Shanghai Gesture (1942)

As ripe as a fetid orchid, and almost as pleasurable to watch

Odd flowers come to mind. The Shanghai Gesture seems like another of Josef von Sternberg's ripely fetid orchids, fascinating to observe but which can leave a nasty smell in your nose if you take a sniff. No, perhaps it's like a pitcher plant from the Discovery Channel, cut open so we can watch a fly slide down into a sweet smelling pool of liquid and then be slowly digested while it struggles for life. Wow, that purple prose is almost as good as some of what von Sternberg comes up with. He might have been a master of mise en scene, whatever that catch-all phrase may mean, but his movies can be so ripe, lush and oblivious to what makes a good movie that in some perverse way at least a handful of his films are still interesting. The Scarlet Empress, for example, is so over the top with such a sly and amusingly lewd performance by Marlene Dietrich that even Criterion has blessed it. The Shanghai Gesture is not all that good, but it is so seriously fervid, so stuffed with oozing melodrama and contains so many fascinating performances, some excellent and some not, that the movie just keeps striding through its 99 minutes.

We're in Shanghai in the International Settlement. Mother Gin Sling, a dragon lady who rose from poverty and enslaved prostitution now owns the most elegant, the largest, and the richest casino in town. She's a powerful woman. She knows everything that needs knowing about the important foreign men in Shanghai who come to be flattered and gamble at her establishment. She knows quite a bit about their wives, too. Sir Guy Charteris, however, who is new to Shanghai, is buying up property to turn into a rich new development, and that will include Mother Gin Sling's establishment. Charteris has a lovely young daughter, just out of finishing school. She's beautiful, impulsive, spoiled and is used to her father's money. She loves the idea of dark thrills. She's soon to become a pawn between Mother Gin Sling and Charteris, who doesn't realize that long ago the young Chinese girl he married and lost was...yes, Mother Gin Sling. `Mother' will get her revenge on this man, all right, but Charteris has a secret of his own. You'll never guess, of course. It all comes together at an elegant Chinese New Year's dinner party hosted by `Mother,' with firecrackers going off outside in the streets, girls in basket cages hoisted up outside her window to be bid on by eager rickshaw drivers and cold revenge served up as the main course

The quality of the movie is as variable as the acting. Walter Huston as Charteris is excellent. He was a commanding actor and always interesting to watch. He might be remembered by most nowadays as the old coot Howard, smarter than them all, in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but watch him in Dodsworth. As Sam Dodsworth he's touching and unforgettable.

Ona Munson as the vengeance-driven, hardened Mother Gin Sling, however, is just caricature. At times her line reading sounds like Mae West was playing the part. Sternberg gives her a lacquered hairdo that would make Medusa envious. As the smooth Doctor Omar, one of Mother Gin Sling's many corrupt employees, Victor Mature does a surprisingly good job. With his fleshy lips, sleepy eyes and wearing evening clothes, he looks the part. He has to contend with some silly lines to say, a ridiculous fez to wear and what appears to be a silk bed sheet tossed around his shoulders. Gene Tierney, beautiful, carefully photographed, stunning to see, simply can't act. She manages as the spoiled Victoria Charteris, but as the corrupted Poppy Smith, even when she's trying her best, she just can't handle the part. The secondary actors range from awkward, obvious portrayals to the fine work of Eric Blore as a genuinely offensive sycophant who belongs to `Mother,' Albert Basserman as an aged and worldly commissioner and Mike Mazurki as a big, big Chinese coolee who does with sullen pleasure what `Mother' tells him to.

To give some sympathy to Sternberg, the Hollywood Code required him to make Victoria's downfall the result of being led by Doctor Omar to gambling and liquor. This makes her degradation at the hands of Mother Gin Sling seem a little lightweight. In the play, of course, Omar led her to sex and opium.

Still, you can't beat the last scene in the movie. The secrets have been exposed, a shooting has taken place, the `best' people in Shanghai have fled `Mother's' party and the fireworks are exploding. Amidst all this the sweaty, bare-chested Mazurki turns to Sir Guy as they stand in the crowded street and asks, "Likee Chinee New Year?"

The DVD is barebones and isn't pristine but it's easy to watch. June 28, 2008

"You like our Chinese New Year?"

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (based on the controversial play by John Colton) is a stylish noir drama which reeks with all the hallmarks of director Josef von Sternberg. In one of the early loan-outs from her Fox contract, Gene Tierney is a luminous heroine, and Ona Munson provides a fun villainess.

