Shanghai was a theme and a place and a concept which western cinema kept touching on in the 1920s and 1930s particularly, a symbol of the exotic, the mysterious and the wanton. There were dozens of movies made in Hollywood and elsewhere which referred to Shanghai in their title, starting with a film called Shanghaied in 1909.

It was the first of a number of films with that title, not all of them about Shanghai, of course -- the word as a synonym for kidnapping was in wide use in those decades, no doubt bolstered by the aura of danger emanating from the city on the east China coast. Charlie Chaplin made a silent film using the name Shanghaed in 1915, with himself as a tramp in love with the daughter of a ship-owner who intends to scuttle his ship on its last voyage to get the insurance money. Charlie helps the captain shanghai some shiphands, and the daughter stows away on board to be with Charlie. In the most famous scene, Charlie tries to serve a meal during a storm. The ship never gets within camera sight of Shanghai.

Charlie Chan, one of the great figures of cinema in the 1930s and 1940s, had a couple of adventures in Shanghai, a Shanghai as real as Charlie Chan was Chinese of course (he was usually played by the actor Warner Oland). In the 1935 film Charlie Chan in Shanghai, the Chinese government invites Charlie to Shanghai to help investigate a murder involving an opium ring. Charlie is kidnapped by the opium traders and try to have him killed.

Charlie returned to Shanghai twice in the 1940s, first in the Shanghai Cobra in 1945 based around efforts to steal radium stored in a bank. In the 1948 film the Shanghai Chest. Roland Winters plays Charlie Chan attempting to solve a case in which a dead man's finger prints show up at all three murder sites. Shades of Judge Dee.

The Japanese War inspired a number of Shanghai-related movies, including Exiled to Shanghai (1937) "Fighting their way out of enemy hands...as the Burma Express speeds on its way!", Shadows Over Shanghai (1938), in which a pilot carrying a valuable amulet is shot down over China by a Russian agent, and the spy drama North of Shanghai (1939). In West of Shanghai in 1937 (also called The War Lord, Boris Karloff practices playing an Asian (a role he later perfected in The King And I).

Shanghai often appeared in these movies in a peripheral role. Alfred Hitchcock made a movie called East of Shanghai in 1932, in which Fred and Emily Hill decide to abandon their boring suburban life in London and escape on a world cruise. Orson Welles in 1948 made Lady from Shanghai, which is a murder-mystery not set in Shanghai, and starring Welles and Rita Hayworth.