Henri Jeanson had worked with Louis Jouvet on Hotel du Nord and that's a masterpiece whichever way you slice it so adding Pabst to the mix in that same year (1938) should have been a shoo-in but alas, the best-laid schemes ... It's probably fair to say that Jeanson and Pabst expect the viewer to be fully up to speed on the political situation that obtained in Shanghai at the time and not only do they fail to make the audience au fait but they also waste a lot of footage on a mother crooning to a child and tend to go overboard in the last reel with the visual equivalent of We Shall Overcome filling the frame. Not a turkey but it still falls a little short of being a contender - about from here to Macao short.
Review of The Shanghai Drama
