A good movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this movie but since it seemed to have a decent reputation, I thought I might as well check it out. To be honest, the whole thing was rather disjointed but it make sense since the production on this movie was rather chaotic. Indeed, if you think that this movie was rather dark and seedy, the play it was based on was so much worse involving a brothel instead of a casino and such fun things like nymphomania and drug addiction. As a result, it took more than a decade to adapt it and, after so many rewriting attempts, the end-result was slightly bewildering. Indeed, there was no real plot and too many characters involved which was probably not such a great idea since the damned thing lasted less than 100 mins. As a result, it was never really clear what the hell was going on with most of the characters. The best example would be the character played by the lovely Gene Tierney. Indeed, because of all the censorship going through all the script revisions, there wasn’t much left to characterize this woman so they never properly explained what was going on with her and what she was exactly doing in this casino. However, the other characters were probably even less developed than she was. And, yet, Josef von Sternberg who was working here on his final movie (he did work on some other movies such as ‘Macao’ in 1952 and ‘Jet Pilot’ in 1957 but he always managed to get fired) did create such a spellbinding mood. In fact, even though this movie was supposed to be about Shanghai, you actually almost never leaves this casino but it didn’t matter as, like all the players coming there, once you enter, you actually never ever want to leave this place. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.