way Wong and Oland are cast given that Wong had played Oland’s daughter in the Fu Manchu film Daughter of the Dragon (1931). After Hui Fei is thrown out of Chang’s rooms with her formerly sculpted hair now loose and bedraggled, pawed at by one of Chang’s soldiers, she descends back into the train, trailed by Lily who grabs her when she plucks a dagger from her carrying bag and seems to be considering suicide. Instead, Hui Fei sneaks back into the station, lays in wait for Chang in the shadows, and stabs him to death when his back is turned to her: Sternberg films her through the hanging veils and shadows, transformed into a spectral presence by murderous zeal, only to return to her compartment on the train and resume her game of solitaire, only a slightly sadder gleam to her betraying anything happened in the meantime. By this time Chang has released Donald, having used the hot iron he was going to use on Donald’s eyes to first light his cigarette and then scorch through the bonds on his captive’s wrists to release him.

Seeing Lily in Chang’s company and assured by both of them that she’s going with the warlord willingly, Donald retreats with his gentlemanly pretences barely suppressing offence and anger, but when he learns from Hui Fei that she’s killed Chang, he grabs a gun from a superintendent sent to fetch him and dashes into the station to rescue Lily. Donald doesn’t have to shoot anyone, knocking out a couple of guards, returning to the train with Lily, and ordering a fast departure. Donald is an interesting romantic hero in the frame of such drama. He’s portrayed as an almost ideal embodiment of a certain kind of masculinity, so English you can smell London smog on him, combining the bravery of a soldier and a healer’s sense of care, one who readily jumps to the rescue even when he’s broken-hearted and furious. Sternberg plainly describes this creature he admires enormously to also critique him: Donald is also repressed and troubled by his memories of loving Lily, and his romantic failure is that he had no deep intrinsic sense of her loving him back, even as he wants to. Lily had not just an infamous career to retreat into but also an alternate identity, the costume of Shanghai Lily wrapped around Madeline, a privilege of womanhood. Donald’s uniform is the perfect outer expression of his inner spirit, tight and contained, gallant but held in check: the curse of manhood.

Brook, a mostly forgotten matinee idol who nonetheless also had the claim of starring in the following year’s Best Picture winner Cavalcade, has the relatively thankless role in the film that’s more about a man being loved by a woman, in which the hero is indeed more of an object despite his shows of bravura. And yet the film very much depends on Brook pulling off what Sternberg demands of him, to suggest what’s impressive about Donald and also what’s flaccid in him. Despite being freed in flashes of action, Donald is so often throughout the film locked into frieze-like postures, or as film writer Erich Kuersten neatly described, “cigarette ad abstraction,” in part because he’s constantly pictured with a cigarette squeezed between his fingers as tightly and tensely as a falcon’s claws about a fish, blowing out smoke in measured plumes. Such postures illustrate Donald’s frigid Anglo-Saxon restraint warring with his deep-flowing sense of erotic and emotional excitement when drawn back into Lily’s orbit, resulting in paralysis and sour frustration concealed by a veneer of flinty cool, reduced to registering expressions of pouty, desperate Englishness as he oscillates between sarcastic and urgently romantic pronouncements. Carmichael finally becomes as fuming mad at him as he was with Lily at the outset, not revealing the motives for Lily’s actions but mentioning her praying for him, planting disquiet in Donald’s mind. Meanwhile Mrs Haggerty derides Lily’s behaviour on the train whilst Lily announces her disdain for everyone else by playing her gramophone as loud as she can.

The real climax of the film isn’t Chang’s death and Donald’s rescue, nor is it the final clinch the lovers share in Shanghai, although that makes for a splendid afterword. The climax instead comes when Lily, with a carefully contrived appearance of flirty casualness, comes to Donald as he sits pensively in his compartment. Lily bums a cigarette and Donald notices her hands are shaking like she’s nervous, before noting that Carmichael told her about the praying, but appends with a curl of disdain, “Which I doubt,” and Lily, aggravated and with pride resurgent, says she would have done it for anyone and takes her leave. She retreat into her cabin, turns off the light, and leans against the wall, lit by a fanlight. An on-set still photo taken with this lighting set-up and Dietrich posed with eyes turned up to the light became famous, capturing the mystique of Dietrich as Sternberg had laboured so hard to fashion in its most iconic reduction. But the photo didn’t capture the specific emotion Dietrich is called upon to project in the actual scene, what makes it so memorable as a moment of cinema. The tiny quivers in Lily’s hands, the lines in her forehead and the expression of frayed desperation and anguish, the cost of what she’s done finally telling but still only expressed in private reverie. Here Sternberg does something very few other directors have managed, to convey a character’s inner life with every element available to their filmmaking – a highpoint of his labours, and Dietrich’s.

The train passengers all reach Shanghai and the terminus of their association, people who earlier were facing pivots of life and death together saying their farewells in varying degrees of rush, distraction, and eagerness to leave it all behind, except for Donald and Lily who receive gratitude for their actions: “I owe you my life and I’m not the man to forget it,” Salt tells Donald, “Although between you and me it isn’t worth very much.” Hui Fei gains her own, fresh, not particularly welcome fame as journalists quiz her about how she killed Chang, and very quickly and irritably moves to flee them. Lily buys Donald a new watch to replace the one with her image, broken in the melee, whilst Donald has her on his mind even as he exchanges pleasantries with others. Sternberg maintains his cinematic wit through these last shots as he makes odd use of dissolves, first to suggest how Lily is lingering on Donald’s mind even as he’s speaking to Salt and a military colleague, and then to weave their final union into the flow of life churning through the station. Finally, Donald gives in and places aside his doubts, finally achieving the odd state of grace Lily always demanded of him, allowing them to have their triumphal kiss before the fade-out, with the enticingly fetishistic final detail of Lily caressing and gripping the leather strap of Donald’s bandolier. All accompanied by jaunty jazz on the soundtrack, fanfare for people willing to take their leap into the strange new world.

1920s, Action-Adventure, Romance

The Sheik (1921) / The Son of the Sheik (1926)

Directors: George Melford, George Fitzmaurice

By Roderick Heath

This essay is offered as part of the Allan Fish Online Film Festival, a festival founded by Jamie Uhler and hosted by Wonders in the Dark, held to honor the memory of the late cineaste extraordinaire Allan Fish.

Rudolph Valentino. Over ninety years since he died aged 31, his name is still familiar to people who have never watched any of his movies. As the first great heartthrob of Hollywood film, his impact lingers like background radiation in pop culture. Valentino was the defining archetype of the Latin Lover and icon of silent film’s budding cosmopolitan promise, and is still the subject of legend and feverish speculation, particularly in regards to off-screen escapades and omnivorous sexual tastes. Young Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella acted out the essential myth of early Hollywood. He arrived in America as an eighteen-year-old immigrant, struggling in his early days in New York and skirting the outer edges of a scandalous tragedy before taking to the road as a travelling actor. Valentino took the advice of movie actor Norman Kerry to go to Hollywood and try his luck there, but found himself initially typecast as a villain for his dark, exotic looks. Then he was cast in the lead of Rex Ingram’s adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s bestseller, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, produced by Metro Pictures and released in 1921. Valentino was catapulted to stardom, and in spite of the film’s seriousness as a World War I drama, what everyone remembered afterwards was Valentino’s tango scene.
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Valentino still found himself patronised by Metro and after two throwaway vehicles grabbed the chance to head over to Famous Players-Lasky, where George Melford’s The Sheik, an adaptation of a novel by Edith Maude Hull, who like Valentino was a displaced cosmopolitan who found her life reshaped by travelling. Her wanderings began as a child alongside her parents, including a trip to Algiers, where most of her fiction would be set. The novel had been a colossal bestseller, a perfect vehicle for the star deemed fit to fill the role. Billed second to Agnes Ayres, Valentino was cast as Arab sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan. Except that, well, he’s not really Arab. Ahmed is ultimately revealed to be half-Spanish, half-English, one who was found orphaned and raised by a real Sheik in his traditional lifestyle. This was nominally a sop to Valentino’s Latin Lover image but was also designed to ward off the anti-miscegenation crowd who might have been infuriated by the central theme of romance between a white woman and a dark-skinned man. The sight of Valentino draped in a headscarf is up there with Charlie Chaplin’s bowler and moustache and Mary Pickford’s curls as one of the instantly recognisable points of iconography from the silent era regardless, from a day when cinema meant opening horizons and the images projected upon the screen blazed with an intensity of deliverance from the mundane that’s difficult to imagine in our screen-saturated day where our fantasy lives are serviced so often if not always so well.
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Close to a century has elapsed since The Sheik was released, and aspects of it remind me just what a long century it’s been. But it also feels peculiarly familiar in its similarities to more recent phenomena in its queasy, artful exploitation of a perverse romantic dynamic of threat and attraction, a reduction of the world to a pre-modern zone of hot-blooded men who know what they want from a woman. The Sheik opens with a scene in which Sheik Ahmed oversees the purchase of a selection of new brides for his tribe from another, where he sticks up for the right of one man (George Waggner, who would go on to direct The Wolf Man, 1941) to claim a woman he’s in love with over other, higher bidders, an early sign Ahmed is a covert romantic in a world defined otherwise by a crude and transactional sense of male-female relations. Meanwhile, Lady Diana Mayo (Ayres), a character who seems to have been based on Gertrude Bell, has arrived in the Saharan oasis town of Biskra, intending an exploratory venture into the desert and has hired one of Ahmed’s friends Mustapha Ali (Charles Brinley) as a guide. She’s accompanied by her flimsy brother Aubrey (Frank Butler), who tries in vain to talk her out of her expedition.
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Diana is an interloping emblem of modernity with her proto-feminist independence and wilful adoption of a masculine mode of dress for her planned venture. But she also finds herself enticed by the stir Ahmed makes when he breezes into town with his followers and their new selection of brides. Ahmed takes over the town’s casino for the night and bans all foreigners from the building so he and his men can stage a raucous celebration and watch the new wives dance. Diana, seeing a challenge, borrows the costume from a dancer in her hotel and uses it to enter and watch as the Arab men gamble to marry the various women. Diana is discovered when she’s grabbed to be the next lot on offer, and when Ahmed strips off her burka finds she’s carrying a pistol and uses it ward off any harassers before escaping. Ahmed’s interest is stirred and he enters her hotel the next morning to catch a glimpse of her in her room, and she hears him singing a love song outside her window without knowing who’s singing it. Soon Ahmed decides he must possess Diana, so he sabotages her gun and snatches her away, taking her to his desert camp.
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Hull’s book was a racy tale laced with a heady, violent erotic streak, and pushed the implied the rape fantasy much further than the film (quote: “Chattel, a slave to do his bidding, to bear his pleasure and his displeasure, shaken to the very foundation of her being with the upheaval of her convictions and the ruthless violence done to her cold, sexless temperament.”) Director George Melford congratulated himself on restricting to this element to only the faintest implication, as Diana finds herself at the mercy of the imperious Ahmed, who laughs at her mode of dress and declares that she makes a very pretty boy, but he doesn’t want a boy, so he forces her to dress in Arab female clothes. Unlike in the book Ahmed stops short of seeming to actually rape her, declaring “I could make you love me!”, but holds her captive in the expectation she will eventually succumb to the pure force of his throbbing passion. The ritualised stripping back of Diana’s arch western, liberated pretences before the might of an idealised figure of masculine entitlement is nonetheless reproduced exactingly, but that same force is then in turn tamed by the vicissitudes of romantic respect as Ahmed finds himself paralysed by his desire to be loved rather than to merely possess.
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Of course, The Sheik is very dated even as some of the things it exploits have proven insidiously difficult to extract from the modern mindset, exploiting a sexual fantasy of domination not really that far from the kind evinced in recent phenomena like the Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey books and films, mixed up a dubious conception of Arabic men as lascivious brutes, even when they’re actually Anglo-Spanish. One could read it all as self-aware role-play, an idea the film’s 1926 sequel takes up a little more brazenly. What’s undeniable is that The Sheik struck audiences of the day right where they lived. Or, at least, female audiences. Many male viewers reportedly found Valentino irksome in his liquid good-looks and willingness to enact erogenous fantasies for women, and his screen image was a violent switchback from the sort of hale and hearty American leading men prominent at the time. Charges of insidious effeminacy pursued the actor as well, accusations that eventually drove Valentino to stage and win his famous bout against the New York Evening Journal’s boxing writer, Frank O’Neill.
