In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Dreadful film best summarizes this 1941 movie.Businessman Walter Huston buys up land and wants to evict gambling house owner Ona Munson. Was Ms. Munson always cast as the gambling house dame? Remember her as Belle Watling, owner of the brothel and gambling in the memorable "Gone With the Wind?" By the way, what did Munson have on top of her head, a bird cage? Just like the rest of the film, it is absolutely ridiculous.Gin-sling, or whatever her name is, recognizes Huston and in a memorable Chinese New Year celebration reveals herself to him. Gene Tierney did some pretty good acting here. In a way, she reminded me of her part in 1946's "The Razor Edge," but the latter film was so far superior to this junk.The film seems to drag at the tables. You know the voice of the Frenchman who calls the numbers-Vingt-neuf rouge (29-red, etc.)

***SPOILERS*** Originally on Broadway in 1926 "The Shanghai Gesture" was a lot hotter and spicier hen it was made into a movie some 15 years later. The play involved drugs prostitution and a high class whore house that was replaced by Mother Gin Sing's Casino in the very sanitized, due to the Hollywood Hayes Commission, movie version.In the move Mother Gin Sing, Ona Munson, who runs a very profitable casino in downtown Shanghai is threatened to be evicted by big time British land developer Sir Guy Charteris, Walter Huston, who plans to convert it into a luxury high rise overlooking the South china Sea. While running her casino Mother Gin Sing spots this English woman Poppy, Gene Terney, at the bar and immediately takes a shine to her. Getting Poppy drunk on drinks thats on the house Mother Gin Sing encourages her to gamble the night away giving Poppy unlimited credit where she ends up getting as much as 20,000 Bitish pounds in debt. What we in the audience as well as Poppy don't know is that Moher Gin Sing is hatching a plan that in the end will save her casino from being foreclosed and taken over by Sir Guy! And it's that sinister and evil plan that's she's planning to lay on the unsuspecting Sir Guy at the closing party for the by then defunct casino on the forthcoming Chinese New year that he Poppy and a number of other Shanghai luminaries are invited to attend!The movie is a take on Dante's Inferno where hell is a casino where there's no end to the action and where the action never ends. We see people playing the tables for what seems like eternity never running out of money with money being by far the cheapest commodity in the place. The big surprise is at the going away party when Mother Gin Sing spills the beans of Sir Guy in what a low life heel he really is in what he did to her when she was a young girl some 20 years earlier.****SPOILERS*** The by far biggest surprise in the film is what Mother Gin Sing's relationship is with Poppy that Sir Guy's been hiding for her all these years. The revelations that Sir Guy brings out is so shocking that it leads Mother Gin Sing to completely flip out and end up doing something that not even her money status and political and police connections can cover up or get her out of.Strange casting in the movie with Victor Mature looking as if he's stoned on pot as this spaced out looking guy called Doctor Omar who thinks he's a poet but, like those of us listening to his corny lyrics, really doesn't have the talent to be one. There's also in the movie cast the hulking and non Asiatic looking, with a deep Florida suntan, ex-professional wrestler Mike Mazurki playing of all people a Chinese coolie.

I don't see too much reason to go on at length about this strikingly photographed von Sternberg number -- except maybe two.One is that there are some pretty clever lines in it, lifted, presumably, from John Colton's play. Examples: Gene Tierney: "This place is so deliciously evil. You can smell it." Tierney to Victor Mature: "You call yourself Doctor Roma. Doctor of what?" Mature: "Of nothing. It sounds important. I hurt no one, unlike some others." The second reason for seeing this is Gene Tierney when she was twenty years old, as "Poppy", prodigal daughter of ultra-rich Walter Huston. Especially with the way that von Sternberg lights her, it's hard to imagine anything approaching more closely feminine perfection. She also puts more energy into her role -- drunk, seductive, throwing away money -- than in any other part I've seen her play. That she overacts, that she may not be able to act AT ALL, is really a negligible consideration. She is what she is, like a blade of grass, like the Grand Canyon, like the freaking Pleiades.The story is some nonsense about gambling and real estate and family dynamics and morality in Mother Gin Sling's Casino, with Ona Munson as the least likely Chinese matron imaginable. A man loses at the roulette wheel and tries to shoot himself before being calmed down. (How do you "try" to shoot yourself?) The croupier is Marcel Dalio, who has, I think, been a croupier in other films and has appeared in three movies ripped fresh from the quivering flanks of Ernest Hemingway's works.You know, when you come right down to it, Shanghai must have been a fascinating city in the 1930s. It was cosmopolitan, raffish, colorful, and its name translates as "on the water." The U. S. Marines lost the bones of the original "Peking Man" in Shanghai as World War II was breaking out. Things were happening in Shanghai. I understand they're beginning to happen again.Anyway, I found the whole thing a bit boring but others may like it more.

Josef von Sternberg's crazy film stars Gene Tierney as a good girl who goes woefully bad while visiting Shanghai. At the local casino she runs into the likes of "doctor" Victor Mature, showgirl Phyllis Brooks (as Dixie Pomeroy) as well as the dragon lady proprietor Ona Munson (as Mother Gin Sling!). The film is fun but way too outrageous for its own good. Munson is unforgettable though dangerously close to being upstaged by her outlandish hairdos. Mature is awful wearing a fez and claiming to be born in Damascus. Tierney, just 21 at the time, gives a wildly uneven performance...at first a fairly convincing femme fatale and then later a very whiny ingénue. By the time Tierney's seemingly respectable father Walter Huston shows up, von Sternberg throws the film into melodramatic overdrive. You have to see the last 1/2 hour to believe it. The production values are stunning, including brilliant art direction by Boris Leven and great cinematography by Paul Ivano.