A Sternberg film is built on paradox and dichotomy, its essence fixed not by one particular image that can be isolated, but by a particular pair of images, or series of images or motifs…. [The Shanghai Gesture] is a Sternberg image set without a film: namely, a virtuoso crane into the depths of a gambling pit near the beginning and a complementary crane out again at the end, echoed by more clipped tracks into the gamblers themselves. As an evocation of a human vortex of feeling and chance, this is as electric and concise a 'fix' on the Sternberg theme as there is. (p. 106)

The whole structure and design of The Blue Angel—classroom/cabaret, professor/clown, students/audience—is symmetrical…. Lola, Kiepert, the clown with the frozen mock-empathetic expression and Rath's students are less characters than parts of a psychic-aesthetic whole, a completion of Rath, one summoning...