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The Minister from Bolivia has dissolved—probably in the interests of hemisphere solidarity—into an Italian envoy. Poor Poppy Smith (Gene Tierney), highborn, incognito daughter of English Sir Guy Charteris (Walter Huston), has lost many of her vices; she doesn't even smoke opium. Lush Victor Mature, the poor man's Boyer, cast in a role replacing the original Prince Oshima, Poppy's Japanese traducer, is now Dr. (of nothing) Omar, a befezzed, leering, Levantine heel.
The outcome of this fruitless face-saving is a silly tale of the undoing of little Poppy, who is fresh out of a Swiss finishing school, looks and acts it. She has an affair with Doc Omar. This upsets Sir Guy, who is still more upset when he discovers that Mother Gin Sling is his Chinese wife, whom he had long thought dead. That disclosure makes the slightly tarnished Poppy behave so badly that her mother shoots her dead, and everyone goes home.
Shanghai Gesture is notable for its inexcusably bad acting and directing. Magniloquent Director Josef von Sternberg (once plain Joe Stern of Queens) apparently spent a million or so dollars trying to repeat his former success in turning Marlene Dietrich into the screen's No. 1 siren (Blue Angel, Morocco, etc.). He succeeds merely in making Gesture an unexciting series of close-ups of Miss Tierney, a nice, pretty, corn-fed American girl of 21, who is too young and inexperienced for her part.
Louisiana Purchase (Paramount) is the kind of tasteful, tuneful, genial, comic job that Hollywood often boggles. But Paramount knew what it was up to a year ago when it drafted Broadway's Buddy De Sylva, producer of the Broadway original, and made him production head of the studio.
Streamlined and tempered to fit the screen, Purchase has just the right amount of song & dance, patter and production to put over its good-natured kidding of Louisiana skulduggery in Kingfishy days. It also has droll, despondent, befuddled Victor Moore, not quite as broad as on Broadway but just as natural as U.S. Senator Oliver P. Loganberry, the mild-mannered but sea-green incorruptible Yankee who goes to New Orleans to investigate the odd political situation where football players share their salaries with the police.
Good as Mr. Moore is, he has to bank on the turns to stay ahead of Comic Bob Hope, the Flexible Flyer. Each of them is a hilarious mixture of dopey dove and smart serpent. Hope's style of comedy (the dead-pan wisecrack, the unembarrassed exhibition—e.g., demonstrating the correct way to don a woman's girdle) is designed for counterpunching. His performance is patly complementary to that of Victor Moore, who has been around long enough (66 years) to know how to handle enthusiastic young comics without either stealing or being stolen from.
Pleasantest surprise of Purchase is Dancer Vera Zorina, who Technicolors up into a charming comedienne, no longer solely dependent on her main stems.