Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #73 Shanghai Surprise

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like Todd in the Shadows, whose very successful (nearly 300 thousand subscribers!) Youtube channel you can check out here and whose podcast, Song Vs. Song, which started this year, is available on Spotify, and have me explore the films of a particular actor or actress, in this case Madonna.

Incidentally if you’d like me to plug a project in a Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 article I’d be happy to do so. I want to make this option as appealing as possible. 

I’ve written about Dick Tracy, Madonna’s hilariously overwrought directorial effort W.E and her deeply misconceived throwback screwball comedy Who’s That Girl for Todd and now I am finally tackling one of Madonna’s biggest flops and one of the most notorious duds of the 1980s, the abysmal 1986 retro adventure romance Shanghai Surprise.

I was a little reluctant to wade back into the murky, excrement-filled waters of Shanghai Surprise because I started watching with an eye towards writing about it for My World of Flops only to grow so bored so quickly that I don’t think I ever even bothered finishing it, let alone devoted a workday to dissecting its myriad faults and glaring weaknesses.

You’d think a movie like Shanghai Surprise would be perfect for My World of Flops. Like the best subjects for this column the story behind the story is absolutely riveting. It’s a sexually charged rock and roll melodrama involving George Harrison’s production company Handmade Films and the short-lived, explosive marriage, creative and otherwise, of Madonna, the biggest, hottest female pop star in the world, a preeminent icon of confident, assertive female sexuality, and Sean Penn, the bad boy of American film, a hot-tempered genius hooligan with a much-publicized weakness for punching shutterbugs

A documentary or non-fiction book about the tumultuous making of Shanghai Surprise would undoubtedly be fascinating. The film itself is a much different story. Re-watching Shanghai Surprise I found myself agreeing my earlier assessment that despite its many promising elements the 1986 flop, which cost seventeen million dollars to make yet grossed about three million dollars at the box-office, is not good. Nor is it bad in an entertaining or distinctive or fun way. Shanghai Surprise didn’t even seem like it would be much fun to write about. In other words, it was a total waste, a real stinkeroo.  

In the mid 1980s movie executives looked at the breakout success of Prince’s Purple Rain and its accompanying blockbuster soundtrack, as well as Madonna’s breakthrough turn as a mysterious hipster in Desperately Seeking Susan and decided, in their infinite wisdom, that what the moviegoing public wanted next from these most contemporary of pop stars/sex symbols was period comedy in a decidedly retro vein. 

Prince possessed many wonderful qualities. Alas, making people laugh so hard they shit themselves was not one of them. The same is true of Madonna. She titillated us. She provoked us. She made us think. But she has consistently failed to tickle our collective funny bone. 

It could be argued by anyone who has suffered through Shanghai Surprise or Who’s That Girl that Madonna has no natural facility for comedy, no natural timing, no inherent sense of what is and is not funny. It doesn’t seem too mean to argue that Madonna merely tried acting, that despite the many items on her IMDB page, some very successful, like Desperately Seeking Susan, Madonna: Truth or Dare, A League of Their Own and Dick Tracy, she never actually succeeded in making the jump from singer to actress and eventually took the universe’s strong hint and stopped acting in movies altogether. Madonna hasn’t starred in a movie since 2002’s disastrously received Swept Away. 

Shanghai Surprise gets off to an appropriately cringe-inducing opening with Executive Producer and bit player George Harrison’s title song, which contains lyrics like, “Back streets so crowded there’s no room to swing a cat/I'd like to know you but you're acting so coolie/I'm finding out being pursued by evil looking dudes it’s/Getting hot for me like tofu when it deep fries/Oh, Shanghai surprise” that all too accurately convey the film’s fetishization of its Far East setting, the way it depicts 1938 Shanghai as an exotic realm of great sensuality and unthinkable brutality, with impossibly alluring concubines and bloodthirsty thugs and next to nothing in between. 

In Shanghai Surprise Madonna is cast wildly and unsuccessfully against type as an uptight missionary. Casting pop culture’s preeminent sexual provocateur as a missionary is a joke alright, but not a good one. 

Madonna begins the movie trying to pass herself off as a woman of breeding and refinement, painfully over-enunciating excessively formal dialogue about how “a person free of financial responsibility can perform much more efficiently” and curtly telling the crude entrepreneur and adventurer Penn plays, “I do not intend to be made a fool of. You’re flippant, facetious, and, I suspect, sorely lacking in moral fiber.”

