The Shanghai Gesture, 1941 Here: the look makes the story. Without the outrageous hair, the labyrinthine casino floor, the cheering and screaming in the streets, the girls hanging from the sky trapped in cages, the roulette cane blocking the shot, the eyeline match ups … without these, the story would be a different thing entirely. (Contrast this with Romeo + Juliet (the Baz Luhrman) where the look is a style: the story is the story we know, the look is something we’d pay money to see.) Sternberg makes essentially a silent movie, one where each shot tells us emotionally what we need, the music tears it open, and the dialogue is more effective as a soundscape: the bluntness of Poppy’s wails, the greasy syncopations of the Rubiyat-quoting love interest. The story itself, as noir in tone as the night is long, is essentially a myth: one of rebirth and revenge. A successful white man loves a Chinese woman who doesn’t die but appears to and he runs into her later in his life (when she is beyond human recognition) as his daughter ruins herself on gambling at the casino she owns that the white man is about to buy out. The question of the film is who has power over whom, who must listen to whom. The voice of vice and sin and fun speaks to Poppy, as does her father who insists she reform (he charters her a plane to dry out in Singapore — the one moment where a character is looking upward with hope or something like it) and the madam, her mother it is revealed: urging her unknown-to-her daughter toward destruction and dependency. Great scene: Poppy, the daughter, needs to see that her man is faithful to her — she bangs on his door, hoping to catch him with a chorus girl and when he ignores her, careless as he is, she performs the worst kind of pantomime and insists her ankle is hurt. Despite his worthlessness, despite her paranoid vengeance, he carries her over his doorstep. It’s about the way playacting and projecting onto others (sins of the father…) can even at their basest (and nothing could be baser than a dinner party with imprisoned girls and blackmail and societal niceties) bring out basic decency, a sense of fairness and justice that is otherwise wholly absent from the moral universe of film noir.

The Shanghai Gesture, 1941

Here: the look makes the story. Without the outrageous hair, the labyrinthine casino floor, the cheering and screaming in the streets, the girls hanging from the sky trapped in cages, the roulette cane blocking the shot, the eyeline match ups … without these, the story would be a different thing entirely.

(Contrast this with Romeo + Juliet (the Baz Luhrman) where the look is a style: the story is the story we know, the look is something we’d pay money to see.)

Sternberg makes essentially a silent movie, one where each shot tells us emotionally what we need, the music tears it open, and the dialogue is more effective as a soundscape: the bluntness of Poppy’s wails, the greasy syncopations of the Rubiyat-quoting love interest.

The story itself, as noir in tone as the night is long, is essentially a myth: one of rebirth and revenge. A successful white man loves a Chinese woman who doesn’t die but appears to and he runs into her later in his life (when she is beyond human recognition) as his daughter ruins herself on gambling at the casino she owns that the white man is about to buy out.

The question of the film is who has power over whom, who must listen to whom.

The voice of vice and sin and fun speaks to Poppy, as does her father who insists she reform (he charters her a plane to dry out in Singapore — the one moment where a character is looking upward with hope or something like it) and the madam, her mother it is revealed: urging her unknown-to-her daughter toward destruction and dependency.

Great scene: Poppy, the daughter, needs to see that her man is faithful to her — she bangs on his door, hoping to catch him with a chorus girl and when he ignores her, careless as he is, she performs the worst kind of pantomime and insists her ankle is hurt. Despite his worthlessness, despite her paranoid vengeance, he carries her over his doorstep.

It’s about the way playacting and projecting onto others (sins of the father…) can even at their basest (and nothing could be baser than a dinner party with imprisoned girls and blackmail and societal niceties) bring out basic decency, a sense of fairness and justice that is otherwise wholly absent from the moral universe of film noir.