Three Marlene .

Author: dbdumonteil
4 October 2004

Marlene Dietrich,(oui ben faut arrêter avec Marlène Dietrich !..elle n'est pas dans le film.point barre)even if she does not appear is present here :she's the marvelous Gene Tierney,the terrifying Ona Munson and the cynical Victor Mature."The Shanghai gesture" is one of my favorite Sternberg movies.I love the lines which warns us at the beginning of the film:it's not real Shanghai,it does not take place in the present.

"The Shanghai gesture" is an unclassifiable work: a film noir?a melodrama?Most likely an extravaganza ,an incredible exotic story which smells of the intoxicating perfume of poisonous flowers.The gigantic dive looks like a cobweb which the high priestess Mother Gin Sling spins ."Why not Mother Whiskey Soda? " Tierney asks.All the characters are not what they seem ,they just pretend.Tierney has two names (one of them is the well-chosen "Poppy") and we only learn her real identity in the second half in a scene which seems completely "out of the movie".Mature is Doctor Omar ,doctor of nothing! Even the women in the cages and the sailors who buy them just pretend .Nothing is real.

Tierney's downfall is depicted in lavish detail:from the elegant woman of the beginning to the wreck Gin Sling invites to her Chinese New Year feast .Directing is absolutely breathtaking,when the camera circles around the dive where a cast of thousands -Sternberg even pays a tribute to the extras in the cast and credits,which is rare ,to my knowledge ,the first and last time it had been made-surrounds the heroine ,or in the final scenes when the shots merge with the firecrackers of the New Year."The Shanghai gesture" may be a guilty pleasure.But this kind of pleasure ,I ask for more!