by Paul French

“Macao: There is no Place Like it on Earth”

Josef von Sternberg’s hand written notation on the shooting script

Macao was going to be the culmination of a dream long held by Josef von Sternberg—the last in a trio of movies about the Far East. After his triumphs with Shanghai Express (1932) and The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Macao would be his crowning glory. He had a script, money, a big studio behind him and a plethora of Hollywood stars. The Austrian-born von Sternberg was almost unique as a film director, having had a thirty-year-long stellar career with hardly any duds along the way. After his early years in Berlin making silents, the successful 1929 “talkie” (Germany’s first) Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), made a star of his oft-collaborator Marlene Dietrich bringing them both to Hollywood. There followed a slew of great movies—Morocco (1930), Dishonoured (1931), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934) and The Devil is a Woman (1935) among them. In 1950 when filming on Macao began, von Sternberg was only 57, youthful for a director. He had signed an exclusive two-picture deal with the fabulously wealthy Howard Hughes’s RKO studio; budgets were enormous. Macao was the second movie of their agreement.

Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell had signed on as the leads with William Bendix and Gloria Grahame in supporting roles. The basic story was pretty good, even if von Sternberg found the script problematic. Nick Cochran (Mitchum), a World War Two vet with a troubled past in America and now in exile in the Far East, is given a chance to restore his name by helping capture an international crime boss, fugitive American racketeer and owner of the Quick Reward casino, Halloran (played by tough guy specialist Brad Dexter). He goes undercover in the Portuguese enclave while also falling in love with Julie Benson, a beautiful but hardboiled and chippy nightclub singer (Russell). Filming was to be in California mostly, but there was to be a trip to Macao—”A fabulous speck off the China coast,” as the opening voiceover tells us—for authenticity.

Most of the Hollywood trade press predicted movie gold—the sort of gold von Sternberg, Mitchum and Russell had delivered repeatedly. How could Russell’s dark beauty and Mitchum’s almost decade-long string of noir hits (Undercurrent, The Locket, Pursued, Crossfire …) not suit the legendary depravity of Macao! Von Sternberg envisioned Russell as another in his string of ice cool beauties—a brunette Dietrich. He wanted Mitchum to recreate the Gary Cooper of Morocco twenty years earlier, emphasising the languid, the cool, the flip off. But it was all to be an unmitigated disaster on set—Russell was Russell, an actress with a drollness and wry approach that transcended the simplistic sex-symbol box the studios tried to force her into; she was not the continental ice-queen Dietrich. Mitchum was his own man with his particular brand of post-war cool; more anti-hero than American-hero. Soon after shooting began, cast and director fell out leading to brutal firings, bitter fights, lifelong hatreds, a significant loss of money, but perhaps not such a terrible movie in the end if we just appreciate it aesthetically and forget the script.

How did Macao fall apart?

***

Von Sternberg loved Asia, China particularly. He had spent time there, a trip he recalls in his autobiography Fun in a Chinese Laundry. His two previous cinematic ventures to China had been massive successes. Shanghai Express was a sexy pre-code movie originally from a thirty-three-page treatment written by the gay Savannah-based writer and Asia-hand Harry Hervey. Jules Furthman wrote the script; Dietrich signed on (for the fourth of the seven films von Sternberg and Marlene would make together) along with the English actor Clive Brook and the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong. The Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, who had just appeared in the first of the long-lived and extremely popular Charlie Chan movies, appeared in Yellowface. Dietrich smouldered as Shanghai Lily, a notorious “White Flower of the China Coast” living off her wits. Anna May Wong was equally captivating as the courtesan Hu Fei—von Sternberg lit both of them remarkably. Furthman’s script has some great lines—”It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Shanghai Express won an Oscar for cinematography and was nominated for best picture and best director.

