SPOILERS: The film starts with the charming Willi Forst as a playboy having fun with ladies often cleverly getting out of a tight squeeze using sophisticated tactics. He has several lovers and several close calls with their husbands or boyfriends that is until he meets a woman he cannot forget, Marlene Dietrich. The two meet on a train journey, not knowing that his best friend is her fiancé. The film has a sexy feel that sneaks past the censors, but close-ups of legs were removed "for the prohibition of overstimulating the imagination." A version of the film has been reconstructed by the Deutsche Kinemathek, into which the censorship cuts have been reinserted. The "DANGERS OF THE BRIDAL TIME" (another possible title) consist of a train accident that forces a baron and a young girl, who was previously a stranger to him, to spend the night together. The next morning they are no longer strangers, but the young girl is off to her engagement party. With who? Oh well, with that baron's best friend from the night before. The baron, who is also supposed to take part in the celebration, but the bride, who wants to escape with him, and there's the friend who notices everything, now behaves noble, very noble. SPOILER: In his initial anger he shoots the Baron right in the heart, but he is so noble that he doesn't immediately fall over, but instead talks for a while about bad aim, and only then - finally alone - finds his unhappy end. Not without, by the way, faking suicide so that the friend and his bride don't have to blame each other. It has a high-comedy plot (Lubitsch would use it in ANGEL) with a low-rent denouement and a lot of Art Deco furniture.
Lotte Eisner, despite her personal antipathy towards Marlene (and her conviction that she had better legs), recognized in NIGHTS OF LOVE (another possible title) something flickering through all Marlene's late silent films: "a woman who materializes mysteriously and sadly in a railway compartment (she wrote), charming and alluring in her blend of mysterious behavior and strange passivity, her lovely face shadowed by a presentiment of tragedy." Eisner thought it was all the cameraman, not realizing the passivity was the performance. She might well have been describing Shanghai Lily. I recommend this title.
Lotte Eisner, despite her personal antipathy towards Marlene (and her conviction that she had better legs), recognized in NIGHTS OF LOVE (another possible title) something flickering through all Marlene's late silent films: "a woman who materializes mysteriously and sadly in a railway compartment (she wrote), charming and alluring in her blend of mysterious behavior and strange passivity, her lovely face shadowed by a presentiment of tragedy." Eisner thought it was all the cameraman, not realizing the passivity was the performance. She might well have been describing Shanghai Lily. I recommend this title.
