'Shanghai" is one of those movies with world-weary guys in well-cut suits and fedoras, a tough-as-nails broad who drags imperiously on her cigarettes and plenty of neon reflected on the rain-swept streets. You know it's only a matter of time before someone slugs his whiskey and growls, "Just get the hell out of Shanghai."
Director Mikael Hafstrom sets his film in December 1941, which, if you recall, is exactly the same month that, out of all the gin joints in the world, Ilsa walks into Rick's Cafe Americain in "Casablanca." That doesn't seem coincidental, as "Shanghai" tries quite hard to capture some of that old hardboiled-yet-romantic magic.
Like Casablanca, Shanghai at the start of World War II was a colonial city full of spies, occupying military, underground resistance and gangsters working all sides; it's a recipe for intrigue that has inspired many a neo-noir, from Chinese productions such as "Shanghai Triad" and "Purple Butterfly," Ang Lee's hybrid "Lust, Caution" and the more colonial viewpoint of "The White Countess." Hafstrom's is the first to drop an American star into the mix, which didn't seem to help, as one year on, the film has yet to be released in the States.