My ever-present addiction to Turner Classic Movies always hits a problem point come August, when the channel runs its Summer Under the Stars series. Today they’re running 24 hours worth of Jane Russell, and with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes mysteriously absent from the schedule, the real gem of the line-up is Josef Von Sternberg’s Macao, from which I’ve embedded a clip above.
Despite the fact that I’m both something of a Sternberg devotee AND mildly obsessed with Russell, I hadn’t seen Macao until fairly recently. I Netflixed it a month or so ago and fell in love. On the surface, it’s the story of a group of Americans who may or may not be criminals, who get mixed up in one another’s business whilst hiding out in the Chinese port city. But as with any Sternberg film, it’s really an isolation fantasy, in which two outsiders (Russell and Robert Mitchum) meet in an exotic, alternate universe and bond over their mutual loneliness.
I’d love to be able to show you the scene where a spat between Russell and Mitchum escalates into an unexpectedly violent pillow fight; or maybe the chase scene, which Sternberg shoots through so many layers of netting that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of who’s winning (Sternberg loved to obfuscate action scenes, as if to say, “You might as well not even watch this part — this isn’t what the film is about.”)
Unfortunately, the clip above was the only embeddable portion I could find online from Macao (although there’s also a trailer on TCM’s site). I love Russell’s self-conscious “It’s a living” eye roll at the end, but this is not even my favorite musical number from the film — that would be Russell’s devastatingly depressive take on “One For My Baby.” As a singer, she was never going to steal any work from a Judy Garland, but dear god, could she hold a close-up.
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