In the early fifties the French Surrealist Group selected The Shanghai Gesture for an experiment in film analysis along the lines of earlier projects elucidating the irrational "possibilities" of an object. Their results, entitled "Data Towards the Irrational Enlargement of a Film," included this question (among many): "What don't we see?" and these responses: "The scene deep in the forest, even though it is the one that determines all the others/ The death of Mother Gin-Sling, who ultimately lets herself be swallowed by a dragon/ The flight of the swallows and the swimming of sea-cucumbers above and below the sea, far from Shanghai, over which Poppy's plane returns behind time/ The sea/ The Dunsinane Forest." Any film with Victor Mature as the "Doctor of Nothing, poet of Shanghai and Gomorrha" proclaims itself a masterpiece of subversive cinema.