Henri Jeanson had worked with Louis Jouvet on Hotel du Nord and that's a masterpiece whichever way you slice it so adding Pabst to the mix in that same year (1938) should have been a shoo-in but alas, the best-laid schemes ... It's probably fair to say that Jeanson and Pabst expect the viewer to be fully up to speed on the political situation that obtained in Shanghai at the time and not only do they fail to make the audience au fait but they also waste a lot of footage on a mother crooning to a child and tend to go overboard in the last reel with the visual equivalent of We Shall Overcome filling the frame. Not a turkey but it still falls a little short of being a contender - about from here to Macao short.
3 Reviews
memorable and well done
fatboy-631 October 1998
This movie was shown last night (10/30/98) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as part of a G. W. Pabst retrospective. The date of the movie was 1938 and it was very evocative of the period. Although shot in Saigon (instead of Hong Kong), it appeared to be very reflective of what I imagine was the Hong Kong atmosphere at the time - including good references to the many Russian ex-patriots there and their desperation. Not a perfect movie but one to be seen, if available.
The Shanghai texture
dbdumonteil13 February 2008
This is a very complicated story and the viewer -not familiar with the situation in China at the time- may sometimes feel lost.The first thirty minutes reveal an average script,which is going all over the place: a chanteuse who sings a little song every five minutes,her daughter in a fitting boarding-school (Gabrielle Dorziat as the headmistress,a three-minute part),a people hero,Tchang, a French journalist,an organization ,the "black dragon" ,this is really a Shanghai mixture.
In fact,this is as far-fetched as "Fraulein Doctor " aka "Salonique Nid d'Espions" which Pabst made two years before .What saves this film is the cast (Louis Jouvet,Raymond Rouleau) Some of Henri Jeanson's lines ("compared to our passports,the true ones look false!" "why didn't you do that fifteen years ago?" (kill me) )are up to scratch;Pabst 's directing is sometimes excellent: the free-for-all in the night club ;the bloody passport bullets went through;and most of all,the death of Kay in the jubilant crowd.
In fact,this is as far-fetched as "Fraulein Doctor " aka "Salonique Nid d'Espions" which Pabst made two years before .What saves this film is the cast (Louis Jouvet,Raymond Rouleau) Some of Henri Jeanson's lines ("compared to our passports,the true ones look false!" "why didn't you do that fifteen years ago?" (kill me) )are up to scratch;Pabst 's directing is sometimes excellent: the free-for-all in the night club ;the bloody passport bullets went through;and most of all,the death of Kay in the jubilant crowd.
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