Filmed in France and French Saigon after Pabst’s departure from Nazi Germany, this film is a fantastic spy thriller set in an imagined Shanghai imbued with opium smoke and darkness, a place of intrigue and excess and a hyperbolic extension of the Paris Pabst had created earlier in Jeanne Ney. Here, nationalist political turmoil, gang activity, the threat of Japanese military invasion, and individual lust and cruelty overwhelm the film’s struggling central character, nightclub singer Kay Murphy (Mardayn). Like much of the director’s work in the 1930s, The Shanghai Drama deals with exile and displacement as abiding human conditions.