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Recent videocassette releases, reviewed by Times critics.
*** 1/2 “The Shanghai Gesture.”
Mystic Fire . $59.95. 1941.
There’s something gloriously mad and bad about this movie, Josef Von Sternberg and Jules Furthman’s bowdlerized version of John Colton’s sordid play about a rich girl going crazy in a Shanghai bordello. (Here it’s a posh, aesthetical gambling casino, which may have helped inspire “Casablanca.”) The atmosphere is languid, overheated, ripe with silken menace and perversity. Sternberg gives it an outrageously beautiful surface; the light seems to shimmer, stink and steam. Even the bad performances--Victor Mature as a decadent poet-libertine, Gene Tierney in an orgy of pettish self-destruction--somehow work, and the good ones--Walter Huston, Ona Massen, Marcel Dalio--have an eerie, camp grandeur.
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