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Part of the problem might well be evinced in the way Valentino readily plays a character here who is supremely powerful in his little world but who, once he finds the woman who will obsess him, then places her at the very centre of all thoughts and ambitions. He is forgiven for his transgressions towards Diana because he at least wants her in absoluteness – there’s no playboy affectation or dilettantish indifference in his persona. Either way, Ayres and Valentino commit to their roles with gusto, and in many ways Ayres gives the more interesting performance in her registers swaying passing haughty self-possession to tremulous fear before her captor-lover and, at last, ardent amour. Valentino’s charisma is still amazingly potent when he’s charged with hawkish attention and brooding lust: his look of supreme erotic intent seems to x-ray whoever the object of that gaze through to the bone marrow. This quality is dramatized when Ahmed first sees Diana, his returned attention shunts her through a rapid succession of involuntary responses, anxiety, embarrassment, desire, revelation.
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Valentino does tread close to the boundaries of the overripe when his Ahmed flashes his eyes and gives an eagerly lustful smile. But what’s most obvious is his excellence as an actor attuned to silent cinema as a vehicle, conveying his character’s states of mind and attitude entirely through gestural and expressive affect, but also most entirely avoiding the hokier screen acting templates of the day: his on-screen stances and motions have a feline concision and fluency. One reason many of Valentino’s vehicles aren’t given much shrift today beyond retaining the man’s image itself is because he worked with no regarded directors, except for Ingram, who wasn’t particularly excited by the young star. But Melford’s direction of The Sheik is better than it’s often given credit for. It’s easily Melford’s best-known effort although he directed movies for over twenty years. Another of his odder claims to repute was handling the Spanish-language version of Dracula (1931) produced simultaneously to the Tod Browning film and which is, in its way, another variation on this kind of demon-seducer tale. Melford also made several imitations of his most popular work like Burning Sands (1922) and Love in the Desert (1928).
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Despite his relative anonymity, Melford’s direction is a great part of the strength of The Sheik, in his lucid sense of atmosphere and drama, establishing a visual motif through his use of the period movie camera’s depth of field in multiple planes of action often subdivided by physical elements, finding of ways of bringing theatrical integrity to the expanse of the desert with his columns of horsemen zig-zagging across the landscape. Archways and doorframes in Biskra, the flaps and panels within Ahmed’s tent, the dunes of the desert, render the film a succession of penetrated layers and chambers, apt for a journey that’s about getting to the heart of a certain way of seeing relations between the genders. The scenes of Diana’s first arrival at Ahmed’s tent and prostration before him are particularly strong, as the winds pummelling the desert set the whole structure about Diana shuddering and swaying, mimicking her psyche’s extreme tumult, and culminating in the affecting sight of her and one of Ahmed’s female servants, Zilah (Ruth Miller), embracing in sympathy.
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For some reason Diana’s brother never gets around to looking for her, and for a complicating flourish Ahmed instead is happy to receive his old friend, the writer Raoul St Hubert (Adolphe Menjou), who’s been his friend since Ahmed was schooled in Paris. Ahmed fears that Raoul might prove a romantic rival, but he really stands in for the side of Ahmed that has been ‘civilised’ by his western roots and education, whilst bandit chief Omair (Walter Long) represents the primitive and bestial facet that only wants to snatch Diana and make her a sex slave. Omair first glimpses Diana when she makes an attempt to ride out of the desert after fooling Ahmed’s French manservant Gaston (Lucien Littlefield): she falls from her horse and Omair’s caravan, returning to the city he controls, happens upon Diana, but Ahmed tracks her down before the bandit can pluck her from the sands. Raoul shames Ahmed for making Diana sustaining the façade of dressing in western clothes again and fronting up to another westerner who will comprehend her subjugation. Omair soon leads a raid, snatching up Diana and carrying her away after she and some of Ahmed’s men valiantly try to fight them off, leaving Gaston and others dead. Ahmed quickly gathers together the rest of his tribesmen and sets off in pursuit.
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The film’s most wistful image, reproduced on one of the posters, is that of Diana’s missive scratched idly in the sand declaring her love for Ahmed, a message that remains in place to spur Ahmed’s resurgence to chase down and take back his woman. Glimpses of Omair’s city deliver the film up to a sense of total immersion in a fantasy concept of a foreign world as a zone totally dedicated to erotic display and intent, with its teeming streets, ecstatically writhing dancing girls, leering male choruses and, at last, the sight of Diana lying unconscious and prostrate on a couch under the watchful eye of a hulking black manservant. In another, significant touch of character mirroring in the play of possession and desire, Omair has a wife who has attempted to talk him out of his kidnapping and when confronted by the sight of her man about to ravage the young white woman tries to knife him in a jealous rage. Omair easily fends her off, but the delay gives Ahmed time to arrive at the gates. He sneaks over the walls, penetrates Omair’s home, whilst his men batter down the gate and defeat the bandits. Ahmed enters Omair’s home and strangles him to death, but is in turn struck down by the manservant. Diana sits by Ahmed’s bed and waits to see if he will recover. Long story short: he does.
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H.L. Mencken’s fascinating meditation on Valentino’s life and death published after his funeral converted the late star into a different kind of archetype, that of the instinctively poetic and philosophical young man who gains all he wants in worldly terms but found it essentially worthless even before he’s cruelly cut down. This narrative connects Valentino less with many other live-fast-die-young movie stars than it does a later brand of idol more associated with rock music, like Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Five years after The Sheik, Valentino returned to Hull’s property to film a sequel she had written. Just how long a five years it had been seems perfectly encapsulated in the way the film casts him as both an older Ahmed Ben Hassan, now grizzled and long married to Diana, and his grown son, also named Ahmed: Valentino seems have lived just as many lifetimes in that short time. By this time Valentino was in need of a hit, after a couple of less successful films, and quarrelling with another studio. Although he was tired of the image The Sheik had stuck him with, he resumed the part with gusto, carrying over his costar from The Eagle (1925), Vilma Bánky, to play his new love interest. Valentino liked Bánky, who had been brought to Hollywood and billed as “the Hungarian Rhapsody.” The Son of the Sheik finds a reasonably clever way of redeploying the original film’s essential tension as young Ahmed takes a woman captive, whilst offering a different spin on it.
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Here young Ahmed is in love with Yasmin (Bánky), the daughter of a French emcee, Andre (George Fawcett). Andre has fallen so low he leads a band of performers who double as thieves, with the Moor Ghabah (Montagu Love) a glowering and terrible figure barely kept in hand by his nominal boss, who holds his leash with vague suggestions he’ll marry Yasmin one day. It’s Yasmin who really keeps the band with her alluring dancing, a talent that’s also drawn in Ahmed. Yasmin arranges to meet Ahmed in some ruins close to where the troupe camps, but her companions catch wind of this. Ghabah leads them out to take Ahmed captive, tie him up, and plan to ransom him back to his family. Ghabah, recognising Yasmin’s connection to Ahmed, also tells the young man she deliberately drew him into their clutches. Ahmed is rescued the next morning by faithful family retainer Ramadan (Karl Dane), and taken to a friend’s house in the town of Touggourt. Ahmed sees Andre’s troupe enter town advertising their upcoming engagement at a town nightspot, the Café Maure, and when Yasmin sees her lover waves to him, only for Ahmed to sternly ignore her. Ahmed can’t shake loose his apparent betrayal, and he soon reproduces his father’s crime in snatching Yasmin away and taking her into the desert, vowing to her that “I may not be the first victim – but, by Allah, I shall be the one you’ll remember!”
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This central situation, as young Ahmed holds Yasmin captive, offers a great revenge that seems to consist merely of Ahmed standing about in lordly postures and chewing her out some, again with some not-quite-rape heavy romancing as the two bark mutual protestations of loathing at each-other but also can barely keep their hands to themselves. The Son of the Sheik was directed by George Fitzmaurice, whose handling betrays the quickly evolving sophistication of Hollywood cinema. Fitzmaurice was probably picked as director because he had helmed Bánky’s Hollywood debut The Dark Angel (1925). The film lacks the pictorial beauty of Melford’s but makes up for it in lunging storytelling verve and Fitzmaurice’s attentiveness to the essence of the vehicle’s intent turns the act of being loved by Valentino. This crystallises in a scene when Ahmed kisses Yasmin in the very eye of their apparent mutual hate, Valentino stalking towards the camera as it takes Bánky’s point of view and then reversing the shot, gliding in towards Bánky’s face and then cutting to a huge close-up of her teary yet erotically mesmerised eyes. Character experience and audience wont are churned together in a moment of cinematic shamanism, the kind of near-surreal pictorial intensity filmmaking and worship of the star visage from this era could wield effortlessly and which would obsess experimental filmmakers of later years.
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One of the main tweaks The Son of the Sheik makes on its predecessor was to beef up the swashbuckling, and in this the film also represents rapidly solidifying formulas for this sort of thing, the transformation of the cinema art from act of atavism into industrial product. This is clearest in the quick alternations of high drama and comic relief, most of it coming from Ahmed’s sarcastic pal Ramadan, and the physical tussles of the mountebanks Ali and Pincher (Bull Montana and Bynunsky Hyman) in Andre’s crew. The film has a tongue-in-cheek aspect that never overwhelms the drama but keeps it all in perspective as pure daydreaming. Certainly it’s all a template for the maturing ideal of the action movie of a brand where Errol Flynn would soon readily step in to fill the hole left by the death of Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks. Valentino also seems to have been determined to butch up his image a bit: his costuming leaves his arms bare, the better to show off his rippling muscles as he grips and compels Yasmin, before launching into an extended action finale that sees Ahmed performing some quintessential stunts like swinging on a chandelier and making a bold jump onto a horse’s back. There’s even a torture sequence of the kind Flynn would also be often subjected to with heavy whiffs of S&M and homoerotic appeal, when Ahmed is held captive by the criminal band, leaving Valentino’s body scored with dark welts.
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The most substantial subtext lies in the casting of Valentino not simply as the young doppelganger of his father but also playing the old Sheik Ahmed as well, made up with grizzled beard. There’s a kind of audience appeal joke in this – more Valentino for your dollar, folks! But it’s also a commentary on Valentino’s awareness of his improving skill as an actor and a more than vaguely meta gag on his inability to shake the Sheik image. The son is cast in the father’s mould and finds himself entrapped by his father’s psychology even as he attempts to resist his will, a tough voice for the Jazz age scion of the stern old-world father, illustrated when Ahmed straightens out the poker his father bends to demonstrate his strength. The Sheik intends for his son to marry Diana’s cousin Clara, who’s about to visit, but young Ahmed remains aloof. Diana, still played by Ayres, prods the Sheik with awareness of his own wilful, unstoppable determination, cueing a flashback to his kidnapping of her, putting a wryly guilty smile on the old rogue’s face. Valentino plays the two rolls distinctly, occasionally letting the old man show the same florid grins and rolling-eyed glares, whilst young Ahmed is a study in the actor’s more refined sense of effect. Fitzmaurice pulls off some clever, simple special effects in scenes where Valentino plays against himself, including shots where the old Sheik puts his arm around his son, and the two men hold hands whilst duelling side by side in the finale.
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The narrative, such as it is, eventually sees Ahmed decide to send Yasmin back to Touggourt, but her father, Ghabah, and cohort surprise her and Ramadan in the desert. Ghabah makes the mistake of gloating to Yasmin at poisoning Ahmed’s mind against her whilst Ramadan can hear, but Ahmed’s already trying to find her again. The troupe return to the Café Maure, where Ghabah makes it clear he intends to possess Yasmin one way or another. But Ahmed sneaks in disguised: Fitzmaurice reverses the early shot of Yasmin’s swooning before Ahmed as the man now beholds Yasmin again in the delivering ecstasies of dance, eyes glowing from under his shadowing hood, before leaping into action to save her from Ghabah. His father, defying the windstorm thrashing the desert, tracks him and helps him battle off the Café denizens. The eruption of action here is terrific, showing off Valentino’s physicality to the max as the two Ahmeds swing their scimitars and wield off opponents with table, barrels, and improvised firebombs, dodging thrown knives and hurling them back. Father and son fend off the ruffians but Ahmed still has to chase after Ghabah and Yasmin on horseback, duelling his enemy as the pound across the sands. Ahmed loses his sword so he springs upon Ghabah and throttles him on the ground before embracing Yasmin just in time for the fade-out.
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The Son of the Sheik would surely have been the big hit Valentino was chasing even if he hadn’t died when gearing up to publicise it, as it’s a great entertainment by any measure in spite of the lackadaisical plot. Although she never rivalled his stature Bánky’s name is sometimes used like Valentino’s to invoke raciness from a long-ago time, and she was most definitely a luminous and dazzlingly sexy presence. It’s also fun to see Ayres playing the older Diana, now mistress of her desert palace. It’s rather painful to think about what bad luck all these beautiful and talented people suffered: Ayres would die aged 42, her fortune wiped out by the Black Friday crash and career ruined by weight gain, and Bánky foiled, as Valentino might well have been if he had lived, by her heavy accent once sound came. At least on screen they’re all eternally young, gallivanting across a moonlit survey with nothing to do but enact our fantasies.

The Sheik can be viewed here on YouTube…

…and The Son of the Sheik here.

1950s, Action-Adventure, Auteurs, German cinema, Romance

The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) / The Indian Tomb (1959)

Der Tiger von Eschnapur / Das Indische Grabmal

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenwriters: Werner Jörg Lüddecke, Fritz Lang (uncredited)

By Roderick Heath

Fritz Lang returned to make films in Germany after a quarter-century’s absence, after the box office failure of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) finally brought down the curtain on his Hollywood career. Lang had arrived in America as a feted figure wielding great prestige, but he subsisted in marginally produced, often low-budget films after his stern, uncompromising efforts at social commentary purveyed in films like Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937) dismayed audiences. Lang’s late oeuvre has long since been disinterred and celebrated for his lucid filmmaking and devious deployment of social commentary and personal artistry, but Lang himself felt awkward pride for most of them as a hired studio hand trying to wring personal interest from his assignments, understandable considering the comedown the director had experienced from his days as the titan of UFA.

As if in obedience to some common law entwining the nature of gravity, economics, and artistic inspiration, the careers of many film directors seem to fold back upon themselves eventually, bringing them back to their roots and early territory in their later films. Lang’s return to Germany saw him make three final films that all had obvious ties to his early efforts. The two-part exotic melodrama The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb was adapted from a popular novel by Lang’s one-time wife Thea von Harbou, whilst his very last released work continued his series of thrillers based around supervillain Dr Mabuse with The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). To say a lot of water had flowed under the bridge since Lang had last worked on Von Harbou’s material would be an understatement. Lang and Von Harbou had been a glamorous, scandalous, fractious, uniquely productive couple for over a decade, collaborating on some of the greatest films of the silent era. On top of their personal split, Lang represented staunch refusal to countenance Hitler’s rise, whereas Von Harbou had joined the Nazi Party, albeit, she had argued, for the sake of helping her work for the rights of Indians like her third husband under the regime.

This real-life resonance lends even greater piquancy to the story’s wistful daydream about another, almost idyllic world that becomes fatally infected by authoritarian brutality. Two earlier versions of Von Harbou’s novel had already been made. Lang had felt cheated out of directing the first version, which was handled by one of Lang’s great rivals Joe May, because of his lack of directing experience at the time. Getting Lang to make another smacked of the same phenomenon that would produce the following year’s Ben-Hur, the push to make a blockbuster version of a well-proven property to recapture past glories and reinvigorate a waning film industry. In spite of his great influence on the idea of the epic film, Lang had been bypassed for making any entries in Hollywood’s glut of historical sagas which were produced to exploit the spectacle of widescreen processes as an answer to television. Lang famously derided widescreen formats as only good for snakes and funerals. And then he took on a project that revolves around, well, at least one snake.

The lush, Orientalist fantasia that is Lang’s Indian duology suggests, at first glance, a director happily taking refuge in glossy decoration as he faces the sunset of his career. A few years later, Lang would feature as the representative of artistic ambition in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), trying to make an airily abstracted take on The Odyssey and clashing with his sleazy producer. It feels more than a little ironic then that the Eschnapur duology is in many ways exactly the sort of film Godard’s emblematic philistine bankroller would have loved, a vigorous and sexy piece of kitschy showmanship. And yet The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb are deceptively complex meditations on Lang’s favourite themes and career-long motifs. Lang’s career was still utterly compelled by his contemplations of ingrained human impulses towards violence, repression, despotism, and paranoia underlying surface social codes, and his incisive perspective was scarcely diluted by age. But he was still also an accomplished fabulist, a talent who constantly battled the dark side of his imagination and occasionally embraced the lighter.

The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb take place in the nominal present-day, but exist more properly in a dream-state, all the better to focus the compulsions of Lang’s lifelong fascination with the distorting, competing gravities of power and desire. Tellingly, the series also stages a partial repeat of motifs found in both Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1926). As in the former, a strong and upright hero defeats a monster only to find himself beset for the sake of sexual jealousy and statecraft machinations. Like the latter, it presents the idea of a city as an embodiment of both the psyche and the body politic. The Tiger of Eschnapur, the first part of the duology, commences with German architect Harald Berger (Paul Hubschmid, who had also gone by the name Paul Christian during his own Hollywood foray) staying overnight in a village as he makes his way to the capital of the small Indian state of Eschnapur. Harald, a tall, strong man with a fierce sense of justice, is annoyed when two soldiers harass a serving girl, Bharani (Luciana Paluzzi), so he picks them up and bangs their heads together like Moe Howard. Bharani’s mistress, the sacred temple dancer Seetha (Debra Paget), thanks Harald for his chivalry. A tiger is terrorising the countryside, and it breaks into the village after nightfall, killing a boy.

As Harald and Seetha travel in the same caravan across country to the capital, the tiger attacks and drives away Seetha’s litter bearers, leaving her trapped at the monster’s mercy. Harald has the inspiration of driving the tiger off with a fiery torch, saving Seetha. Architect and dancer are both welcomed at the palace of the state’s autocratic Maharajah, Chandra (Walther Reyer), Harald to help with his programme of modernisation and improvement, and Seetha to perform at an upcoming festival. Harald begins mapping Chandra’s ancient palace with the help of western-trained Eschnapuri engineering expert Asagara (Jochen Blume). The bond between Harald and Seetha deepens after they’re met with perfect hospitality by the Maharajah. Harald helps Seetha plumb the ambiguities of her past, recognising a song she sings learned in childhood as an Irish folk song, awakening memories in the lady that confirm she’s the daughter of a British soldier and an Indian woman. The monster tiger is captured and imprisoned in the palace.

The Eschnapur duology unfolds over the course of about 200 minutes (the two films were edited together into a single 95 minute unit entitled Journey to the Lost City for initial English-language release), keeping one foot squarely planted in Lang’s earliest movies – the venturesome cliffhanging and secret zones of The Spiders (1919), the Arabesque and Chinoiserie stylisation of the stories in Der Müede Tod (1921), the tyrannical figure who tries to orchestrate people’s lives and goes on a destructive warpath when they resist, a la Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922). Although the diptych enters wholeheartedly into a realm of melodrama and pulp fiction thrills, Lang maintains emotional depth, shaded by his unique talent for creating worlds within worlds. This talent is signalled in the peculiarly dreamy prologue as Harald first glimpses Seetha as a veiled face hovering amongst ancient brickwork, a ghost of elusive femininity, incarnation of the enigmatically attractive spirit of place. Seetha is a deeply dedicated and pure-hearted avatar of the local culture, faithful to Shiva and seemingly favoured by the gods.

