Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

metamorphosis into film noir, the city in which gangsters move about appears very often in
the daylight, a contrast to the enclosed urban darkness found in noir.
Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld mentioned above comes closest to being an
underworld noir film, being more tangible and more threatening than other noir precursors.
Despite a harsh review when it was first screened, 18 The Shanghai Gesture contains much
of what was to develop into “the standard expression of noir” and it surely captures the
flavour of the city in the thirties. Like many of the gangster films, this also has a title
disclaimer: “Our story has nothing to do with the present” and it has to be noted that it also
suffered numerous changes mandated by the Hays Office. The plot revolves around a
young woman, Victoria Charteris (Gene Tierney), also known as Poppy Smith, who is the
daughter of Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston), a wealthy British financier. Dragon-lady
Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson) is the proprietor of a Shanghai casino which Sir Guy has
decided to close down as it sits on real estate he has bought, despite the bribes that he gets
from her. The rest of the plot works on around this triangular axis, and make Poppy Smith
the key portrayal of noir fatality.
The casino’s nightlife depicted in The Shanghai Gesture is extremely detailed, with
its own social codes, and works as a “miniature city-within-the-city”, as Christopher
identifies it in his comment above. Many noir films have the word “city” or the word
“street” in their titles (see p. 411) since often the city is transformed into a maze,
psychologically charged with the protagonist’s innermost conflicts and desires. The
symbolic meaning of the noir city is also rooted in a sense of urban claustrophobia
showing that in film noir there is no separation between the disturbed depths of a society
(its noir underworld) and the acceptable modes of living within that society. The amplitude
of the city in the gangster story differs from the one in the noir thrillers inasmuch as the
gangster encapsulates the city and its hidden and secret subworld serves as the place where
he manages his economic activities, deploying all means of violence and brutality
necessary to achieve his goals. In the noir story the city assumes a near mythic power and
engulfs the protagonist who thus becomes aware of his own insignificance, as I will
18 On the day the film was released (26 th December 1941), The New York Times annotated that, “[the film] is
so utterly and lavishly pretentious, so persistently opaque and so very badly acted in every leading role but
one that its single redeeming feature is that it finally becomes laughable.” The article newspaper also noted
that “the director was apparently so interested in shooting magnificent scenes that he overlooked the
necessity of fitting together a lucid film” (in DelGaudio 1993:150).
84