The Shanghai Gesture (1941) is equally good. Based on John Colton’s Broadway play that scandalised audiences, critics and the censors in 1925 with its opium addiction, lost white girls in the Far East and casual racial mingling. The movie somehow manages to retain much of that original 1920s edginess despite the imposition of the Hays Code. Gene Tierney, as “Poppy,” appears effectively drugged throughout. Her flawless beauty, heavy lidded eyes and (to Hollywood’s way of thinking at least) European mannerisms, repeatedly led her to be cast in ethnically ambiguous roles. The swarthy Victor Mature in his tarbush and djellaba is suitably indefinable as Dr Omar (“the matter-of-fact Arab despoiler,” as he is described in the script), Ona Munson in Yellowface as the Empress Dowager of Shanghai’s gaming tables, Madame Gin Sling (Madame Goddam in Colton’s original play) and, perhaps the best part in the movie, Phyllis Brookes as the China Coasting show girl Dixie Pomeroy, stranded in Shanghai and with a ladder in her nylons to symbolise her descent into the netherworld of Shanghai. Again the movie got great reviews. Von Sternberg’s stylistic black-and-white chiaroscuro cinematography of Shanghai Express, the butterfly lighting (placing the light above and directly centred on the actresses’ faces) that he instituted as the effective in-house lighting style of Paramount Studios, the obscuring effects of gauze curtains, were all employed again. The Chinese-American actor and artist Keye Luke (who made over sixty movies but is best remembered as Charlie Chan’s eldest son in the long running Fox Studios franchise) provided vivid background art for Madame Gin Sling’s apartment. Her Shanghai casino resembles Dante’s inferno with Dr Omar orchestrating the frenzied revels of the gambling. The film is decadent in the extreme and, frankly, rather druggy.

So when von Sternberg turned his attention to the Far East once again (which in 1950 now meant Hong Kong or Macao given the inconvenience of China just having turned Red) audiences could be forgiven for anticipating another dark and noir-y ride. They had enjoyed von Sternberg’s previous Oriental Dreamscapes and so anticipated the early images released by RKO’s press department of the Macao waterfront—the latticework fishing nets, black cats, blind beggars, crowded gaming houses, cheongsams, a myriad of bobbing sampans … surely the master had done it again?

***

Filming got underway in August 1950, though von Sternberg’s directorial style was not to everyone’s taste. The script, despite over half a dozen full-time RKO scriptwriters getting involved, had major holes in the plotline. Von Sternberg banned the crew from eating while on set and then worked them long hours without breaks. They were starving and tired. Mitchum, keen to ingratiate himself with the lighting and cameramen, as well as perhaps to annoy von Sternberg, brought in baskets of fruit and muffins every day for the crew. Von Sternberg threatened to fire him; Russell defended her friend and co-star; von Sternberg called her a “beautiful but stupid girl.” He tried to drive a wedge between the actors telling Mitchum, “she has as much talent as this cigarette case.” Relations between the director and his two stars went downhill from there.

Mitchum and Russell had become buddies a year before while making His Kind of Woman for Hughes and RKO. That previous movie is not actually very different in many ways from Macao—gambling, a down-on-his-luck American, Russell in a relationship with a bad guy etc. … except that it takes place in Mexico. What His Kind of Woman did prove conclusively was that the pair had great screen presence. Hughes loved them so much he told them they were immediately teaming up again for Macao. As actors signed to RKO, they didn’t have much choice. Hughes was a massive Russell fan and took great delight in commenting on her dresses in the movie, obsessing on her figure (in the 1943 film, The Outlaw, Hughes effectively invented the underwire bra to enhance her chest) and writing notes to von Sternberg when viewing the rushes such as, “The fit of the dress around her breasts is not good and gives the impression, God forbid, that her breasts are padded or artificial.” Von Sternberg thought Hughes interfering; Hughes felt the director didn’t understand the concept of being an employee. They were right about each other. Russell thought Hughes a pest who repeatedly tried to sleep with her.

