More weird than exotic, it's like waking up and finding Ming The Merciless in charge of a Las Vegas casino. Then too, Mother Gin Sling's head should be featured in Architectural Digest since it resembles nothing less than the Manhattan skyline. And how wacky is it finding all those central European types hiding out in Shanghai as Chinese of one racial blend or another. No wonder the Chinese consulate complained. Only wacko Hollywood could turn a semi-pornographic play into a trip to bizarro-land and put a visual artist like von Sternberg in charge.
For example, catch that great opening boom-shot of the casino interior where patrons swarm like bees over a hive. Or the surging street crowds that seem to suck the life out of the very air. I think Sternberg could take an empty room and make it visually interesting. No doubt about it, the Austrian director lifts the eye at the same time he depresses the brain. What the heck, for example, did he tell Gene Tierney that turned her from a Miss Manners in one scene into a raging nympho the next. I guess that was supposed to be because of Victor Mature's overwhelming magnetism even though he lounges around like a well-fed garden slug. No doubt about it, the celebrated director preferred postures to people.
Still, where else could a passing stranger buy a girl-in-a-basket instead of the usual chicken. That scene alone is worth all the other nuttiness, like telling us the girls are just- pretend. Yeah, sure. I'll bet the Chinese consulate didn't think so. Even so, you can't blame the screenplay for having more holes than grandma's sieve. This is incendiary material for the Production Code 40's— brothels, hookers, opium dens, babies out of wedlock. How else could enterprising producers get this on screen without a trip to bizzaro-land. The straight- laced Walter Huston must have thought he'd wandered into the wrong sound stage.
Any way you cut it, it's a weird one-of-a-kind-- half camp, half brilliance-- so don't miss it.
