Noir of the Week: The Shanghai Gesture (1941)

10 Responses to Noir of the Week: The Shanghai Gesture (1941)

1. Phil P says:

   September 6, 2010 at 10:42 pm

   I recall stumbling on this on TCM a long time ago and finding it very weird and interesting. Definitely worth another look.

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2. sheila says:

   September 7, 2010 at 6:19 am

   Weird is right. It’s one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen.

   I mean, honestly: Mother Gin Sling??? Apparently, in the play it was based on her name was Mother Goddamn. So yeah, that needed to be changed.

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3. Bruce Reid says:

   September 7, 2010 at 12:13 pm

   Typically perceptive and beautifully expressed, Sheila. One quibble, though: von Sternberg’s last film, Anatahan, has its fans and its detractors (I’m with the former), but it is so complete a summation of the director, both his most artificial construct and (arguably) his most piercing study, that it deserves to be considered a major work.

   Have you gone through the recent DVD release of three silent von Sternbergs? I’d seen The Last Command before and was again amazed, but Underworld and, especially, The Docks of New York were even greater revelations. They’re masterpieces of the type that cause you to rewrite the histories and hierarchies of cinema you’ve built up in your head. In tracking down a thought, they free you from your own. Remarkable stuff.

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4. sheila says:

   September 7, 2010 at 12:18 pm

   Bruce – I am dying to get a look at the latest von Sternberg collection – I’ve been reading the reviews and getting very excited. Your words only intensify my excitement – thank you!!

   And I agree with your quibble, actually – I probably should have re-worded (although I have not seen Anatahan and now I most definitely will). Macao certainly has its following as well. Anything with Robert Mitchum is okay by me. But from what I understand, The Shanghai Gesture represents the end of an era for him. He was very very ill when he filmed it – I believe he had had a nervous breakdown, but you may know more about that than me.

   What a trip the movie is. Mother Gin Sling’s hair pieces are so substantial they probably have moons orbiting around them.

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5. sheila says:

   September 7, 2010 at 12:19 pm

   Oh, and someone over on the Back Alley Noir message boards mentioned how bad the current print is. It really is atrocious – it would be great if it could be cleaned up and re-released.

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6. Bruce Reid says:

   September 7, 2010 at 1:06 pm

   Macao is recognizably Sternberg–the fishing nets and window slats see to that–and I do love it, but I couldn’t really disagree with an assessment that it’s a minor work. But yeah, any time spent with Mitchum is worthwhile.

   I’m sure von Sternberg had many breakdowns, but his illness on the Shanghai Gesture set was due to complications from an infection he acquired visiting Indonesia, and the subsequent surgery. He directed most of the film lying on a cot, which probably influenced (for the better) the languorous pacing you reference. I love how everything creeps like an opiate haze; even the rhythm of the film is decadent.

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7. sheila says:

   September 7, 2010 at 1:15 pm

   Yes, I had heard that “lying on a cot” story. It probably did influence the slow pace, you’re right. I actually liked most of that, how each moment was surrounded by some bizarre silent moment – especially Mother Gin Sling’s moments. It’s like people were forced to sit and WAIT to hear what she had to say, which became a perfect character thing – the way she wielded power (or one of the ways).

   That first wide panning shot of the casino blows my mind. It’s beautiful, but awful. It’s almost too much to grasp. People seem dwarfed by the set, and the echoes are just all over the place. Dazzling.

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8. Phil P says:

   September 15, 2010 at 11:45 am

   I had to tell you Sheila, that I just rented the movie. I liked it even better the second time, and the third; in fact I loved it. Loved your article too, now that I can appreciate it. There’s something fascinating about that milieu of displaced persons stranded in a kind of purgatory; it’s like Casablanca, only ten times more corrupt and without any sentiment at all. Part of that fascination is no doubt the appeal of the exotic to us Westerners – it calls to mind the worlds of Conrad and Graham Greene.

