Shanghai Gesture

[Ed_Mottershead]

Posted: 3/30/09 at 12:57pm

I've been familiar with this play since the 1950's -- ignore what the blurb says, it's a real melodramatic hoot -- Charles Busch would have had a ball playing Mother Goddam. In his autobiography, "Me and Kit," Guthrie McClintic discusses the original production which he directed and the travails he underwent with the star, Mrs. Leslie Carter. It's been out of print for years, but is worth a search just for the chapter, "Red Hair in Shanghai." Treat yourself to a fabulous read!!!

[Jon]

Posted: 3/30/09 at 1:45pm

Of course, in the days of the Hays Code in Hollywood, the film version turned "Mother Goddam" into "Madame Gin Sling", and the whorehouse/opium den became a bar.

[bk]

Posted: 3/30/09 at 4:27pm

The film of Shanghai Gesture is one of the weirdest and most wonderful films ever - starring the great Ona Munson, and Walter Huston, Gene Tierney (so WEIRD), Victor Mature, and a host of the oddest performances you'll ever see, all directed in classic style by Josef von Sternberg. Seek it out.

[tazber]

Posted: 3/30/09 at 4:33pm

[PalJoey]

Posted: 3/30/09 at 6:56pm

I almost worked on a musical version of this for Lisa Kirk, who had received the rights to the play as a gift from a gentleman admirer.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 6/17/14 at 11:33am

"And still I survived!"

[PalJoey]

Posted: 6/18/14 at 1:01am

The 1950 recording of an abridged version of the 1926 play starring the original Mother Goddam, Florence Reed.


Side One

http://youtu.be/WuAf8geBYI4


Side Two


http://youtu.be/oFW-O0TJT9s

[PalJoey]

Posted: 6/18/14 at 1:01am

[Pawnee Bill]

Posted: 6/18/14 at 6:34am

I think that line is "Yet I survived!"

And where did Mrs. Leslie Carter come from? Mother Goddam was played
by Florence Reed.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 6/18/14 at 8:36am

What Ed_Mottershead was referrng to in his post in this 4-year-old thread is that John Colton write the play as a vehicle for Mrs. Leslie Carter, whose career in 1926 was not what is had been a decade previously. The flamboyant Mrs. Carter didn't get along with the director, the equally flamboyant Guthrie McClintic, who had Mrs. Carter fired after the first out-of-town tryout in Newark, replaced by Florence Reed before the opening in the second tryout in Atlantic City.

But Mrs. Carter had the last laugh: She had signed a contract with John Colton giving her half his royalties, and she took the show on tour after it closed on Broadway.

[Pawnee Bill]

Posted: 6/19/14 at 12:54pm

Thanks for the update. Too bad there isn't a website we can google our way to with intel on tryout and tour casts.