The tiger that erupts out of the foliage to assault Seetha, like the dragon felled by Siegfried in Die Nibelungen, represents chaos and savagery kept at strength by a man blessed both in mental muscle and physical might, making Harald a contemporary version of a legendary Germanic hero. Fairy-tale romance is however about to run headlong into its appointed enemy: Chandra, who becomes utterly fixated on Seetha after watching her dance, and insists she marry him. As ever in Lang, there ought to be a sign pointing at everyone’s head that reads, here there be tigers. Chandra however seems like an entirely upright and rational figure when they first meet him. He’s the very model of an enlightened despot, in the mode of Frederick the Great, that much-admired figure of German history who nonetheless made servility and autocracy seem comfortable for too many both within and without his fledgling nation. Lang sets out to pull apart this cultural ideal with ruthless concision as he portrays Chandra prone to exactly the same forces of human weakness as anyone else, but who through his place at the centre of a state gets to enact that will apparently unchecked. The Human Beast, the Zola novel first filmed by Jean Renoir and then remade by Lang as Human Desire (1954), offers the perfect thumbnail description of Lang’s later career preoccupations, as he returned with increasingly sly method to the theme in his studio work.

“You’ll notice there are no carpets here,’ Chandra points out to Harald when first showing about the upper apartments of his palace: “Because of cobras.” The inferred if not glimpsed notion of malign, slithering strokes of black sneaking their way into the shining, scrupulously ordered environs of civilisation’s expression conveys not just the essence of the lurking threat in the immediate narrative but also connects again to Lang’s career-long obsession with irrational forces prying at the limits of civilised order. The floors must be kept bare, the clutter at a minimum, the essence of the architecture must show what’s what. Chandra’s plans for a rapid and convulsive reconstruction of his backwater, to be leveraged through the efforts of his imported architects, creates unease amongst the local oligarchs who don’t want any such change or destabilisation, not the high priest of the local sects, Yama (Valéry Inkijinoff), nor Chandra’s younger brother Ramigani (René Deltgen), or his former brother-in-law, Prince Padhu (Jochen Brockmann).

Chandra is still in mourning for Padhu’s sister, the former Maharani, whilst Ramigani has designs for usurping his brother’s throne, for which he needs both the backing of other potentates and a swell of popular support. Ramigani sees in Chandra’s ardour for Seetha a unique chance to gain both: Padhu and the priests are all deeply offended by the notion of the Maharajah marrying again, and the populace might also be swayed. Ramigani decides to help Chandra destroy himself, including arranging the death of Bharani in a magic act as she was acting as go-between for Harald and Seetha, but he’s unable to prevent Chandra discovering the burgeoning romance. Chandra retaliates by having Harald herded into a pen where he keeps captured tigers, including the monster tiger: he gives Harald a pike to battle the tiger with as a chance to survive the ordeal. Harald succeeds in killing the beast, so Chandra lets him leave with the threat to have him killed if he isn’t out of the kingdom within twenty-four hours. But Seetha elects to join him, and the pair flee into the desert fringing the state.

Von Harbou’s book probably conveyed a strong dose of distanced ethnographic interest in India, and some have noted that it also clearly bore out a deep German interest in the era in Indian culture as a fount of western culture in general – an interest that would take on a graver cast given the Nazis’ beloved fantasies of the Aryan inheritance. For Lang, Eschnapur is more like the sort of half-real foreign land where dramatists of Shakespeare’s day would set their parables for easy consumption and sneaky inference. In this regard, the casting of European actors as Indians, whilst grating, helps clarify Lang’s subtexts: all of this is a dress-up game, a pantomime masking the violent fray of feelings enacted by the victimised lovers and the glowering, increasingly implacable Chandra. The narrative highlights the structure and stability of a state, with its pillars of religion, military, and nominally allied grandees, dependent on personal ties and revolving theoretically around the outlook of its leader. Once that outlook is thrown from its proper orbit, the state becomes diseased; when the stuff of government is deeply personal – Padhu allies with Ramigani because a remarriage will offend his sister’s memory – it becomes entirely in thrall to individual neurosis and perversity. The Eschnapur duology essays a theme that’s not really that far from a seemingly very different meditation on recent European history, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), as the inevitability of personal passion which refuses the rule of the state and will of the leadership caste becomes a form of dissidence, however incidental.

“I can think of nothing that might destroy our friendship,” the Maharajah comments to Harald after gifting him a ring for saving his life: Lang cuts with brute candour to Seetha, whose pulchritude is all but literally worshipped as the linchpin of state and religion, which is idolises the sacred feminine. The statue in the temple where Seetha dances is a colossal vision of such, complete with massive, bulbous breasts. Chandra’s decline from modernising and liberalising influence to the worst kind of despot is speedy and requires only sexual jealousy to gain impetus. Powerful and civilised men destroying themselves and, sometimes, those who love them over a woman was one of the most fundamental Lang themes, of course, enacted in variations in films as disparate as Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, Spies (1928), Scarlet Street (1946), The House by the River (1950), and The Big Heat (1953). Here, the theme is not contained by Lang’s acerbic, realist side, but the fairytale setting allows it to become a veritable universal condition, harking back to Lang’s early expressionist works (including The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1919, which he wrote) where the landscape becomes a projection of the interior drama, a device he managed to deploy in Hollywood works like The House by the River where the eponymous waterway literalises the processes of the psyche, slowly but surely turning in a gyre where every sunken sickness emerges again.

Like many great directors whose career started in the silent era but stretched into the burgeoning age of widescreen colour, including the likes John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, Teinosuke Kinugasa, and King Vidor, Lang’s later work betrayed a waning interest in the increasingly realistic strictures of post-war film, and an increasing tendency to utilise the devices they were being handed – the bigger screens and the richer colour and the film with greater sensitivity to space and light gradation – to tellingly counterintuitive ends. Lang had pushed the western in the direction of expressionism on Rancho Notorious (1952), and with the Eschanpur duology enters entirely into a zone where the value of colour is at once decorative and spiritual, otherworldly and artistically precise: Lang’s fantasy India is a place where the clothes, flowers, buildings, and animals glow with colour-drenched inner life that threatens to overwhelm the Technicolor textures. Early scenes of Seetha rehearsing her dance and speaking of her hazy past to Harald take place in a dreamy locale of lotus flowers drifting in cool, crystalline water all placed and described with the care of an impressionist master. The animals, from a phallic cobra that Seetha has to dance before, to crocodiles lunging towards some fallen bodies, are more the stuff of pantomime than documentary authenticity. The location photography in India beholds white palisades and bastions, the pageantry of Chandra’s festivals and functions, and subsumes all into a delirium.

