The Shanghai Gesture (…) is in a certain sense the epitome of Sternberg’s world. First, it is a revenge story. The revenge of Mother Gin Sling, the owner of a luxurious casino, against Sir Charteris, a  puritanical business man who tries to make her close her gambling house. A vengeance that will become a mise en scène. As is always the case for Sternberg, the setting is king: it is the heart of the action and the undertaking. Mother Gin Sling is the setting. Everything starts off because someone wants to drive her out. This inconsiderate act with ambiguous motives can only lead to death. Not the death of the two adversaries, but the only inhabitant of this world that still has some sign of life. Sternberg’s world is one of vampires, of devouring values, of light and dark that are more frequently juxtaposed then integrated… Right from the opening credits, the tone is set. Glaucous, in all senses of the word, dominates. The world described has been corrupted by desire. Corrupt, devoured, attacked, practically decimated. Desire that feeds on the death of another, of being transformed into an object, of its absorption into the surroundings. Hence the choice of that particular casino, a place where beings mix, where money changes hands, where everyone is someone and somewhere else. Sternberg’s (trash) exoticism makes sense here: total otherness, dreams as support and desire as stimulant. A desire that cannot be satisfied by anything other than a place so out of reach that it is merely a representation of a confused, unreal and indestructible exoticism. No one can really break free from the grasp of this bewitching environment, if not by escaping. The escape of puritanical Charteris – whose moral baseness is eventually revealed – is the very image of his foolish spiritual ambitions: sinking into the crowd, in the corrupt city, in the haze thatopens the film, where screen and scenery, light and object, desire and lack of conscience are all mixed up.

Joël Magny, The Shanghai Gesture, “Cinéma 82”, n. 280, April 1982