Josef von Sternberg Week #5 – Keye Luke’s Murals for The Shanghai Gesture

Von Sternberg’s 1941 The Shanghai Gesture is, without doubt, the most hyper real portrayal of old Shanghai’s casinos and Badlands. I must have watched the film a hundred times. What I didn’t know till the other day is that murals that dot the walls of the casino and Mother Gin Sling’s (Ona Munson in yellow face) casino and rooms were done by the Chinese-American actor Keye Luke. Canton born Luke was about the best known Chinese face in cinema before the war in all those Charlie Chan and Mr Moto movies and had a career that went on long after too. He was also a talented painter. In fact, after growing up in Seattle, he first worked in the film business as a commercial artist and a designer of movie posters. He did a lot of murals including some for the inside of Graumann’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. Luke was hired by von Sternberg to do murals for The Shanghai Gesture and commented that,

‘…it was like painting the Great Wall of China. It was a huge room – a dining room – and there was four sides and one a plate glass mirror. It was very, very effective.’

Here then some scenes from the movie with the mural in the background….