Penn, meanwhile, is introduced half-naked on a dock, having recently received a deeply unfortunate tattoo, howling insults like “You stole my last ten bucks you thieving corn hole pirate bastard!” and “syphilitic pig trash!” In a voice like razor blades, nails and glue.

Penn’s Glendon Wasey has a greasy, anachronistic mullet that is quickly and mercifully shorn. Penn is supposed to inhabit an old school archetype of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood: unconventional leading men with intense character actor auras and personas like Humphrey Bogart or Jimmy Cagney.

Alternately Glendon is supposed to remind us of the dashing, old-timey heroism of Indiana Jones and knock-offs successful (Romancing the Stone) and otherwise (Cannon’s Allan Quartermain movies). 

Sparks are supposed to fly from the very beginning as these two VERY different people learn to put aside their differences while searching for Faraday's Flowers, a fortune in powerful, uncut opium. The 1978 Tony Kenrick novel that Shanghai Surprise is based upon is entitled Faraday's Flowers, although, in a hilariously counter-productive attempt to capitalize on the non-existent success of its high-profile film adaptation, Kenrick’s book was re-published as Shanghai Surprise around the time of the film’s release.

So perhaps it should not be surprising that Faraday’s Flowers figure VERY prominently in the proceedings. Shanghai Surprise is needlessly complicated and convoluted, a dense web of intrigue and betrayals involving the faked death of an opium king, a sadist with fake hands, an American-obsessed mobster who refers to himself in the third person as “Johnny Go” and yearns to throw a magical new pitch called the Knuckleball that no one could possibly be expected to give a mad-ass fuck about. 

My lazy brain did not want to do the work of keeping track of what was happening with the MacGuffin at the center of all this furious striving and pointless machinations because it knew it would not be rewarded in any conceivable way beyond, I suppose, the movie being more or less coherent as well as brutally unfunny and utterly un-engaging on an emotional and narrative level. 

It’s that infernal, overwrought, unnecessary plot that put me off Shanghai Surprise the first time around and ensured that I did not derive any pleasure, even of the guilty or ironic variety, this time either. 

Madonna and Penn’s famously troubled offscreen relationship, which played out in screaming tabloid headlines around the time Shanghai Surprise bombed should give the leads an electric erotic charge. Yet Shanghai Surprise proves yet another example of infamous real-life lovers making a movie together at the height of their l’amour fou cursed with a perverse, seemingly counter-intuitive total lack of chemistry, romantic, sexual, comic or otherwise. 

Madonna and Penn are so dreadful separately, and together, that they could have sent their divorce lawyer a tape of the film as incontrovertible proof that they are fundamentally incompatible. 

If Madonna comes off as stiff and phony, labored and artificial, that’s partially by design. Gloria is not at all what she first appears to be. Though she presents herself as the Godly antithesis of the roughneck hedonist she’s shackled to by fate and circumstance it turns out she can pick a lock and curse and do all sorts of things good missionary girls aren’t supposed to do.

Madonna is more natural and convincing once Gloria’s street-smart side emerges, if not any more sympathetic or compelling. The problem is by that point it has becomes nearly impossible to be emotionally invested in this frenetic, old-school idiocy. 

Penn may be a legitimately great actor but he’s just as lost as Madonna here. Neither is well-served by the material; Penn fatally lacks the sly, winking, self-deprecating self-awareness Harrison Ford brought to Indiana Jones, the sense that he knew just how ridiculous everything was, and gave us endless permission to just have fun with it. 

Penn is a heavy dude. WIth the prominent exception of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, he does not do light comedy. He’s utterly miscast as a sleazy rogue with a heart of gold who turns out to have a moral compass after all. 

It’s a testament to how dreary Shanghai Surprise is that I laughed more at an IMDB Trivia item claiming “The fact that Sean Penn and Madonna were then newlyweds was thought of to be a good way to promote the movie. This backfired however when it raised audience's expectations too high and the movie flopped” then I did during the film in its entirety. 

If audiences expected anything out of Shanghai Surprise beyond basic professionalism they were bound to be disappointed. 

How bad is Shanghai Surprise? It doesn’t deserve to be included in My World of Flops, and that is of course an epic, possibly endless exploration of the very worst cinema has to offer. Oogieloves in the Big Balloon made the cut but this charmless turkey most assuredly did not. 

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