Shanghai Express

I was thinking of recommending The L-Shaped Room from TCM's lineup of British "Kitchen Sink" movies tonight at 10:00 PM. Leslie Caron plays a preganant Frenchwoman who rents the titular room in a run-down London house so she can have her baby. To be honest, though, it's another one of those movies that I saw once and thought was well-made, even if it's not particularly memorable: unlike, say, the recently-recommended Girl Missing, it's the sort of film I find blends in with a lot of others. It's probably worth a watch, though, if you haven't seen it before.

I knew the last (and only) time I had seen The L-Shaped Room was when Leslie Caron was TCM's Star of the Month, but I've been blogging so long that I couldn't remember exactly which month that was. So in looking up when it was (it turns out to be October, 2009), I came across TCM's web-page promoting Caron's turn as Star of the Month. Nothing earth-shattering about Caron or her movies. But on the right-hand side of the page, I saw an advertisement for a two-movie set starring Marlene Dietrich, which was released last month courtesy of the TCM Vault and Universal, which of course now owns the rights to the 1930s and 1940s Paramount features. One is Dishonored, which I don't believe I've seen before. The other is Shanghai Express, which I blogged about back in January 2011. Back when I blogged about Shanghai Express, it still wasn't on DVD. I don't have a copy of the DVD to review the quality of the print, but I am happy to see that it's gotten a DVD release.