{"id":10121,"date":"2010-05-28T05:49:20","date_gmt":"2010-05-28T09:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=10121"},"modified":"2024-10-27T17:31:33","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T21:31:33","slug":"shanghai-gesture-1941-dir-joseph-von-sternberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=10121","title":{"rendered":"<i>Shanghai Gesture<\/i> (1941); Dir. Josef von Sternberg"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A very strange movie, corrupt and bleak and fantastical, with a glacial pace, and phenomenal crowd scenes in a giant Shanghai casino (with the awesome Marcel Dalio again playing a croupier, as he did in <i>Casablanca<\/i>), <i>Shanghai Gesture<\/i> features Ona Munson (a dead ringer for Marlene Dietrich here, von Sternberg&#8217;s muse, and most familiar to modern-day audiences because of her role as Belle in <i>Gone With the Wind<\/i>) as &#8220;Mother Gin Sling&#8221;, a Shanghai casino-owner, and goddess of the Chinese underworld.  I adore her performance beyond measure, but more than that, I cannot get enough of her costumes and hair pieces.  It&#8217;s distracting at first, but then I got used to it; It&#8217;s a deadly serious movie, with a big secret revealed at the end to rival the one in <i>Chinatown<\/i>, and the pace only adds to the feeling that <i>all of this is serious business<\/i>.  However, there would still be moments when she was having big dramatic monologues (At one point, she spits, with great bitterness and pride, &#8220;<i>I &#8230;. am Mother GIN SLING<\/i>&#8220;.  Of course you are, Ona) and suddenly I would remember the damn get-up she was wearing and burst out laughing, and then have to rewind to catch the missed dialogue.  Hazel Rogers was the wig-maker for the picture, and I can only imagine her glee in getting assigned to this project, where she could let herself go hog-wild.  Victor Mature, Walter Huston, Gene Tierney, also star, and the chorus girl named Dixie is played by Phyllis Brooks, an adorable wise-cracking blonde I want to write more about &#8230; but for now, I will leave you with &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The hair-pieces of MOTHER.  GIN SLING.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"shanghai6.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/shanghai6.jpg\" width=\"708\" height=\"534\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"shanghai13.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/shanghai13.jpg\" width=\"711\" height=\"534\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"shanghai17.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/shanghai17.jpg\" width=\"710\" height=\"534\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"shanghai24.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/shanghai24.jpg\" width=\"710\" height=\"534\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"shanghai11.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/shanghai11.jpg\" width=\"713\" height=\"533\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" alt=\"shanghai31.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/shanghai31.jpg\" width=\"711\" height=\"535\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A very strange movie, corrupt and bleak and fantastical, with a glacial pace, and phenomenal crowd scenes in a giant Shanghai casino (with the awesome Marcel Dalio again playing a croupier, as he did in Casablanca), Shanghai Gesture features Ona &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=10121\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[2572,438],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10121"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10121"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27426,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10121\/revisions\/27426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}