Josef von Sternberg’s a master of masking and unmasking the characters in his films. Almost always, they involve questions of authenticity and fakery. People pretend they’re something other than what they are—empty husks of existence long gone. They simultaneously wish for stability and disruption. But always, they maintain their need for power.
We see these themes in von Sternberg’s collaboration with Marlene Dietrich in films like Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932). The characters find themselves in places that resist definition (especially national). In The Shanghai Gesture (1941), von Sternberg delves more into the same themes that he keeps returning to, obsessively and repeatedly. It’s considered a film noir but von Sternberg’s touch of dreaminess and elusive play with light and shadow move the film among many categories. Much like the characters in it, von Sternberg’s final vision is made of aesthetic glimpses that are hard to arrest. All great art resists this.
The Shanghai Gesture tells a story of an odd collection of people living in Shanghai—a place known for the misfits, criminals, and those who want to forget their past. Gene Tierney plays Victoria Charteris, daughter of a wealthy businessman, Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston). It’s clear that Victoria (or as she calls herself, Poppy), is privileged and spends her father’s money with abandon.
The central place of the film is a casino owned by a woman who calls herself “Mother Gin Sling” (Ona Munson), who’s informed that she has to move her casino elsewhere. Guy Charteris will be taking over the district that she is currently in. Of course, she won’t go without a proper fight.
Adding to the mix is “Doctor” Omar (Victor Mature) and Dixie Pomeroy (Phyllis Brooks). Dixie has made it to Shanghai from the United States as a chorus girl. Omar’s a smooth-talker, and immediately takes an interest in Poppy, as she does in him. But for whose benefit? Are they really interested in each other, or are they mutual place holders until another possible conquest arrives?
When the two initially meet, Poppy wants to know who Omar really is but he’s poetically cryptic: “My birthplace took under a full moon on the sands of Damascus. My father was an Armenian tobacco dealer and was far away. And my mother—the less said about her the better. She was half-French and the other half is lost in the dust of time… I’m related to all the earth, and nothing that’s human is foreign to me.” Omar’s autobiographical musings could be considered as the blueprint for The Shanghai Gesture.
The question, however, is what does it mean to be human? The good and the bad? All of the characters have plenty of both, and they all converge in a place sacred only to them—the house of gambling. This is their “tent” and their reason for being. This is the place where cultures and nationalities don’t matter, and the only loyalty that exists is to oneself. The vice of sinking deeper into debt is what brings them together—masters and slaves caught in the cage of Shanghai.
The driving force of impending revenge is Mother Gin Sling, who recognized Sir Guy Charteris as a man from her uneasy and tortured past. Secrets are revealed and, as expected, the masks begin to slip off. The biggest victim of the collective inauthenticity is Poppy. She oscillates between a weak representation of the femme fatale (especially in her encounters with Omar) and a spoiled brat on the verge of another pointless nervous breakdown. Gene Tierney’s eyes—half-closed and sleepy—show a mix of sadness and submission to her fate, while the rest of her being is screaming to leave the cage of despair.
What’s revealed and what’s concealed? Josef von Sternberg was a master of chiaroscuro in cinema. The film was his canvas and he understood the perfect balance of light and shadow. The camera was an entrance point into the metaphysics of art and acting, and unlike any other filmmaker (except, perhaps, Orson Welles, who was another master of concealment and illumination), von Sternberg blended the technical physicality of the film with its metaphysical subtext that unravels in each frame. But he doesn’t give us satisfaction in this unwrapping. If anything, we’re left in the depths of ontological burden, facing our own reason for being.
The final shot of The Shanghai Gesture brings us back to the casino: the den of insanity, in which acedia continues to reign supreme. The alleged togetherness everyone feels is revealed as the mad race to the bottom, as the roulette wheel spins again and again and again, indifferent to the human condition.