Dixie (Toothpaste girl Phyllis Brooks) arrives in Shanghai from Brooklyn, immediately runs into trouble due to being broke and clueless, has to be rescued by hat-guy Vic Mature (before his postwar breakout in My Darling Clementine). At the casino, “Mother” is Ona Munson of Scandal Sheet (not that one). Neither of these gals are no Marlene Dietrich, though Ona does call herself Lily at one point – but the movie is rescued by a delightful Gene Tierney (year after The Return of Frank James), who is the lost daughter of bigwig Walter Huston.
In fact everyone’s got Big Secrets and half the room wants to kill the other half when Mother invites all the major players to her new year’s table – between this and Mildred Pierce I met my melodrama quota for the month. Unfortunately these secrets and rivalries aren’t interesting, and the movie fizzles after a first half that was full of possibility. Rosenbaum: “Given the censorship of the period, much of the decadence is implied rather than stated.”
Mother has been watching Uzumaki:
This movie needs a restoration, I demand one:
