The Shanghai Gesture

There is a casino in Shanghai where every layer of the city meets. The woman who runs it is under threat of closure; the English businessman who holds the land wants the site cleared. At the same time his daughter starts coming and going there and sinks into debt. The subject is not gambling but an account closed in the past coming to light. The revelation at the end turns every scene watched until then into something else, and the narrative resolves into a family matter. The form is entirely atmosphere. The casino is designed in tiers, the tables sit in a pit descending below, and the camera looks down. Light arrives through cages, shutters and smoke; Josef von Sternberg's visual style is here at its densest. The source is a stage play whose subject was a brothel. When the censors would not have it, the setting was changed to a casino, the characters were renamed and the text was rewritten. All of the film's implication was born out of that necessity. Gene Tierney plays the daughter, Ona Munson the owner of the casino and Victor Mature a man of unspecified identity. Who it is for: viewers who like classical-era visual style and the antecedents of film noir. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism, or troubled by the period's orientalist conventions; the objection is fair.