Now we are talking.

There was a time when I was watching the final moments of Shanghai Express last night that I felt transported back to our first home in Dallas in the late seventies.  I felt as if it were Xmas break and I was watching the Late Late Movie on my old black and white.  It was such a warm, comfort food type of feeling.

Shanghai Express is miles better than Morocco.  Both were made by the same folks at the same studio and both star Marlene Dietrich.  Lee Garmes' photography is luminescent, especially the soft-focus close-ups of Dietrich, which, although still v much of a tradition with the gauzy, powdery Paramount style of the period, still, make Dietrich sultry as all get out.  Dietrich oftentimes has one hand on her hip, showing off her long elegant fingers and the way she speaks with her eyes in the close-ups is still deliriously sexy.  She ain't perfect.  A couple or few times you catch her looking in to the camera but for me that just multiplies the heat factor.  I like to think she is staring at her director (and lover), Josef von Sternberg, asking, "Can we really pull this off? Who is going to believe this?"

You need to ash, Grandma, ... 

Like a lot of good art the premise, the bones of it, is banal.  Shanghai Express is the story of a hooker with a heart of gold.  But everything else about this picture elevates and then obliterates the premise, turning the hooker with a heart of gold story in to a McGuffin.  Von Sternberg's use of montage at the beginning and end of the film are sublime.  I am still in wonder at how Clive Brook managed to give such an arresting performance giving the same line reading over and over again.  (Maybe it was the props? The riding crop and never-ending smokes?) I love how folks are always closing and opening carriage doors, raising and lowering blinds, making both transparency and privacy precious.  And I am not buying for one minute the prayer reformation.  I know I am wrong but I like to think Dietrich did it to get that fucking annoying Parson off her back.

I really treasure Hollywood entertainments, especially those made for grown-ups.  There is something so magical about the American cinema where great art and commerce safely intersect.  That is what the late Late Late Movie was all about.  In our modern times of anything you want whenever and wherever you want it we have lost something in the bargain.  At one of the crappest points in my life I had a chance to see Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (my all-time favorite film) at a rep house in the City twice.  It was right around Xmas time and each time I settled in to my seat I felt blessed and so lucky.  What a Xmas gift was I receiving! It seems we never unwrap our gifts anymore.  We have forgotten what gifts are, what makes things, life precious.

But despite our Future Shock, the truth will always out.  And great art like Shanghai Express will always glow.