chaos-rampant This has all the pros and cons of Hollywood Sternberg, so Sternberg after he was swept in the whirlwind passion that was Marlene Dietrich. It is at once oblique, dreamy, lascivious, hysterical, ridiculous..These films, starting with Dishonored, are what I call first or primary texts. Generally speaking, these primary texts more or less unconsciously generate a distinct world of abstract dynamics, in Sternberg's case seduced out of him by real life passion for Dietrich, but have not been spun or layered deeply, mapping a good deal of structure but ultimately leaving it blank. Their function is akin to the use of the mathematical zero as conceived in India (the actual symbol was introduced by the Buddha); 'shunya', meaning empty or void, but understood as a nothing that is something that has capacity to be filled.This is most clearly understood in Sternberg. What is The Scarlet Empress about after all? Nothing beyond a lot of demented excess, beyond us being made to dream about Dietrich in the flickering light of a candle. The rest was a lot of noise.These zeroes can be used by later filmmakers, recognizing potential for something out of nothing, to create notations on the original that make use of the abstract dynamics, usually by stressing their abstract nature or commenting on their emptiness. Lynch would take from noir. Herzog would take from Tod Browning and German begfilm. Rivette would use The Seventh Victim and Moonfleet for two of his films.In Sternberg's case, you can see one such example as early as 1933, where the Busby Berkeley musical Footlight Parade annotates Shanghai Express from just the previous year - this is how immediately powerful was the allure - for one of its numbers. Or you can look at this. Another unbelievably seductive world like breath drawing smoke from an opium pipe, mysterious figures from every corner of the earth, gambling, flirting, sashaying, hedging bets for control of reality in the Chinese port of intrigue. At the center is Mother Gin-sling, the dazzling hostess of a gambling den exuding all the scented allure from the Orient. She controls the patrons quite openly by feeding their addiction, by being able to recognize their impulse ahead of them.On the other end, there is a group of American businessmen plotting to foreclose on Gin-sling. They're seen hatching their plans in front of a big map of Shanghai.Women are between them, young and fresh, specifically two and counterpoints to each other - the one haughty and elegant, the other a sassy Brooklyn girl - to be used as stakes in the sexual poker. There is also an Arab casanova who recites poetry, early on he points at the roulette swarmed by patrons in the middle of the lavish ballroom and claims this is where you wipe away images. Suddenly the game acquires another meaning, this is about forgetting, about spinning time and gambling your past away. Meanwhile, Gin-sling, a villainess worthy of Fu Manchu, seems to be plotting something herself, and has crafted miniature-size figurines of the characters she weaves her web around.This is very sophisticated work on the abstract level, a sort of half-finished Marienbad. You could illustrate all sorts of representations of noir cosmology between the maps and the figures. But just as you have been lulled by the intoxicating smoke, the film gets out of control and becomes a nervous melodramatic mess. Gene Tierny suddenly turns into a petulant child. Last-minute twists involving lost mothers and husbands are the most trite you can imagine. There is a feverish staged show with women locked in cages and men lusting beneath them. But it doesn't matter any longer, has no danger, nothing that nags at you.My guess is that this fiasco is the result of storytelling constrictions of the time, where things had, by all means, to resolve dramatically and in a way that made complete sense to the audience. You had to have that old-fashioned Greek thing, closure, as though the real world makes a lot of sense - does it? - and you have to be faithful to that, otherwise you're cheating.And you cannot resolve an elusive thing like this in such a way, without completely vandalizing its delicate air. But if you discard the last third, you're left with an open text suggesting sinister going-ons that you cannot quite put your finger on. It is quite obvious to me that Raoul Ruiz has used this as template for some of his films.

writers_reign Despite the thousands of movies I HAVE seen there are still a respectable number that for one reason or another eluded me. Shanghai Gesture was one of them until I came across a bargain basement DVD. I've just been looking at the first page of reviews and one is a rave by a French friend of mine that I am unable to share much as I respect his opinion. The impressions came hurtling toward me at breakneck speed; the 'cluttered' set in the opening shot, a Von Sternberg trademark, the ridiculously eclectic cast barely two of which belong in the same movie. What Eric Blore is doing there at all, for example, is anybody's guess, playing his usual 'silly ass' distributing his 'slow burns' randomly and handicapped for no good reason. Ona Munson is so like Marlene Dietrich one wonders why they didn't just get the real thing and have done with it. Mike Mazurki as a coolie? You've got to be kidding. It just goes on, Gene Tierney, playing against type - or at least trying to do 'bad', Marcel Dalio rehearsing his croupier role in the next year's Casablanca. And the Plot! Talk about melodrama. Enough already.

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.

BILLYBOY-10 Whoever directed or at least cut/edited it should have been committed. It's the sloppiest piece of film making pretending to be a first rate production I've ever seen. Oh, sure, the casino shots are fabulous and the gowns by Cassini are beautiful on the beautiful wooden Tierney and the interminable close-ups of everyone are effective for a good old silent movie, but I guess someone forgot to tell the director this was a talkie.The characters are portrayed as caricatures. Mother Gin Sling has such exaggerated hair do's it looks like she is wearing the worlds greatest fright wig and she chews up AND spits out ever scene like a hyena. Walter Houston reads his lines from 3X5 cue cards pasted to the top of the camera for those exasperating close-ups.Whoever wrote this tripe must have been hallucinating at the time. If there were minus stars to give a piece of wasted celluloid, I would give it about minus 5.I want my money back.