The most beautiful thing of all, and the most stringently fetishised, is Paget’s Seetha. Echoing the android succubus of Metropolis whose Salome-ish dance drives rational men into paroxysms of lunacy, Seetha’s well-shaken booty has the power to set the entire state of Eschnapur into chaos along with its leadership caste. Unlike the robot Maria in Metropolis, Seetha is not evil, but is rather like the other Maria in that film, representative of all things good and beneficent, one who obeys her perfectly natural ardour for Harald after initial misgivings over potential cultural tensions. Seetha embodies the sacred feminine but also its very earthly and desirable incarnation. Each episode of the diptych revolves around a lengthy dance sequence in which Seetha performs in the temple adjoining Chandra’s palace, in the shadow of the great statue of the Goddess. These scenes, rather than any action sequences or sprawls of pageantry, are the centrepieces of spectacle in the diptych; Lang’s last true act of cinematic showmanship is simply to confirm that there’s nothing better to transfix the eye than the human form. Seetha’s dances break down the gap between Indian folk dance and Minsky’s act in Paget’s dazzling, sensually provocative gyrations, swathed in gold mail and ornaments for her first dance and teasingly frail-looking silver leaf for her second. Mainstream cinema night not have seen dance sequences as unabashedly erotic since DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932), and they were initially greatly curtailed for American release.

Not that this is mere elaborate sexploitation, although it’s certainly that too; Lang offers them as a commentary on the business of movie stardom. Lang depicts Seetha at the outset as an exacting artist, rehearsing her performances with her musicians in preparation for the great festival, only to find in both dances she’s actually performing to prove and then retain her worth as a sexual object. She auditions in the first as a potential wife for the smitten Chandra and in the second to appease the priapic insanity she’s incidentally stoked, symbolised by the snake she has to calmly dance around without irritating. Seetha is a devoutly religious protagonist whose definition of her beliefs transcends the resolutely bigoted use of it by the high priests: when her face dance is halted when she glimpses Harald high above in the temple galleries, and a strange darkening comes over the temple statue, everyone assumes it’s a sign of anger, but Seetha instead sees it as a warning and a promise of care. Paget’s name became synonymous to a certain degree with historical epics in her relatively short career, thanks to her performances in movies including Princess of the Nile (1954), The Ten Commandments (1956), where she had also played a living pawn caught between powerful fiends and a true lover, and Omar Khayyam (1957). Her presence, even when dubbed, is vital to the duology, particularly as her genuine dancing skill and strong-looking body, which through its very prowess refuses to be objectified, but instead wields palpable independence as the instrument of her own will, one very large part of what drives Chandra insane in his desire to possess it.

The spectacle of performance rendered as nexus of the sacred and profane evidently amused Lang. It might even be seen as the very basis of his career, his long and patient march against the tide of fortune and industry to keep on purveying his vision regardless of setting. Lang’s career is replete with sophisticated games with the act of storytelling and making art, from the finale of Spione (1928) as a clown’s onstage death represents the ultimate takedown for a would-be world-conqueror, to The House by the River, where the antihero’s incidental homicide becomes fuel for gleeful exertions in creativity. Bharani’s death is a more self-conscious example of spectacle and conjuring as arts worked for deception and political subversion. Here, Ramigani contrives to have the inconvenient servant murdered before Chandra’s court by a fakir who has already managed the classic conjuror’s stunt of the Indian Rope Trick. The ability to vanish in front of a watching crowd gives way to the sight of very real, red blood pouring out of a wicker basket through which the fakir has plunged his swords: Lang telegraphs the moment from so far out and then compels the audience (and Seetha) to watch it all unfold with merciless patience, both women assured by powerful, patronising men all the while that everything is fine.

When Chandra has Seetha scooped up from her private lodgings and installed in his palace, she notes the potentially illustrative irony of having a bird in a literal gilded cage as company. Chandra releases the bird only to have it fly back, but finds humans don’t act as simply as animals. Padhu kidnaps Seetha, intending to ruin Seetha as a potential bride by having her raped and disfigured, only for Chandra to chase them down and whip his recalcitrant former brother-in-law in the face, an act of gallantry that fails to gain what Chandra assumes is its proper reward as Harald and Seetha flee him. Chandra soon greets Harald’s colleague Walter Rhode (Claus Holm), who is married to Harald’s sister Irene (Sabine Bethmann), and instructs him to abandon all plans for modernisation and improvement, and instead build a spectacular tomb, one Chandra implies Seetha will be immured alive in once she’s recaptured. The Tiger of Eschnapur ends with a classic cliffhanger scenario as Harald and Seetha collapse in the desert in fleeing Chandra’s soldiers, sprawled upon the sands clutching each-others’ hands, a pair of crucified lovers. In The Indian Tomb, the couple are found and aided by people from a nearby village, who hide them from the soldiers in obedience to the laws of hospitality, although one man eventually sells them out.

Forewarned, Harald and Seetha leave the village and retreat into jagged nearby mountains, where they take refuge in a cave that’s an ancient shrine to Shiva. Seetha’s urgent prayers seem to be answered when a spider spins a web over the cave entrance, making it seem as if no-one’s entered it in ages. A deeply corny touch, but also charged with a sense of the delicately miraculous as well as a visual flavour straight out of Lang’s silents. Part of the diptych’s weird power lies in just this sense of airy, numinous mystique, and a longing for a spiritual possibility as the only escape from the cruel impulses of the flesh and crueller twists of the mind. Lang conjures a world where faiths new and old, foreign and familiar coexist and blend in unpredictable ways. His patient approach to his storytelling and creating this little world unto itself knits a unique mood, one that retains, from that eerie early first vision of Seetha, of having glimpsed something at once palpable and mystically elusive. An old swami (Victor Francen), a former prince himself, lurks in a ruin on the road to Eschnapur, remarked upon in the first part but not visited until the second, when Chandra goes to see him, at first asking for spiritual advice but soon instead demanding some sort of reassuring platitude. “You don’t want the truth,” the swami retorts: “You want someone to deny it with you.”

