Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Saw two fairly awful movies directed by Josef von Sternberg this evening at the Egyptian. 1941’s The Shanghai Gesture was the worst I’ve seen in a long time. So bad, it was almost good - though that game isn’t really my kind of thing (life is too short). This one truly went overboard with awful, emotionless performances, rubbing shoulders with their opposite, over the top, melodramatic insanity. Filled with horribly made up fake Chinese, racist dialog & dragon-lady costumes, and worst of all, a truly ridiculous plot that might have been rejected from a dime novel. Weirdly enough they followed this with a low budget re-imagining of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Released in 1935 and it looks it. Supposedly set in Russia, but the only way one can guess this is because the main characters worry about being sent to Siberia. The movie instead looks like it was filmed on a left over set from something about Chicago in the 1920s. But it does star Peter Lorre (supposedly in his first “Hollywood” role) and he’s as creepy and compelling to watch as ever - maybe even a little more over the top here than normal - screaming inappropriately even for a man slowly going crazy from guilt and paranoia (I don’t think he played the lead once he got to America too often). In a way this movie felt like, what if Crime and Punishment was written by Franz Kafka after he’d moved into a Hollywood bungalow. And in a way, I kind of liked it, even though, it’s really not very good - if that makes sense. It was certainly enjoyable, compared to the wasteland of The Shanghai Gesture.
