tangojazz I just recently saw the best version of "Shanghai Gesture" lent out to the San Francisco Film Noir festival from the collection of Martin Scorcese. What a picture! It reminds me of something David Lynch would do in the present day (but more crazier and weirder). Actually, it's not weird. It's really a picture about a horribly dysfunctional family situation. Gene Tierney is the most beautiful I have ever seen her in a movie. Victor Mature is totally wacked out and gonzo as the decadent Dr. Omar. And actress Ona Munson is hilarious and incredibly bizarre as Mama Gin Sling (she looks like a character out of a Flash Gordon movie). Why do I give it a ten? Because it is a totally original and bizarre movie that defies convention and enters the world of the surrealistic and the campy. I never would have thought of the ending, you know where Gene Tierney gets killed by her own Mother, who we find out is Mama Gin Sling. Never would have guessed it. Totally original movie.

museumofdave Sometimes I just put my reasoned critic to bed and grab my DVD of Shanghai Gesture for an evening of irrational delight. This extravagant, unhinged, twisted and sometimes terrible film is my Guilty Pleasure, a confession I honor by giving it a higher rating than it probably deserves. When this bizarre film was made, Hollywood, still under the yoke of a stringent production code, could not tackle many taboo subjects and thus director Josef Von Sternberg could only hint at them. The brothel, for instance, where the original Broadway play was set, becomes a gambling den (although girls in bamboo cages are dangled outside!) Any hints of drug use were forbidden, so Gene Tierney's opium-addled, spoiled monster of a daughter is named "Poppy" (as in Opium), and the owner of the casino, formerly Mother "G-D" is now called Mother Gin Sling...and so on. Most of America was flocking to see Mickey Rooney in The Hardy Family series, a happy product from MGM. Shanghai Gesture is hardly mainstream.This strange film was not made at a major studio, but produced by Arnold Pressburger, who did manage to sign an amazing assemblage of major character actors to enact a plot of ultimate revenge. There's Victor Mature, hiding in his capacious burnoose, sleazy in a fez, playing Dr. Omar, seducer of the innocent, or Ona Munson, remembered by some viewers as good-hearted bordello gal Belle Watling in Gone With The Wind, sporting a series of Hollywood's most outrageous wigs. And there's Walter Huston with a gimpy arm, and even acting instructor Maria Ouspenskaya, wordless as "The Amah."The sets alone are worth the viewing, from the initial shot of Madame Gin Sling's gambling den, a Deco vortex of gambling activity sucking you into an absurd plot loaded with illogical coincidence. This frenzied Asian Fantasy, which has little to do with reality, and everything to do with Out-Of-Control Style can be great fun and is sometimes admirable for the right reasons. "You likee Chinee New Year?" says Mike Mazurki, usually seen in films as a two-bit gangster, here a shirtless bouncer who has seldom been better! One caveat: Criterion needs to get their hands on this one and turn out a decent print--the DVD quality is, at best, mediocre! But I want my Shanghai Gesture anyway!

sol ***SPOILERS*** Originally on Broadway in 1926 "The Shanghai Gesture" was a lot hotter and spicier hen it was made into a movie some 15 years later. The play involved drugs prostitution and a high class whore house that was replaced by Mother Gin Sing's Casino in the very sanitized, due to the Hollywood Hayes Commission, movie version.In the move Mother Gin Sing, Ona Munson, who runs a very profitable casino in downtown Shanghai is threatened to be evicted by big time British land developer Sir Guy Charteris, Walter Huston, who plans to convert it into a luxury high rise overlooking the South china Sea. While running her casino Mother Gin Sing spots this English woman Poppy, Gene Terney, at the bar and immediately takes a shine to her. Getting Poppy drunk on drinks thats on the house Mother Gin Sing encourages her to gamble the night away giving Poppy unlimited credit where she ends up getting as much as 20,000 Bitish pounds in debt. What we in the audience as well as Poppy don't know is that Moher Gin Sing is hatching a plan that in the end will save her casino from being foreclosed and taken over by Sir Guy! And it's that sinister and evil plan that's she's planning to lay on the unsuspecting Sir Guy at the closing party for the by then defunct casino on the forthcoming Chinese New year that he Poppy and a number of other Shanghai luminaries are invited to attend!The movie is a take on Dante's Inferno where hell is a casino where there's no end to the action and where the action never ends. We see people playing the tables for what seems like eternity never running out of money with money being by far the cheapest commodity in the place. The big surprise is at the going away party when Mother Gin Sing spills the beans of Sir Guy in what a low life heel he really is in what he did to her when she was a young girl some 20 years earlier.****SPOILERS*** The by far biggest surprise in the film is what Mother Gin Sing's relationship is with Poppy that Sir Guy's been hiding for her all these years. The revelations that Sir Guy brings out is so shocking that it leads Mother Gin Sing to completely flip out and end up doing something that not even her money status and political and police connections can cover up or get her out of.Strange casting in the movie with Victor Mature looking as if he's stoned on pot as this spaced out looking guy called Doctor Omar who thinks he's a poet but, like those of us listening to his corny lyrics, really doesn't have the talent to be one. There's also in the movie cast the hulking and non Asiatic looking, with a deep Florida suntan, ex-professional wrestler Mike Mazurki playing of all people a Chinese coolie.

Robert J. Maxwell I don't see too much reason to go on at length about this strikingly photographed von Sternberg number -- except maybe two.One is that there are some pretty clever lines in it, lifted, presumably, from John Colton's play. Examples: Gene Tierney: "This place is so deliciously evil. You can smell it." Tierney to Victor Mature: "You call yourself Doctor Roma. Doctor of what?" Mature: "Of nothing. It sounds important. I hurt no one, unlike some others." The second reason for seeing this is Gene Tierney when she was twenty years old, as "Poppy", prodigal daughter of ultra-rich Walter Huston. Especially with the way that von Sternberg lights her, it's hard to imagine anything approaching more closely feminine perfection. She also puts more energy into her role -- drunk, seductive, throwing away money -- than in any other part I've seen her play. That she overacts, that she may not be able to act AT ALL, is really a negligible consideration. She is what she is, like a blade of grass, like the Grand Canyon, like the freaking Pleiades.The story is some nonsense about gambling and real estate and family dynamics and morality in Mother Gin Sling's Casino, with Ona Munson as the least likely Chinese matron imaginable. A man loses at the roulette wheel and tries to shoot himself before being calmed down. (How do you "try" to shoot yourself?) The croupier is Marcel Dalio, who has, I think, been a croupier in other films and has appeared in three movies ripped fresh from the quivering flanks of Ernest Hemingway's works.You know, when you come right down to it, Shanghai must have been a fascinating city in the 1930s. It was cosmopolitan, raffish, colorful, and its name translates as "on the water." The U. S. Marines lost the bones of the original "Peking Man" in Shanghai as World War II was breaking out. Things were happening in Shanghai. I understand they're beginning to happen again.Anyway, I found the whole thing a bit boring but others may like it more.