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The moment Marlene Dietrich arrived in Hollywood, she was crossing lines virtually no one else dared to. In her debut American feature, Morocco,<\/em> released in 1930, she dressed in a tuxedo to perform the torch song \u201cGive Me the Man Who Does Things<\/a>,\u201d pausing to kiss a woman in the nightclub crowd. Having come up in Berlin\u2019s cabaret scene in the 1920s, Dietrich was a wife and a mother by the time she became a movie star\u2014but also a \u201cjoyous bisexual with an appetite for many loves,\u201d as Kenneth Anger described her in Hollywood Babylon<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n Dietrich\u2019s bisexuality was a key element of her explosive stardom in the early 1930s, even if it was not quite explicitly part of the text. The kiss in Morocco<\/em> is more of a provocation than an expression of lust, the \u201930s equivalent of Katy Perry<\/strong>\u2019s \u201cI Kissed a Girl.\u201d But in the years just before the Production Code took hold of Hollywood\u2014banishing even hints of non-hetero sexuality\u2014Dietrich was a powerhouse, making several films with director Josef von Sternberg that established her as a uniquely alluring, rule-breaking, and even dangerous kind of star.<\/p>\n That persona was already firmly in place by 1932\u2019s Shanghai Express,<\/em> Dietrich and von Sternberg\u2019s third Hollywood film together, in which Dietrich plays the mysterious but unapologetic courtesan Shanghai Lily. Set on a train from Peking to Shanghai in the midst of China\u2019s civil war, the film starts by introducing a range of colorful characters as they board the train, including Dietrich in a dramatic veil, jet-black boa trailing behind her.<\/p>\n Watch Shanghai Express<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n But Shanghai Lily truly comes to life when we meet her in her compartment with her traveling companion, Hui Fei (Anna May Wong), a fellow courtesan\u2014or, as a fellow passenger denigrates them, another \u201cfallen woman.\u201d A trailblazing Chinese American actress<\/a> in the golden age of Hollywood, Wong was already a global star by the time of Shanghai Express.<\/em> A famous photograph<\/a> taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt at a Berlin gala in 1928 finds Wong and Dietrich posing side by side with none other than Leni Riefenstahl.<\/p>\n Like so many of Dietrich\u2019s costars, Wong is rumored<\/a> to have had an affair with her\u2014the excellent novel Delayed Rays of a Star<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> inspired by that Eisenstaedt photograph, imagines what might have been. But what we know for sure is what we can see between them in Shanghai Express,<\/em> a dynamic so charged that they don\u2019t have to say a word to send a would-be interloper scurrying away from their compartment. Later, the nosy landlady of a boardinghouse for only \u201crespectable people\u201d tries to recruit them before realizing \u201cI\u2019ve made a terrible mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n The romantic plot of Shanghai Express<\/em> is between Shanghai Lily and her old flame Doc Harvey, played by Clive Brook; the queer themes, as they would be in Hollywood for decades more, remain expressly subtext. But Dietrich\u2019s gender-bending confidence gets a moment to shine when she playfully wears Doc\u2019s military hat while the pair revisit their lost love. And both Lily, who sacrifices herself so that Doc can be freed from the film\u2019s villain, and Hui Fei, who eventually kills the bad guy, are women capable of taking action far more effectively than the men around them.<\/p>\n Shanghai Express,<\/em> nominated for three Oscars including best picture, was a high-water mark for both Dietrich and Wong\u2019s Hollywood careers. Dietrich\u2019s performing career continued for more than four more decades, but Shanghai Express<\/em> was the peak of her box-office powers. Wong, after lobbying hard for and losing<\/a> the lead role in 1937\u2019s The Good Earth,<\/em> remained stuck with the kind of stereotypical roles she had spoken out against throughout her career. \u201cWhy is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so cruel a villain\u2014murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass?\u201d she told\u00a0Film Weekly<\/em>\u00a0in 1933<\/a>. \u201cWe are not like that.\u201d<\/p>\n But Dietrich and Wong remain inextricably linked to this day. In last year\u2019s Babylon,<\/em> Li Jun Li<\/strong> plays Lady Fay Zhu, a character modeled closely on Anna May Wong\u2014but who performs a provocative song in unmistakably Dietrich-ian style, tuxedo included<\/a>.<\/p>\n This week\u2019s Little Gold Men<\/em> podcast, which you can listen to above, includes an in-depth conversation about Shanghai Express<\/em> to kick off our monthlong Pride series of Oscar flashbacks. Next week we\u2019ll tackle 1985\u2019s Kiss of the Spider-Woman,<\/em> for which William Hurt won the best-actor Oscar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n