The Lady from Shanghai (1948)

Legend has it that Orson Welles more or less conned studio boss Harry Cohn over the phone into making this movie by grabbing the title from a nearby paperback. In any case, The Lady from Shanghai is one of Welles's most fascinating works, a bizarre tale of an Irish sailor (Welles) who accompanies a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth) and her handicapped husband (Everett Sloane) on a cruise and becomes involved in a murder plot. But never mind all that (the aforementioned legend also claims that Cohn offered a reward to anyone who could explain the plot to him). The film is really a dream of Welles's driving preoccupations on- and offscreen at the time: the elusiveness of identity, the mystique of things lost, and most of all the director's faltering marriage to Hayworth. In the tradition of male filmmakers who indirectly tell the story of their love affairs with leading ladies, Welles tells his own, photographing Hayworth as a deconstructed star, an obvious cinematic creation, thus reflecting, perhaps, a never-satisfied yearning that leads us back to the mystery of Citizen Kane. --Tom Keogh Amazon.com essential video

DID THE STUDIO DO WELLES A FAVOUR?!

A bit of a different take: Could the vindictiveness between Welles and Studio head Harry Cohn have ultimately saved this film and turned it into a out-of-sync classic?
It truly is a bizarre film. Both in the script/dialogue and in the strange outdoor/indoor filming--all combined in the same moments of the film. Cutaways that seem oddly out of place et cetera.
Cohn may have turned this twisted noir of a movie inadvertently into a classic. Uncut, it may have been one big bore fest with Welles obsessing over Hayworth. The plot, what there is of one, is opaque to the point of invisibility; only rapping things up at the end, and you accepting the rap up.
One has to wonder what the two versions would have been like if the cut footage had been saved and restored. Unfortunately, unless some camera man has that missing footage in a sealed container in his garage, we shall never know.
In the end, I think this horribly bizarre classic has gone down as another Wellesian visionary classic. He may have Cohn, and his malice towards Welles, to thank for saving what may have been "The My Marriage To Rita Story".
Only one regret: I wish they had saved the entire ending in the funhouse. Welles worked personally on the sets--painstakingly painting them by hand; and even cut, the funhouse sequence is a piece of film brilliance. It leaves you wanting the whole vision. But then again: it leaves you wanting more; so maybe Cohn did Welles an unwitting favour even in this.
But still . . .
You have to be an Orson Welles viewer to enjoy this out of kilter, queerly shot film.
The funhouse ending sequence is without a doubt a statement of the whole film and how it ended up: Shards on the floor with bodies strewn all over the place with their gasping words trying to clue you in as to what you just watched! :)
If not an aficianado of Welles strange career in cinema, just pass. You shall find it somewhat tedious.

IN CHRIST JESUS: THE LORD GOD INCARNATE!!!


Braithwaite October 11, 2008

Hacked up by the studio what remains is still a classic film noir - more proof of Welles' genius

Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles, with a very soft Irish brogue), an out of work seaman, has a brief encounter in Central Park with Elsa `Rosalie' Bannister (Rita Hayworth, with short blonde hair!). Later that evening they meet again when O'Hara rescues her from a mugging in progress. In gratitude, her crippled husband, Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) seeks out O'Hara and offers him a job as a crew member on their luxury yacht on a voyage from New York to their home in San Francisco. Against his better judgment, O'Hara allows himself to be talked into taking the job. Also against his better judgment, he finds he cannot resist Rosalie's advances.

When the yacht stops in the West Indies to take on supplies, the party is joined by Bannister's law partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders). Grisby and Bannister prove to be a garrulous and very creepy pair. Their exaggerated and unattractive mannerisms as well as their choice of conversational topics are, to say the least, unwholesome. Bannister hints there is something in Rosalie's past that enabled him to blackmail her into marriage. He also implies that he doesn't mind if his beautiful wife is having an affair with O'Hara because he can satisfy her in ways that Bannister cannot. Bannister is twisted in mind as well as body.

On a layover in Acapulco, Grisby approaches O'Hara with an offer of $5000 to kill him. At first Michael thinks he is planning to commit suicide. He talks it over with Rosalie and they conclude that Grisby is just insane. When the yacht finally reaches its destination, Michael asks Rosalie to run away with him. She is reluctant to do so because she doesn't want a life of hardship and poverty. Michael tells her that $5000 will give them a good start in their new life and goes off to find Grisby.

