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List Price: $14.99Amazon.com's Price: $12.99 You Save: $2.00 (13%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 0014381537529
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Label: Image Entertainment
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
Number Of Items: 1
Picture Format: Academy Ratio
Publisher: Image Entertainment
Release Date: March 07, 2006
Running Time: 99 minutes
Sales Rank: 18700
Studio: Image Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: January 15, 1942
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
'The Shanghai Gesture' is a lavishly baroque melodrama set in an international gambling house in Asia featuring a cast of characters with less-than-reputable pasts.Mother Gin-Sling the doyenne of the house controls everyone and everything in her domain. Mother is told by the authorities to close down the establishment because her former lover Sir Guy has just bought the real estate it sits on. Mother seeks revenge by setting up his beautiful daughter Poppy with Dr. Omar a Eurasian of dubious background. Sir Guy fiercely disapproves of Poppy's affair and lifestyle. More murky secrets bubble to the surface before Mother and Sir Guy reach the final blow-out.System Requirements:Running Time 99 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 014381537529 Manufacturer No: ID5375FWDVD
Amazon.com:
Josef von Sternberg's The Shanghai Gesture is one of the most perverse portraits of decadence to squeak past Hollywood censors. Set in a Shanghai of crowded, claustrophobic, and gloriously phony street sets, Sternberg tells the tale of the criminals and aristocrats who inhabit 'Mother Gin Sling's,' a gambling house of seedy opulence where the bored rich and desperate poor congregate to lose their money and possibly their souls. Into this world wanders the thrill-seeking Poppy (the elegant Gene Tierney), a haughty girl infatuated with the club's sleepy-eyed gigolo-poet, Omar (Victor Mature, at his lazy best). 'We buy and sell everything in the most honorable manner,' he purrs to Poppy while luring her further into debt. When Gin Sling (Ona Munson) discovers the girl's secret, she uses her as part of an elaborate revenge against millionaire Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston), a Shanghai businessman with his own dark secrets. Though this came out a year before Casablanca, it plays like a twisted, fun-house mirror reflection of that film, a corrupt paradise in world of meaningless bustle, empty gestures, and easy virtue. Sternberg's languid pacing gives the film a stuck-out-of-time quality, with a story that slows and eddies while the film lingers on the sleazy decadence (suggested, rather than shown, in sly, subversive flourishes.)
Unfortunately the source print is substandard, splotchy, and full of speckles, with a soundtrack layered in hiss. At times it's like looking at the film through the veils Sternberg was so fond of. --Sean Axmaker
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - As ripe as a fetid orchid, and almost as pleasurable to watch
Odd flowers come to mind. The Shanghai Gesture seems like another of Josef von Sternberg's ripely fetid orchids, fascinating to observe but which can leave a nasty smell in your nose if you take a sniff. No, perhaps it's like a pitcher plant from the Discovery Channel, cut open so we can watch a fly slide down into a sweet smelling pool of liquid and then be slowly digested while it struggles for life. Wow, that purple prose is almost as good as some of what von Sternberg comes up with. He might ... Read More
Rating:  - "You like our Chinese New Year?"
THE SHANGHAI GESTURE (based on the controversial play by John Colton) is a stylish noir drama which reeks with all the hallmarks of director Josef von Sternberg. In one of the early loan-outs from her Fox contract, Gene Tierney is a luminous heroine, and Ona Munson provides a fun villainess.
Into the shady streets of Shanghai arrives Victoria "Poppy" Charteris (Gene Tierney), the daughter of an influential financier. She quickly falls under the spell of immoral Doctor Omar (Victor ... Read More
Rating:  - Gene est si touchante
Gene Tierney, actrice magnifique, hante ce film comme tous ceux dans lesquels elle a joué.
Rating: - YOU DO NOT NEED TO SHOW SEX, TO SHOCK
This movie has been written about so often and so well, and in such detail, there is no need to re-hash all that here. The play from which it is taken is deadly dull and pretensious. It amazes me von Sternberg was able to transform it into stimulating adult entertainment.
Nevertheless, from my point of view, the movie ends as a demonstration of the betrayal and infamy and moral depravity of Anglo-colonials, not only in the Orient -- and not only Englishmen either -- but all over the ... Read More
Rating:  - Where's the zero-star rating?
In my ongoing meander through the world of noir (and noir-ish) I thought I'd give this a chance. Yes, Gene Tierney is beautiful. End of story.
This story was watered down, so it goes, to get around the Hollywood censors - and nothing is left. There's not a character to care about (except maybe Dixie). Victor Mature is SO bad, it's amazing he had a career at all.
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