Sternberg is one of the directors favored by the surrealists, and his last Hollywood masterpiece, Shanghai Gesture, received a lengthy analysis by them in the early fifties. Tony Rayns, writing recently for the London journal Time Out, called the film “the true progenitor of Polanski's Chinatown, a delirious melodrama of decadence and sexual guilt that uses its Oriental motifs as a cypher for all that is unknown or unknowable. The battle is waged between a Western hypocrite (Walter Huston) and an Eastern pleasure-queen (Ona Munson): the erotic skirmishes occur between the self-willed but helpless heroine (Gene Tierney) and the apathetic object of her passion (Victor Mature, amazing ‘Doctor of Nothing, poet of Shanghai and Gomorrha'); the chief arena is a casino built like a circle of hell, where nothing is left to ‘chance.' Subversive cinema at its most sublime.”