For a truly delirious late summer experience, try the double feature being offered Saturday night at the 92YTribeca. Josef von Stenberg, the master of exotic visuals, directs his muse and sometimes lover Marlene Dietrich in “Dishonored’’ (1931) and “Shanghai Express’’ (1932) neither of which is legally available on DVD in this country.
The lesser-known “Dishonored” casts Dietrich as an Austrian prostitute who is recruited as a spy by the wonderfully-named Gustave von Seyffertitz. The very Irish Victor McLaglen plays the Russian spy bewitched by Agent X-27, but the real point of the movie, which Sternberg also wrote, seems to be showing off Marlene in feathers, veils and sequins. And her firing-squad scene is nothing to sneeze at, either.
The justly celebrated and very pre-Code “Shanghai Express’’ contains Dietrich’s most famous line of dialogue—“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily!” This is uttered to a former boyfriend (Clive Brook), a British army doctor she encounters on a train traveling through a turbulent China. Also aboard are Warner Oland (taking a break from Charlie Chan as a villain fond of branding his victims), Seyffertitz, Eugene Pallette and the immortal Anna May Wong, who incidentally played Oland’s vengeful offspring—daddy was Fu Manchu—in “Daughter of the Dragon.’’
