Shadows Over Shanghai

In this Grand National cheapie no one got any closer to Shanghai than Los Angeles's Chinatown. James Dunn late of the Fox Studios starred as once again an fast talking Irish American, a kind of Pat O'Brien light working in Shanghai as a news photographer. A chance meeting on the street with Linda Gray the daughter of a missionary gets him involved in all of her troubles which are considerable.

Gray's got troubles all right. She's been entrusted with half an amulet which if presented to the owner of the other half in San Francisco will net her a small fortune that will be used to buy weapons for the Kuomintang government to fight its enemies foreign and domestic. Assisting her is a mutual friend of both Ralph Morgan who suggests that since she was born in China and has no American passport that she and Dunn marry and gain citizenship that way with the automatic exit. It doesn't prove that simple.

For an action hero Dunn doesn't get all that much action, in fact he's reduced to a lot of wisecracks. Morgan does the heavy lifting and he's clever at outwitting Soviet agent Robert Barrat who wants the amulet for nefarious Communist purposes and Japanese top agent Paul Sutton.

Shadow Over Shanghai made with a Gone With The Breeze budget is still reasonably entertaining relying considerably on James Dunn's charming Irish ways.

This is a preview of the second world war, made the year before it started. The characters even point it out, that this is what you have to expect of the coming war, and it sure is coming. The war scenes, although having nothing to do with the intrigue, are devastating in their impact. James Dunn and Ralph Morgan make a perfect complimentary pair: Dunn as hilarious as any comic, and Morgan unfathomable in his sinister objectivity: you can't guess what he really is up to and what he knows and on which side he is on. To this comes Linda Grey as the perfect innocent damsel in distress who has to be helped at any cost, which both the protagonists are more than eager to do, and at least she gets off well, leaving her dying brother behind in a troublesome fate that never gets explained. The villain is typical of the 30s: he is all evil and can't be anything else. James Dunn's humour and good spirits saves the film, which is good entertainment indeed, and the Americans should have known something of what to expect of the Japanese three years before Pearl Harbour, which they of course didn't.

If you just want to relax and not be challenged by a movie, but not be bored either, this one is for you. Cheaply made and a little slow at times, it nonetheless is quite entertaining. James Dunn and Ralph Morgan are performers who hold your attention. Linda Gray is leaden as an actress, but she is gorgeous in an offbeat way. Robert Barat is good as usual. The plot is entertaining enough, although the mcguffin is not necessarily worth all the to-do.

This was released in 1938. A scene of a city being bombed while our heros try to escape seems lifted from some other movie. It was probably pasted in to give this movie some excitement. However, it also reflected the anxiety people felt in those days about aerial bombardment. As Ralph Morgan says "This is what the next war will look like." And it did.

A pilot Peter Roma (Edward Woods) is carrying a valuable amulet and in the process is shot down in a dog fight over China, by a ruthless ex-Russian agent, Igor Sargoza (Robert Barrat with a beard), who also wants the amulet for his own nefarious purpose.

Peter Roma is out of action, so he hands the baton... oops, amulet to his sister Irene Roma (Lynda Grey), to completer the mission. The balance of the movie is the trials and tribulations she must go through along with her uninvited friend Johnny McGinty (James Dunn.) At one point during a marriage ceremony, they leave out "obey" and make a point of it being a modern marriage. I had to put my hands over my wife's ears and point in another direction.

In the process we get some stock ware footage. And a few miniatures tossed in. How will this all end or will it?

Irene, a woman living in China watches as her brother is shot down by an unknown airman. The brother survives but is too weak to continue with his mission which involves taking part of an amulet to San Fransisco to get money for the Chinese war effort against the Japanese. She is warned about the man who shot the brother, a Soviet military man who wants the money for his own. She is also told to look up a certain person in Shanghai if she gets into trouble. Once in Shanghai she runs a fowl of of the villain and escapes thanks to a wounded newspaper photographer, named McGinty, heading home to America. Linking up with her brothers friend the trio tries to get out of the city before the Japanese completely over run it and before the bad guys get them.

Considerably duller than the description makes out (I forgot the villains name and Ralph Morgans as well and I'm not impressed enough to look it up). This is a low budget film that takes into account the then current event of the Japanese Invasion of Shanghai. Despite the use of stock news footage this is a mostly stage bound espionage yarn that substitutes talk for action. Yes its well written, but it lacks any real action until the final reel or two to keep it interesting. The lack of action becomes numbing and I did have to fight to keep awake.

This isn't to say its a bad film, its not,its just a bit too talky for its own good. Lets face it you have to give the film points since the film kept me watching to the end because I had to see how it came out.

Would I recommend it? Well I wouldn't go out of my way to see it but if I found it on I would let it run out its running time. There are worse films and there are better, but in a pinch, on the Late Late Late Movie it would be fine.