 Shanghai,
Shanghai… Shanghai, from the 1920s' to the 1940s', has represented for cultured, curious and (often) rich western fellows, a real place as well as a strong metaphor of China of those days: a place of extreme contradictions, boundless luxury and non-conceivable poverty; the designed place for wild pleasures as well as international intrigues, a city where one could build huge fortunes with illegal but tolerated businesses, where one could by anything, people included, with (not many) US dollars, pound sterlings or Yen…A city for sale, people included… Indeed it has represented for many cultured, curious and (often) rich western people, a place to live for some time, in order to taste the peculiar flavor of the real “East”, in order to live dangerously in a city (and country) where political power was fragmented and invisible, under the control of gangsters, war Lords, corrupted officers and uninterested westerns. The Shanghai Country Club could boast the longest Bar in all Far East, and its impeccable Chinese waiters have often served drinks to Count Ciano – at that time (1930) Italian Consul at Shanghai – who was accompanied by an American adventurer that would have soon after shacked the English Empire and made a king abdicate, Ms Wally Simpson; to Charlie Chaplin who was in search for an exotic set for his next film, together with his then wife Paulette Godard; to Noel Coward that was trying to end in that city the first draft of Private Lives; to Jean Cocteau who was attracted there by the excellent and cheap opium and by available (and cheap as well) boys … Young Christopther Isherwood and his poet friend Auden go to China in order to describe the just-began-war (Japanese invasion of Manchuria) and this is how Shanghai appears to them in 1938, a city in which: “The tired or lustful business man will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor, or a french dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel, and gossip with Freddy Kaufmann, its charming manager, about the European aristocracy or pre-Hitler Berlin. You can attend race-meeting, baseball games, football matches. You cansee the latest American films. If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and the brothels. if you want oppium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult to optain in this climate, but this enought whisky and gin to float a fleet of battleship.” What westerns considered Shanghai, was just the International Settlement and the French Concession, extraterritorial places where order was granted by huge Sikhs, with beard and turban and threatening but effective truncheons, belonging to His Majesty (England), and by French gendarmes who were powerful and already trained to deal with Asian populations in Far-eastern colonies. This Shanghai than became, in western imaginary, a kind of cheap Sodom and Gomorra with oriental eyes, with all up-to-dated and sophisticated modernity comforts. Shanghai was so familiar and famous among westerns, that Hollywood made a privileged set out of it, where to locate the most incredible and bizarre stories. After the beginning of Second World War, Shanghai does loose part of its cinematographic charm, but not before the set construction for the last great masterpiece by Joseph Von Sternbergh, The Shanghai gesture (1941). This film's story is a summary of the inevitable moral corruption that a city like Shanghai can produce. Action is placed inside The Great World, a real and famous place in Shanghai, an enormous tower construction in which, more or like very grounded and affordable Dante's Inferno's circles, all lusts and dreams that money can buy are concentrated: gambling, drugs, food, sex and theater. One of the protagonists, the young and hateful Victor Mature, says about his-self “I am doctor in nothing, poet of Shanghai… and Gomorrah”. With this epitaph, curtains drop on legendary years of Shanghai, the most extraordinary “whore of Asia”.
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