The publicity material for Shanghai mentions in passing that it’s a Casablanca kind of movie. Is it?
It has the title from a major city in, er, an exotic “foreign” country, it’s set during World War II, and … Oh, yes, John Cusack gets to wear Rick’s white tuxedo. Briefly.
Otherwise, Shanghai is more Graham Greene than Casablanca. It can’t or won’t reproduce the heroic self-sacrifice of the 1942 classic, and it certainly can’t muster the jaunty tone with which it ends. It has no jokes likely to become a universal catchline (“Round up the usual suspects”), no romantic lines to be repeated on the relevant moonlit night (“Here’s looking at you, kid”) or whenever it is one says such things nowadays. More-over, given the state of the euro, we’ll never have Paris.
But the link to Casablanca, tenuous as it is, should not detain us. Shanghai is a perfectly good movie in its own right, though not perhaps a great classic that will stand out from the herd of competitors a half-century into the future. Directed by Mikael Håfström from a script by Hossein Amini, it’s a very watchable picture.
Cusack plays Paul Soames, an agent for American naval intelligence, who arrives in the Chinese city in 1941. (I don’t know whether he took the Shanghai Express, but he does meet a Lady from …) His mission is to find out what happened to another agent, who turned up dead; in that respect this storyline is more The Third Man than Casablanca, but let’s not make any more comparisons with classics.
Japan has recently invaded China, though Shanghai is still unconquered. And its glamorous casinos are still running, which is where Soames meets Anna (Gong Li), beautiful wife of a local gangster (Chow Yun-Fat). A high-ranking Japanese spy (Ken Watanabe) is also monitoring the situation. There’s your romantic-political plot right there.
To get closer to the high-ups with hush-hush information, Soames is working as a journalist and pretending to be a Nazi-sympathiser, which adds another layer of tension and interest to the story.
Zooming in
The politics and the history are not all spelled out, and in the end they are just a backdrop to the story of a few individuals whose troubles, really, don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but the divided loyalties of the period are neatly caught in such sidelights.
Cusack is a fine actor (even in crap; see 2012), and here he’s up against the best of his opposite numbers of the East, with Li, Chow and Watanabe, all of whom do excellent work here. The situation of Shanghai 1941 is turbulent, with plenty of opportunities for action of some kind, but these actors play their parts in a largely understated way, which helps make a powerful undercurrent of the emotional stuff in the narrative.
Cusack is losing his youthful bloom and getting a little pouchy around the gills, though that too is an advantage in such a story, as the confusion, tension and pain mount up. (I look forward to Cusack doing a Michael Caine in something like The Quiet American in 20 years’ time.)
The period styling is beautifully done, though Shanghai was apparently a troubled production: it was refused permission to shoot in the city itself and had to move, at the last minute, to Thailand for exteriors and London for studio work. But you wouldn’t say so to see the film — just as you wouldn’t say Casablanca was a miraculous accident, given its disarray during production and its lack of a proper script (despite, or because of, its having about six writers).
Shanghai is not a product of such magic, but it casts a spell of its own.