The highly atmospheric sets, coupled with photographer Lee Garmes' famed soft-focus shots, give Shanghai Express a dream-like quality that is highly appropriate for a film about China that was filmed largely in the San Fernando Valley. Sternberg himself said, “I thought the canvas of China as evoked by my imagination quite effective. The actual Shanghai Express, when I took it out of Peking, was thoroughly unlike the train I invented.” On this train, Dietrich tells Clive Brook, “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lilly,” throwing his five year torch for her into an ambivalence that doesn't stop rocking until the train stops rolling. Sternberg's most colorful and langorous film, Shanghai Express is a kind of Grand Hotel and Stagecoach combined, in which the hierarchy of characters (including Anna May Wong at her sultriest) develops against the bombardment from without by revolutionary troops. But being singlemindedly Sternberg, it is above all a paean to unconditional love, the importance of which is only underscored by its improbability.