Gloria Grahame didn’t want to be in the movie at all. She knew that the part of Margie, the gangster’s moll, had been earmarked for Jane Greer who had been, like Grahame, making her name in noir movies and was another obsession of Hughes. However, his fixation with Greer was love/hate and right then he was in the latter mode. Grahame, like everyone, hated the script, and thought all she got to do was pout in the corner, look sexy and blow on dice. She had just had a big hit and garnered serious critical acclaim for her role opposite Humphrey Bogart as Laurel Gray in In a Lonely Place (1950). That movie was based on the noir by Dorothy B. Hughes and dealt with men returning from World War Two and being so damaged as to turn into killers, unable to readjust to civilian life. The movie adaptation is watered down considerably from the novel, but Grahame excels as the woman drawn to a damaged man despite the threat to herself. Signed to Hughes and RKO since 1947, Grahame wanted to be loaned out to Paramount to do A Place in the Sun, based on the Theodore Dreiser novel An American Tragedy, about a complicated love triangle. It would have been a great follow up movie for her, with some literary heft. Hughes, who admitted he hadn’t seen In a Lonely Place, refused point blank and told Grahame she was making Macao, whether she liked it or not. Elizabeth Taylor got the lead in A Place in the Sun (1951) playing opposite Montgomery Clift; Shelley Winters got the part Grahame wanted, and an Oscar nomination.

Eventually Grahame’s career would take off as better parts came along—1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful (for which she did get the Best Supporting Actress Oscar), The Big Heat (1953) and Oklahoma (1955) among them. But not being allowed to work on A Place in the Sun rankled. Grahame hated everything about Macao even before filming began. She was in the process of divorcing her husband, the film director Nicholas Ray (who had directed In a Lonely Place). The two had married in 1948 and had a son, but it had been a rocky and tempestuous relationship from the get-go. Grahame told Ray she would waive any claim for alimony if he got her out of the movie. He couldn’t—he himself was about to become embroiled in the mayhem in Macao.

***

Mitchum and Russell’s working relationship with von Sternberg was in tatters. Brad Dexter was a friend of Russell’s, having worked with her the year before on RKO’s The Las Vegas Story, and so took her side in the arguments. Along with Grahame’s dislike of being forced to work on the film, it does seem that everyone’s performances are rather strained at times, though it’s hard not to read that into their faces when you know how acrimonious things were on the set. It was agreed by everyone, including the director, that the shooting script made little sense in terms of plot and nobody understood how one scene connected to another.

After roughly a third of the movie had been shot, Howard Hughes stepped in, probably on the insistence of Mitchum and Russell, and fired von Sternberg. He brought in Nick Ray, Gloria Grahame’s husband (mid-divorce proceedings), to direct the rest of the film. Bob Mitchum, who had come to know the sub-standard script inside out, started rewriting it himself, to try and join up all the loose plot ends. He was never officially credited, but did apparently write some real hardboiled zingers—Russell (mildly resisting a clinch): “You’re all wet.” Mitchum (pulling her closer): “You’d better get used to me fresh out of the shower.” Pure Mitchum, and the movie’s last line.

Film critics will argue forever more about whether or not the film is really von Sternberg’s or Ray’s. Certainly, many characteristic elements of von Sternberg’s style remain—the chiaroscuro cinematography, the expressionistic butterfly lighting, wonderfully over-dressed sets and the plethora of his trademark motif, nets (a style the director had first used back in 1928 on his movie The Docks of New York). Von Sternberg himself never publicly spoke of the debacle. In his memoirs, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, published in 1965, he notes only that after filming the mediocre RKO Cold War thriller Jet Pilot (1951), starring John Wayne, Janet Leigh and with a Jules Furthman script, he made:

… one more film in accordance with the contract I had foolishly accepted. This was made under the supervision of six different men in charge. It was called Macao, and instead of fingers in that pie, half a dozen clowns immersed various parts of their anatomy in it. Their names do not appear in the list of credits.

Individually the characters and actors in Macao are great—Mitchum is trademark cynical and handsome, pioneering the eternal outsider type that would become much more common in a later generation of American movies; Russell is an equally cynical and sultry nightclub singer with a chip on her shoulder the size of the Great Wall. William Bendix as Lawrence C. Trumble, a salesman of silk stockings and, it turns out, an undercover cop, is convincing while Halloran, the local kingpin is in it up to his neck with the corrupt Portuguese police. When he hears an undercover cop is in Macao to get him, he suspects everyone. Halloran’s moll and chief croupier, Grahame, is jealous of Russell’s chanteuse. But somehow the characters never come together in anything resembling an ensemble; script-wise it’s a wildly stir-fried noir that never sticks together. The plans to actually film in Hong Kong and Macao were scrapped and only some stock footage of the two locations (shot earlier by second-unit cameraman Dick Davol) were used.