Into the shady streets of Shanghai arrives Victoria "Poppy" Charteris (Gene Tierney), the daughter of an influential financier. She quickly falls under the spell of immoral Doctor Omar (Victor Mature) and becomes a regular at the glamorous casino belonging to Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson), a dangerous woman not to be trifled with, as Poppy and her father (Walter Huston) will soon discover...

Josef von Sternberg paints a lush picture of Shanghai at the very height of it's excess and debauchery. Just like Poppy, the audience is slowly seduced into this gilded world; and it's a very heady cocktail. THE SHANGHAI GESTURE also features the moody and shadow-heavy lighting effects which von Sternberg was famous for.

Gene Tierney (dressed in an exclusive wardrobe by Oleg Cassini) glows as Poppy, and it's really fun watching her playing drunk and disorderly! Ona Munson is the true star here, and provides a chilling and controlled performance as the ultimate dragon lady, Mother Gin Sling. Munson is best-remembered for playing Belle Watling, the tart with a heart in "Gone with the Wind". She was one of the most fascinating yet cruelly-ignored actresses of the period; it's great seeing her in a meaty role like Gin Sling. Her incredible clothes were provided by Royer.

Victor Mature and Walter Huston barely register (you're meant to be watching Tierney and Munson). Phyllis Brooks is also memorable, playing a wisecracking chorus girl on the make.

I really enjoyed THE SHANGHAI GESTURE, even though the current DVD release from Image Entertainment/Mystic Fire Video suffers from just about every example of print damage you can imagine (ghosting, watermarks, vertical scratches); and the audio is almost as bad. But, in a strange way, it all adds to the character of the movie.

(Single-sided, single-layer disc). January 31, 2008

Gene est si touchante

Gene Tierney, actrice magnifique, hante ce film comme tous ceux dans lesquels elle a joué. April 2, 2007

YOU DO NOT NEED TO SHOW SEX, TO SHOCK

This movie has been written about so often and so well, and in such detail, there is no need to re-hash all that here. The play from which it is taken is deadly dull and pretensious. It amazes me von Sternberg was able to transform it into stimulating adult entertainment.

Nevertheless, from my point of view, the movie ends as a demonstration of the betrayal and infamy and moral depravity of Anglo-colonials, not only in the Orient -- and not only Englishmen either -- but all over the world. At the time the movie was made, the notion of such a thing was absolutely scandalous, and that's why the show was hidden by clouds of hippocritical critic-babel, and touted as a kind of von Sternberg freak show of Asiatic, drug-soaked depravity. The Japanese hadn't thrown the English out of Asia yet, and English-speakers and readers lived pretty much in a land described by W. Somorset Maugham. Colonialism was far from dead, even in the cosmopolitan metropolis Shanghai; the first and greatest Open Trading City, where anything you could think of and pay for was available. It's interesting to recollect that Wallace Simpson, who married the King of England and became the Dutchess of Windsor, served her sexual apprenticeship in a Shanghai social club for batchelors, perhaps not too unlike this one of Madame Gin Sling's.

And, it is curious, particularly, that von Sternberg chose to introduce a theme of homoeroticism through the very big, dark handsome and masculine, Victor Mature. In a burnoose and fez and with smoldering sensuality in every un-blinking black-eyed look, he is/was a challenge to every "straight" man. Today's equivalent would be a muscle-bound actor naked, or in a thong. Interestingly enough, at about the same time, in THE MALTESE FALCON, the director does much he same thing, in the same way, with the introduction of a character called Joel Cairo, played by, of all people, Peter Lorre. In that film, the forbidden sin was of Syrian origin, had curly hair, wore a tux, smelled of Chypre and got bitch-slapped by Mary Astor. What is so remarkable is that the existence of Gay men as sexually secure and formidable, integral figures in a modern story, was a very dangerous thing to propose, let alone to show.

How far we have come in only about half a century. In SHANGHAI GESTURE, all the so-called vices are on parade, as characters and types in a gambling den (with rooms upstairs.) It's like an automated wax-works of Protestant sin. But, looking at those characters today, and that situation now in the age of legalized gambling -- and the rebirth of Shanghai -- we see nothing or nearly nothing out of the ordinary. Except, of course, the astonishing beauty of the very young Jean Tierny who, under von Sternberg's lens, writhes and pouts like a little kitten being teased just as she enters her first heat.
August 5, 2006

Where's the zero-star rating?

In my ongoing meander through the world of noir (and noir-ish) I thought I'd give this a chance. Yes, Gene Tierney is beautiful. End of story.
This story was watered down, so it goes, to get around the Hollywood censors - and nothing is left. There's not a character to care about (except maybe Dixie). Victor Mature is SO bad, it's amazing he had a career at all. June 30, 2006

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