Made during G. W. Pabst’s sojourn in France—with exteriors filmed in Saigon—The Shanghai Drama is “the exile film to end all exile films, made on a Paris soundstage with a cast and crew of Austrians, Indochinese, and White Russians. This reverse Casablanca is the sort of minor masterpiece auteurists cherish, a haunting confession in the guise of a despised genre work” (J. Hoberman). “Pabst infuses a lurid tale (centering on a Russian chanteuse) with some surprisingly revolutionary rhetoric espoused—in Mandarin and French—by a Chinese rebel leader who seems equally at home whether patronizing night clubs or leading demonstrations” (Paul Fonoroff).