Makeup Beat

It’s easy to see where NARS found his inspiration for his Spring 08 Shanghai Lilly collection, shown here on model/socialite Lydia Hearst.
Available @ Sephora.

Marlene Dietrich in The Shanghai Express.

Shanghai Express (1932) is a thrilling adventure film ~
one of the best-remembered films of Marlene Dietrich.
In the opening scene, a train is being boarded and loaded with baggage at the Peking Railroad Station. It is traveling from Peking to Shanghai as a civil war rages through war-torn China. One of the train’s passengers, Reverend Carmichael (Lawrence Grant) complains to fellow passenger British Medical Corps Captain Donald Harvey (Clive Brook) about the kinds of women traveling on the train: “Well, sir, I suppose every train carries its cargo of sin, but this train is burdened with more than its share!” He also criticizes two of the them in particular: “One of them is yellow, and the other one is white – but both their souls are rotten.” Harvey criticizes the Reverend’s assumptions:

You interest me, Mr. Carmichael. I’m not exactly irreligous, and, being a physician, I sometimes wonder how a man like you can locate a soul and, having located it, diagnose its condition as rotten.

One of the lady passengers on the train, a notorious adventuress Shanghai Lily (Marlene Dietrich), and a lady of questionable reputation, is known as “the White Flower of the Chinese Coast.” In a rendezvous after over five years, she tells her former lover, Captain Harvey who had deserted her, that she now has a new life and a new name – when asked if her name change was due to marriage…

“It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.”

He is unaware of her reputation as a glamorous prostitute and seductress.

One of the passengers, an Eurasian merchant named Henry Chang (Warner Oland), in actuality a warlord rebel leader, has his rebels ambush and attack the train, angry over the arrest of some of his aides before the train left the station. He takes hostages, including Captain Harvey, planning a prisoner exchange. He also orders: “The white woman stays with me.” Shanghai Lily is forced to be his mistress, but she refuses. He threatens to blind Shanghai Lily’s former lover Captain Harvey, until she offers herself to the warlord to save him. The Captain is unaware of her sacrifice.

A wronged, American-bred Chinese prostitute, Hui Fei (Anna May Wong) angry over being raped earlier by the rebel leader, stabs him to death, freeing the Shanghai Express and all the captives.

Actress Anna May Wong.