The eroticism and exoticism of, respectively, 1940s Hollywood (well-known) and 1950s France (almost entirely forgotten). Respectively: Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and Pierre Cardinal’s Au coeur de la Casbah (In the Heart of the Casbah), 1952. The latter stars Viviane Romance and Claude Laydu (Curé de campagne), was edited by Marguerite Renoir and shot by Henri Decaë, and although it might well have seemed outdated in the early 50s its obscurity is not pre-ordained.

These two films have in common: their exotic, neo-colonial settings, which are obviously audience draws since they both appear in the titles. Their Western-centric fantasising of said settings, of which more later: text-book Orientalism both of them. Their melodrama. Their sexuality/sensuality. Their orbit-system around a diva – notionally, anyway, because one of them has lost its sun and slipped a bit off-kilter. Their misogyny.
Significant differences
1) Story, naturally. Au coeur de la Casbah has a familiar one, at least to French audiences: it’s a modernised, exoticised, re-adjusted version of Phèdre, the masterpiece of French classical tragedy in which a frustrated queen falls for her handsome stepson, an unsophisticated lad who has no idea how to deal with her passion, his own reaction or his father’s inevitable jealousy. French classical tragedy is famous for its minimalism: the more excessive the passions of the story, the more rigidly it had to be corseted by the form, the more explosive it would be. It did, however, approve of exoticism: so long as it was set long ago or far away, it had an excuse both to be so improperly intense and so improbably restrained. Perhaps the 1950s thought it was time to let Phèdre loose and bring her a little closer. As far as I know there was no famous precedent for von Sternberg’s highly decadent story of female revenge, it has echoes of Madame Butterfly if Madame Butterfly had lived up to her title … It’s a good deal nastier than Casbah. Score: for simple plot, even. Both are well put together and there’s no particular advantage either in reworking a strong myth or not. Both of them have moments when the dialogue goes into catatonia. But a point to von Sternberg for not being polite about the underbelly of a port, and that despite the Hays code.

2) The Star. Both depend on her. Casbah has her, in the shape of Viviane Romance who may be less well-known now than she should be but was a beautiful and uninhibited figure of the femme fatale in the 30s, 40s (perhaps that’s why she went out of fashion) and early 50s. She plays a Spanish woman married to a Casbah crime-boss: she was the Latin femme-fatale type who was in fashion in France at this time of fading poetic realism (Maria Casarès, Maria Felix…), she can, and does, easily carry the film, and with no one else in the cast of even half-comparable status, her supremacy is sure. Von Sternberg, on the other hand, has Ona Munson (who?). She plays a Chinese casino-owner (the obscure play this was based on made the obvious more verbally clear, but you gather her profession pretty swiftly). She looks about as Chinese as I do but this was obviously not the point; her job was to channel the absent Dietrich. To be fair, she doesn’t do it badly, but the fact remains she’s both unheard-of, and rather obviously working in someone else’s style. And she has to contend with a far bigger star (Gene Tierney) in the ingénue-victim role, not to mention two high-profile men, one of whom is playing the homme-fatal to some effect. Score: point to Casbah.

3) The casting. It’s much more illustrious and effective in The Shanghai Gesture, with an unfortunate result for the star, as mentioned above – it’s partly down to Munson’s undoubted talent, partly to the narrative structure, that she holds her central place faced with Tierney’s beauty, Walter Huston’s command, Victor Mature’s surprising sleazy sexiness. The supprting cast in Casbah is hardly up to the job. Michel/Hippolyte is certainly supposed to be out of his depth, but Laydu looks about to melt in every shot: you wonder how his father could ever organise that thing they do in breweries, never mind a crime syndicate, and Peter van Eyck is an effective but uncomplicated villain. The only serious rival to Romance is the beautiful Simone Moussia, the director’s sister apparently (I’ve only just discovered this, and it’s sparking all sorts of questions), who plays Romance’s Algerian servant and confidante with immense visual power and, alas, apparently a directorial requirement to speak very fast and very quietly in mixed Franco-Arabic and to be practically incomprehensible. It must be deliberate because the characters remark on it, but it’s not fair on the audience, the actress or the character. Score: point to Shanghai

