Review – Legendary Sin Cities

Rather than a movie, this is three hour-long “documentaries” produced for Canadian television. The subjects are the three supposedly most decadent cities of the 1920s: Berlin, Paris and Shanghai. Actually, I wish I’d watched the episodes in reverse order. Shanghai was depressing, Paris was boring, but Berlin was actually at least somewhat interesting (and I’ve always been a “save the best for last” sort). But for the most part all three programs were fairly terrible. The archive footage was terrific, but it seemed to occupy a relatively small percentage of the screen time. As usual with shows of this sort, a lot of the production is devoted to talking heads, here even more aggravating than usual in that the “experts” selected for the most part come across as stuffy intellectuals who snicker nervously through their discussions of sex and drug abuse. Honestly, if the words “hedonistic” and “demimonde” were banned from the presentation, most of the interviewees would have been struck silent. Were I to watch this set over again, I’d probably do it with the sound off. Mildly amusing