When the movie was released in 1952, Nick Ray’s role was not mentioned and von Sternberg was credited as sole director. Most reviewers praised various set pieces within the movie while remaining confused by the plot. The serious critics noted that Von Sternberg’s trademark unity of form and function was not as strong as in previous movies. However, it is (and Ray was in the von Sternberg mould as a director in this sense) often atmospheric and steamy. It is also, as all good noir should be, in black and white. A waterfront chase scene through docked boats and fishing nets is thrilling; the fight between Mitchum and Brad Dexter is brutal and surprisingly realistic for 1952; a bedroom scene played for comic effect works well (a fan turns a pillow into a mass of floating feathers). It was also the case that Mitchum and Russell further cemented their working partnership—united in their mutual loathing of von Sternberg, it perhaps just upped their shared magnetism—his charismatic machismo; her guardedness against all-comers that eventually breaks down. Russell perhaps lacks the exoticism and world-weariness Dietrich might have brought to the role, but still gives a great performance. Grahame, resisting the film to the last both under the directorship of von Sternberg and Ray, clearly couldn’t care less, which perhaps ultimately just adds to her character. Michael Woulfe’s dresses and jewellery for the leading ladies stand out—Russell’s lamé dress for her nightclub scenes was rumoured to weigh 26lbs!

The supporting roles are worth an admission ticket, too. Vladimir Sokoloff plays the blind beggar Kwan Sum Tang—technically in Yellowface, as Sokoloff was born in Moscow and trained as an actor at the Moscow Arts Theatre under Stanislavky. But all the sorrow of his enforced transient life as an émigré is in his acting—fleeing Bolshevism for a new life in Berlin; then, as Sokoloff was Jewish, to Paris to escape the Nazis and finally to America as fascism encroached across Europe. In his time, he played Filipino, Greek, Arab, Romanian, French, as well as Chinese. And there is Philip Ahn as Itzumi, Halloran’s cold-blooded Asian assassin. Ahn was a Korean-American born in Los Angeles and the first Korean-American to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ahn had worked with Douglas Fairbanks on The Thief of Baghdad as a schoolboy in 1924. He played mostly Chinese in the movies—von Sternberg spotted him opposite Anna May Wong in Daughter of Shanghai in 1937, a B-movie vehicle created specially for Wong, and was impressed by his performance. It was only after the Korean War, when Hollywood started making Korea-set movies, that Ahn would actually get to play Korean.

Macao premiered at the New York Paramount Theater in late April 1952. Howard Hughes wasn’t happy—the movie lost US$700,000 dollars on release (though now, after TV repeats and video/DVD sales it has finally made a profit of, reportedly US$1.1 million). Cameraman Dick Davol, sent to shoot footage in Hong Kong and Macao sent Hughes a list of all the bribes he’d had to pay to be allowed to film:

• Macao Chief of Police
• Propaganda Minister
• Immigration Officers
• Customs Officers
• Macao Harbour Police
• Hong Kong Immigration Officers
• Hong Kong Policemen
• Communist Custom Patrol Boats
• Sampan Owners
• Chinese Junk Owners and Crews
• Communist Business Owners

Macao has rather sunk into obscurity. It’s a shame. Ultimately it is, as von Sternberg originally envisioned, a Macao of the mind; a Casablanca of the South China Seas.

Paul French lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His work focuses on true crime literary non-fiction set in twentieth century China. Paul’s 2018 book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir was his much-anticipated second literary non-fiction book and was a Kirkus Book of the Year. City of Devils followed Midnight in Peking: The Murder that Haunted the Last Days of Old China, which was a New York Times Bestseller and winner of both the Edgar and Dagger awards for true crime writing.