4) The misogyny. It’s blatant in Casbah where the virginal Claude Laydu, just returned from a sanatorium where he could only dream about women (incidentally this seems more convenient to the plot than consonant with reality?), is told by his father’s wise second-in-command that all woman are whores, and bursts into a long and excruciating rant about female perfidy etc. in front of his well-meaning girlfriend. Unfortunately the text of this could probably be found, at first degree, in a lot of novels, plays, essays and other films in France at the time. On the other hand, just because it’s so blatant it becomes visibly partial. This is what Michel says, and Sylvie’s perceptive reaction (’you’re not talking about women, you’re talking about a woman’) comes back to counter it. The audience is forced to think about it; and Romance/Maria has her private moments too, and her motivations which are not what the misogynist credo would think. And if she’s not quite Phèdre, still Phèdre stands behind her. Shanghai, when it speaks, speaks more forcibly about women’s oppression. But then, it’s a ruthless woman who gets to speak it, and one engaged in exploitation on her own account (’it’s not real and they like it’ being probably intended to appease only the Codekeepers and part of the audience), while her principal victim is an eager and apparently natural candidate for rapid rot. And then, at the last minute the plot flips; Huston, the padre-padrone, is suddenly altogether right, Madame is suddenly altogether wrong. Admittedly at that point the actors lose hold of the dialogue and everything goes into wooden puppet-play, but this doesn’t seem deliberate. There’s no appeal against it, no counter-discourse. Score: hmm. Neither side comes out covered in glory.

5) The exoticism, the neo-colonialism. This is blatant in Shanghai. ‘It isn’t real, it’s just for the tourists’: from this point of view, the cry is more convincing. It certainly isn’t China. But then, the real exotic appeal it’s throwing out isn’t Chinese. Hollywood exoticism is the exoticism of the melting-pot: it’s everything and nothing. It’s the International Quarter. It’s an Armenian-Frenchman in an Arab robe who quotes Persian poetry or rather the particular English poetry that Americans recognise as labelled ‘Persian’; it’s a Russian disguised as a Chinese coolie in a costume straight out of Hollywood’s version of ancient Egypt; it’s the man who says ‘I have no country and the more I see of countries the more I like it that way’ (pretty understandable in 1941, and an excellent line, like Bogart’s ’I’m a drunkard’ in another wartime muddle of a naughty port); the casino in Shanghai with a Russian barman, a French croupier, a Manchurian owner (ah yes, the star-part is ‘Chinese’, but she’s also not ‘from here’. The same goes in Casbah: the Star is neither ‘at home’ in Algiers nor ‘one of us’, the rational French; doubly exotic.). It’s a fantastic confusion of everything which isn’t us. And it’s all very, very suspect. Inside, the place ‘smells of evil’: outside, peculiar masks jump through the streets and leer at the audience. Sexual seduction oozes from it: a commanding femme fatale weaves a web for the Captain of industry, while his pretty daughter is captured by a man quite as ‘fatal’. Incidentally, there must be something to be written about ‘hommes fataux’: they’re not as rare as mentions of them are and they’re not always foreign either. Isn’t Harry Lime a sort of ‘Homme fatal’?

All this is shot à la Von Sternberg, i.e. in the studio. Heaven forbid he have to go to Shanghai, or even Chinatown except maybe to borrow a lion. Why would he? It’s not the point. But Casbah is shot in Algiers, and by someone who if you asks me knows Algiers, intimately. It goes outside a great deal, running up and down the Casbah, capturing passers-by. If I’ve seen this place filmed this way before, it’s not in Pepe le Moko (which is where the narrative climate comes from), it’s in The Battle of Algiers. There are times when the eye is neo-realist and the interest seems almost alive. Not that the narrative can engage with this: but rather than Orientalist, it’s simply Western-centric. If this place feels evil at times, it’s because of a French criminal network, its expat American sidekicks, and its boss’s Spanish heartbreaker whom all the locals, with one exception, distrust. Young Michel seeks refuge in the nice high society of the European quarter, but also, a little, outside, on the rooftops where he can laugh with Yasmine, in the streets. Yes, there is one brothel scene which is sort of Arabised by language, but there’s not much conviction in its displacement: when North Africa is made decadent, it’s Westernised, rather than the reverse. Of course, it’s also marginalised. It furnishes servants and service, onlookers, a chorus not quite given a voice (a boy with a flute whose notes provide a final comment on the action), and, nevertheless, a silent presence which seems – but perhaps I’m imagining it – to be rippling already, underneath. Score here: point to Casbah for awareness … but to Shanghai for fantastical imagination [sigh].

Overall: Au coeur de la Casbah, mixed tending to yes; The Shanghai Gesture, yes