My expectations for the 1952 Orientalist noir "Macao" were not very high, athough I think that Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express (1932) may be the most romantic movie ever made. As the 1930s wore on, his compositions built around Marlene Dietrich got more and more stylized (and they were already very stylized in "Shanghai Express").

"Shanghai Gesture" (1941) which he wrote and directed is a travesty of a movie almost entirely set in a Shanghai casino catering to westerners, memorable mostly for the incredibly bizarre coiffure of Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson) and the prim and respectable Gene Tierney discovering Mother Gin Sling is her mother. The debacle seemed to finish off von Sternberg's Hollywood career, but Howard Hughes temporarily revived it by hiring him to direct "Test Pilot" and then turning over Jane Russell, the star he wanted to be transformed from a very beautiful, famously stacked, but straightforward American model into a glamorous siren, or at least femme fatale—in other words, to craft another Dietrich.

At some point, Hughes was quoted as saying that supporting Jane Russell was not a difficult engineering challenge. He was, of course, referring to designing brassieres for her. Building movies around her was more difficult. In repose, she could look like a femme fatale, but does not seem to have been able to act the part of one. Sternberg was more interested in showing off goddess archetypes than in acting or plotting and was not especially concerned about the genre requirement of a femme fatale.

The film is populated with stock figures: the torch singer with her guard up from being hit on and hit on and hit on (Russell), the arch-criminal trapped in his den (the frequently villainous Brad Dexter as a casino owner), the man of the world who is entirely wholesome and ready for True Love under his cynical facade (Robert Mitchum), the corrupt policemen providing information to and taking orders from the villain (Thomas Gomez) and the Neanderthal from Brooklyn (William Bendix, playing a salesman). The boss collects "dames" (Gloria Grahame is already on hand when Russell, Mitchum, and Bendix arrive on a boat from Hong Kong).

There are two lengthy and exquisitely composed chases in a harbor that is supposed to be Macao's (I'm pretty sure that any footage from Macao only appears in back projection and that the film was shot in the RKO studio). The intrigue of diamonds and luring the criminal outside Macao's territorial waters come to a stop twice for Russell to sing (admittedly well) "One for the Road" and "You Kill Me." There is lots of Orientalist decor and many sinister Chinese employees of Dexter. Russell's character — who no doubt has very good reasons for having learned to distrust the motives of men — misunderstands Mitchum several times. And in addition to knives being thrown by a henchman of the the casino boss, the singer he wants (Russell) throws a pair of scissors at Mitchum (before going at him with an unscreened electrical fan).

I'm making it sound like a lot of fun, and I'd momentarily forgotten that Mitchum first sees Russell when a shoe she has hurled at another overly ardent suitor hits Mitchum. That is quite funny, and not long after that a nylon stocking succeeds the shoe. If it weren't for the plot getting in their way, one suspects Mitchum and Russell could have had a good time (in fact, they became close friends and, off-screen, went hand-in-hand in ever-more reactionary directions over the course of the following decades...)

Although Nicholas Ray completed the filming and von Sternberg's only comment on the movie in his memoirs Fun in a Chinese Laundry is that in being employed by Howard Hughes, "instead of fingers in that pie, half a dozen clowns immersed various parts of their anatomy in it," most of the film has a very Sternberg look--especially the longest set piece, the second chase, in which the fugitive is literally enmeshed: that is, it was filmed through increasingly thicker netting.

The casino is almost as out-of-this-world as the one in "Shanghai Gesture," built for tracking shots in which each frame is a striking composition. The gloves Gloria Grahame wears shaking dice have to be seen to be believed. Soon there is a juxtaposition of the raven-tressed Russell in a white dress and the blonde Grahame in black. The men's white suits are often dramatically lit, as, of course, is Russell. (The very noirish box cover photo shows Mitchum much more rumpled than he ever is within the film.)

The cinematography is credited to Harry J. Wild, who had shot some strikingly photographed noirs, including "Murder, My Sweet," "Cornered," and Jean Renoir's "Woman on the Beach." The shimmering in the night against black backgrounds is characteristic of Sternberg's Dietrich vehicles, although there is not a lot of the menacing shadows so common to cinema noir and the German expressionist forerunners of cinema noir.

The look of "Macao" is not exactly cinema noir and the exotic(ized) location is not typical of the genre, but crime and corruption are certainly central to the plot of "Macao" (if anyone can care about its plot...). It is not really fatalistic enough to be cinema noir, either, and I've already noted that Jane Russell's part is not that of a femme fatale. Grahame could play a femme fatale part (specialized in it, in fact, as in the damaged goods in Fritz Lang's Big Heat, but was not given one in "Macao" (she turns out to be quite a "nice girl"). So, I'll categorize it as noirish orientalism rather than cinema noir (if anyone cares...).

And for an adjective, none fits better than "stylized." The compositions and the tracking shots are very striking, so "Macao" can be recommended not only to those who want to admire (or ogle... or even listen to) Jane Russell but to those who enjoy hyper-stylized black-and-white cinematography and over-the-top Orientalist set decoration

A more entertaining noirish movie (set in a Mexican resort rather than an urban jungle with Russell and Mitchum). made the year before, with the bonus Vincent Price hilarious as a hammy actor, is "His Kind of Woman.".

"Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" may be the only film role Russell liked, and she and Mitchum both despised von Sternberg for how he treated the crew (I learned from a TCM join interview of them by Robert Osborne).

This posting was stimulated by George_Chabot's recent rash of reviews lauding Robert Mitchum. I think that Mitchum was best as menacing preachers (Night of the Hunter) and priests (The Wrath of God), but was great as a poor sap in "Out of the Past" and some other noirs, and in many westerns and detective flicks.




Recommended:
Yes

Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older