Funny how the anticlerical spirit of Buñuel emerges in the works of some of Hollywood's supposedly most conservative directors -- not only the John Ford of Seven Women, but also the Frank Capra of this exercise in lush exotica. Both are rich directorial statements, yet the picture is more often read as an uncharacteristic detour into Von Sternbergland by viewers blind to Capra's attention to emotional shifts; Columbia's Shanghai is as barbarically tumultuous as Paramount's is languid, though the focus remains on a woman's psyche, namely Barbara Stanwyck's prim New England gal, recently arrived in Revolution-torn China to marry Christian missionary beau Gavin Gordon. She is conked on the head amid a melee to wake up on her way to the palace of ruthless General Yen (Nils Asher), first introduced running over a rickshaw driver with his limo. Stanwyck is kept in his opulent court as the main goal of his research ("to convert a missionary"), but it's not long for tension to blur prejudice -- a truckload of good-time girls for the soldiers and the heated night air precipitate a stupefying reverie of revulsion-attraction, the rat-Nosferatu Yen vanquished by the matinee-idol Yen, closing on the lingering kiss of miscegenation. The repelled-aroused braiding developing within the heroine becomes an offshoot of the cultural imperialism inherent in missionary indoctrination, the bishop's anecdote near the beginning about Mongolians incorporating the crucifixion into their torture repertoire followed by a swish-pan into a frontal close-up of an old Chinese servant, as docile as the Chinese chorus dutifully singing "Onward Christian Soldiers." Tall, cynically cultured Asher, smashing in military uniform and silk ensembles, makes a ravishing object of desire, and as such his very presence is a threat, less to Stanwyck's virtue than to her own ideology of racial and sexual absolutes -- to Capra, the general's downfall is ultimately brought about not so much by the forgiveness Stanwyck's taught him as by her utter inability to break cultural boundaries and truly believe what she preaches. Cinematography by Joseph Walker. With Toshia Mori, Walter Connolly, and Richard Loo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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