There’s an echo here of a similar Indian-culture-through-Western eyes vision, Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1946), which also revolved around interlopers falling afoul of overpowering passions, where the capacity for total removal from the world of the senses represented by such a figure of religious commitment proved terribly out of reach. Another fascinating aspect of the duology is its approach to Chandra as a character. As monstrous as he often acts, he never loses Lang’s sympathy as his emblem of masculine folly. You can all but feel his teeth grinding in seething sexual frustration and emotional offence in being rejected by two people close to his heart, whilst his better self struggles in vain for supremacy, a struggle foiled by Chandra’s near-unchecked freedom to indulge his ego. Chandra is cursed with an intimate awareness of the incredibly fine line between adoration and detestation, as he articulates to Irene when he encounters that level-headed lady, as he obfuscates the purpose of his intended tomb and describes it as his monument to the idea of a great love, or at least one that will transmute hate into its opposite over the centuries. The centrality of architecture in the narrative serves both to facilitate the plot in this manner, but also allows Lang to nest concepts within concepts. Architecture is at once a metaphor for his own conception of cinema and a way of mapping the torturous locus of history, identity, and personality Chandra’s world represents. No surprise at all to remember young Lang had initially studied civil engineering before switching to art.

Lang had long experimented in blending his own art form with others, most famously with his annexation of expressionism and then cubism to inform his films’ visuals, pursuing the high modernist ideal of trying to create art where the mode of expression is matched to the subject. Like a final statement of faith in the version of the medium he had helped bring to maturity, the Eschnapur duology is a testimony to the illustrative richness and depth of visual field he could gain from the traditional Academy film ratio. That seemingly boxy and intractable space accords perfectly with Lang’s careful explorations of the confines of Chandra’s palace and adjacent catacomb, mimicking the compartmentalisation of the mind; here are places where precious things and high ideals are stashed; here’s where old foes and unpleasant facts are locked away. One film made under Lang’s potent influence, Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), which also referenced his overtly Freudian essay in psychic architectonics, Secret Beyond the Door (1948), borrowed the device of navigating by footfall Irene uses here in trying to locate Seetha and Harald’s prisons. The diptych was also almost certainly an influence on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas’ Indiana Jones films, particularly Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), which lifts imagery wholesale.

Eschanpur as a fantasy landscape echoes Metropolis with its grandiose upper reaches of stability, order, and beauty, and its septic depths. Harald and Asagara’s exploration of the labyrinthine Moghul tunnels under the palace see them wandering into ancient precincts where the carved figure of a skull-bedecked Kali represents the lurking spectre of evils unexamined, and the dark, muddy waters filled with crocodiles can sometimes break in unbidden. Harald accidentally penetrates a chamber that proves to be where Chandra stashes Eschanpur’s populace of lepers, who advance in lunatic ranks upon any intruder. “Haven’t you noticed there aren’t any sick people in Eschnapur?” Asagara asks Harald after rescuing him from the horde. The downright creep scenes with the lepers feel like some rough draft for George Romero’s zombie hordes, actualisations of all that is diseased in the body politic bound at some point to burst out upon the world. Similarly Chandra’s desire to graft new shoals of clean modernity onto his state, represented by the nice neat models poured over by Harald, Asagara, and Rhode, without effecting any sort of political, social, or personal transformation is indicted as a common disease, one that renders it liable to being consumed by all those crocodiles and cobras. Dramatic architecture and the more literal kind fuse together in the diptych’s last act as Irene braves the labyrinth.

The spider’s miracle proves to only temporarily save them from capture as Ramigani and his men manage to grab Seetha and Harald seems to die falling off a cliff along as he battles a soldier. But Ramigani soon reveals to Seetha that Harald survived and is now held captive in a dungeon under the palace, threatening to have him killed if she fails to marry Chandra and facilitate Ramigani’s coup. Catching wind of the conspiracy that seems to surround them, Rhode and Irene try to extract the truth from Asagara, who has a fair idea of what’s transpired but, compelled to remain silent for fear of reprisal from the Maharajah, has to settle for dropping faint hints as to Harald’s fate. Soon Irene pieces together her brother’s map of the palace and uses it to find Seetha, and finally hears the whole tale. Harald himself manages to escape by overpowering his guard, thanks to an admirably simple ruse that builds to a classic, vivid episode of Langian violence as Harald strangles his jailer with his own chains – the terrible face of death filmed in fearsome, looming close-up that speaks of Lang’s impact on Hitchcock – and then locates his sister and her husband in the labyrinth. Asagara dies heroically trying to defend Irene from the lepers after she inadvertently releases them. The film’s last act finally sees the many, patiently worked plot threads begin to collide, as Ramigani’s coup succeeds and Padhu’s forces invade the palace, unchecked by the Maharajah’s own forces because Ramigani has stabbed his general Dagh (Guido Celano) after he refused to join the insurrection. Chandra finally gets his brutal chastening as he’s stripped to the waist, tied up, and viciously whipped for the enjoyment of a gloating Padhu.

But the usurpers’ gloating proves short-lived, as Dagh, injured but still able, appears with his soldiers to shoot down Padhu and crush the coup. Ramigani flees into the labyrinth only to be trapped in a low chamber into which pours river water and crocodiles eager to feast on his flesh, in a fiendishly great comeuppance. But the film’s real resolution is the confrontation between the freed, glowering, vengeful Chandra and Harald and Seetha, as the lord finds man and mate fighting assorted thugs and reacting to his own entrance as just another fight in the offing, Harald with barely enough strength to stay on his feet. For all of the characters, their civilised pretences have been stripped bare, leaving them only primal realities, the essence of their beings honed to raw nerves, will, and loyalty. Such an endpoint was common for Lang’s characters, although it was often a point of complete internal collapse, like Mabuse. Here, however, Lang opens the gate to new spiritual possibilities, as the spectacle of his own cruelty is enough to cause Chandra to drop his sword and give up his royal life, becoming instead the swami’s new acolyte, another form of self-extinction, but one that feels like a relieve exhalation from its creator, a last attempt to define a zone of life that might deliver freedom from the merciless hunger of life itself. It’s hard to deny that many criticisms levelled at the Eschnapur duology were accurate – it was silly, passé, and naïve. But it’s also still an utterly glorious late testimonial and summative work from one of cinema’s titans.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: Orientalism

Shanghai Express (1931)

The Sheik (1921) / The Son of the Sheik (1926)

The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959) / The Indian Tomb (1959)