Tuesday, November 24, 2015

Josef von Sternberg is problematic for throwing likeable people into hell in Shanghai Gesture.  That cast is cute.

Legend has it that the Shanghai Gesture is thumb-to-the-nose/pinky-to-the-recipient-of-it gesture...
(Let's add the texture to the harmless pause or gesture, that it's done when there was not one gives it gravitas and punch.  I bite my nails 'cause it's too much.)  

Shanghai's ancient history, accessible in the Town God Temple and Yu Garden, dates back to the 15th Century.
The European visitors who divided it into sectors arrived around 1850 and in 1945 Mao began the new people's era lurking behind the Japanese occupation in 1939?

The playwright of The Shanghai Gesture, John Colton, wrote it in the 1920's.  He also wrote the play Under Capricorn.  He also wrote the intertitles for White Sails in the South Seas.

Walter Huston was in the movie.  I still can't get over his recording of Lost in the Stars.   He also played a foreign occupier of old New York, Peter Stuyvesant.  

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