   I’m intrigued that it originally took place in a brothel – did you get that from IMDB or do you have other sources, because I’d be interested in knowing more about the film? They must have had to change the plot a lot; I can imagine Poppy entering a casino, but not a brothel, though she could end up there. Probably the play started at a later point in the story. I’d be curious to read the play, though it’s hard to come by. I’m sure it’s no masterpiece, but it did run 206 performances in New York. I wonder if this bit of dialogue came from the play or the screen writers:

   Poppy: If anyone saw us coming in here I’d certainly hear plenty. The other places are like kindergartens compared with this. It smells so incredibly evil. I didn’t think such a place existed except in my own imagination. It has a ghastly familiarity, like a half-remembered dream. Anything could happen here, any moment.

   I wonder how the scene with the girls in cages got past the censors. Hollywood censorship was weird; you couldn’t show married couples sleeping in the same bed but you could show girls being sold at auction. I suppose they covered themselves by Gin Sling’s line that the auctions were phony. It was the line that sounded phony.

   I wanted to say something about the acting. I wonder what you thought of “loony and dead-eyed” Victor Mature. I have trouble getting a fix on him. I know only three good films he was in. In Kiss of Death he was fine and perfectly cast. In My Darling Clementine he was also very good but seemed miscast. As an educated-man-who-can-recite-Shakespeare turned killer, I didn’t quite believe either side of him. In SG, he seemed to get everything right, the languorousness, the heavy-lidded eyes, the bored cynicism. But something seemed missing. Of course he was too obviously American, but that wasn’t really it. Despite his rugged good looks he lacks sexual charisma (of course I’m only a man, what do I know?). He was missing a certain dangerousness, even brutality – that’s what Poppy would be attracted to.

   I thought there was one bad scene in the movie, the one where Poppy is acting up with Omar, pretending to break her leg. I thought it was badly acted on Tierney’s part. I don’t think she was really a great actor. She was a stunning beauty and had great presence. She was perfectly cast as a spoiled, petulant beauty, the role of a lifetime for her. I don’t think she had that extra element of genius. Perhaps I’m nitpicking, but it’s often great films that inspire that reaction. I imagine them as even better, which I don’t do with mediocre films.

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9. sheila says:

   September 15, 2010 at 6:10 pm

   Phil – There was a big article on TCM about the film, which really went into the original script and its brothel-setting, but I read it elsewhere.

   I thought that Victor Mature’s performance was pure camp. In a good way. He strolled through that movie. I feel that he was so dead to innocence that it couldn’t move him at all. I don’t think he was convincing as a Turk, or whatever he was supposed to be- but it just added to the weird displacement of that character. But no, I felt zero sexual threat from him. His interest in the ladies was bored and yet voracious at the same time. He was like a pimp: dead to the possibilities of sex except in terms of the dollar signs attached to it. I’m not sure. I thought he was really campy in the part. And the first moment I saw Mother Gin Sling I thought SHE would be the camp center of the film, with that HAIR – but she turns in a very realistic and tightly-coiled performance, where you forget the outfit, and that she is not in any way Chinese … She was a person.

   I too loved the feeling that this was an outpost of outlaws. Kind of like that crazy inter-species bar in Star Wars. A frontier town. Rough justice. All different “species” there. And man, that casino – wasn’t it just gorgeous? And scary?

   I was thinking the same thing about the girls in cages. The men in the street were a scary howling mob – their intentions clear – and the girls are obviously terrified. The film does not let us off the hook in that moment, by making us believe that they may be enjoying their predicament. They are scared. They are in cages. Awful.

   And, for me, I somehow clicked in more with the Dixie character than the Poppy character – maybe because she shows up first in the film, so I assumed she would be the center … maybe because I have this affinity for Phyllis Brooks because of the Cary Grant story … I find Gene Tierney to be almost distractingly beautiful. I think she is at her prime here. von Sternberg sure knew how to film beautiful women. It is iconic. Alienating, almost.

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10. Phil P says:

    September 16, 2010 at 9:55 am

    Thanks for the tip about TCM. I never explored their website. There’s interesting stuff about SG. I was surprised by some of the negative reviews. I guess not everyone shares our taste for garish melodrama.

    I too liked Phyllis Brooks. She was a wonderful foil for the other characters – the good ol’ girl from Brooklyn, the one normal, uncorrupt person in the film. And I have a soft spot in my heart for characters from Brooklyn, having been born there.

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