Grisby doesn't really want Michael to kill him. He wants to fake his own death so he can collect on insurance and live the good life on some tropical island. In order to prove to the insurance company that he is dead, he needs a signed confession from Michael that he accidentally shot Grisby and dumped the body in the bay. Without an actual body, Michael can't be convicted. It's a win / win. Unfortunately, something goes dreadfully wrong. Michael arrives at Grisby's office, with a smoking gun in his hand and a signed confession in his pocket, just as Grisby's corpse is being wheeled out on a stretcher. Will Michael be convicted of the crime? Will he be able to discover the real killer? What will happen between Michael, Rosalie and Bannister? From here out, the pace of the film becomes a roller coaster of suspense and action. Welles planned an elaborate tour de force chase and confrontation scene in an amusement park fun house, but the studio cut and destroyed most of the footage. What remains is a very famous scene involving a shootout in a hall of mirrors.

The studio hack job makes it very difficult follow the plot and almost impossible to understand the particulars of how the insurance scam is actually supposed to work. There still exists a nine page memo from Welles to studio head, Harry Cohen, describing how the film should be scored; the film as it exists today follows none of the guidelines. Sequences that Welles wanted to cut out entirely were revamped during the studio's editing process. The genius of Orson Welles was such that even with massive studio interference in rewrite, editing and music, "The Lady from Shanghai" can still be considered one of the great films noir.

The DVD has a very nicely cleaned up black and white film quality. The audio is clear and sharp, though Welles' Irish accent can be a bit soft and inaudible at times. Soundtracks are available in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, subtitles are available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean and Thai. The special features include an optional commentary track by Peter Bogdanovich, in which he quotes from many conversations he had with Welles about this movie; a featurette "Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich"; printed biography and filmography `talent files' for Welles and Hayworth; vintage advertising and original theatrical trailers for "The Lady from Shanghai" and several other classic films.

As Michael O'Hara says in the beginning of the film, "I never make up my mind about anything at all until after it's over and done with." Recommended....
July 7, 2008

Beware of Ladies From Shanghai

I happened to watch Lady From Shanghai back to back with Gilda although there was not particular purpose I was trying to achieve by doing so. As I mentioned in the review of Gilda, published elsewhere in this space, do not ever exclude the young Rita Hayworth playing the title role of Gilda as one of the classic film femme fatales. She plays the femme fatale here as well but to much less affect. Her role as the scheming fatale does not stretch her talents, and here she is more of an appendage to the other main characters. The story line is the familiar one for femme fatales. Hooked up with some older man, husband or not but here a husband, who pays the bills for the hard luck waif. She then meets Mr. Right, or is it Mr. Fall Guy at the wrong time and things explode from there. In this case "Mr. Right" is none other that Orson Welles with an improbable Irish brogue but with all the wit and daring of an old-fashioned street Irishman. This ménage is bound to lead to the only place that it can-murder.

The twists and turns of the plot are not the only thing that is interesting here. Orson Welles not only acted in the film but wrote the screenplay and produced it. His touch shows in the startling black and white close ups of the characters, especially the husband (played by Everett Sloan) and his law partner, as they go through their paces. At the end the classic hall of mirrors confrontation between Hayworth and Sloan is pure Welles. Welles may have had his ups and downs as actor, writer, director and producer but this effort holds up pretty well after 60 years.
November 30, 2007

An aborted classic with Rita as super star

It feels like watching a preview of a great classic film noir. All the scenes are great, superb camera angles, beautiful vistas of natural sets, terrific lines all thru the movie. Everything is great; the cast, Rita is shockingly beautiful, as beautiful as Garbo was in "Queen Christina"... it's got everything, I tell you. But the problem is it's just a preview: only 90 minutes when the original thing was 2 and a half hours. You can see through its surface, how void the whole story is.

By the end one doesn't know who killed whom, why, or what was it all about. But Rita, Oh my! She was gorgeous. If only Welles (The Black Irish) didn't play the role of a fool, and she didn't play the unbelievable character she played it would have been different (or was it really different in its original idea? We will never know). September 26, 2007

Welles' camera seemed almost to caress Rita Hayworth...

After all, you do not go to an Orson Welles movie to see a nice simple little plot and a burnishing of the image of a happy-ever-after star...

You go to see theatrically heightened characters locked in conflict against colorful and unusual settings, lighted and scored imaginatively, photographed bravely, and the whole thing peppered with unexpected details of surprise that a wiser and duller director would either avoid or not think of in the first place...

As usual, as well as directing, Welles wrote the script and he also played the hero - a young Irish seaman who had knocked about the world and seen its evil, but still retained his clear-eyed trust in the goodness of others... Unfortunately for him, he reposed this trust in Rita Hayworth, whose cool good looks concealed a gloomy past and murderous inclinations for the future... She was married without love, to an impotent, crippled advocate, acted like a malevolent lizard by the brilliant Everett Sloane...

There is a youthful romanticism underlying it all, and this quality came into exuberant play in "The Lady from Shanghai." Before the inevitable happened, Welles escaped - to a final triangular showdown in a hall of mirrors, which has become one of the classic scenes of the post-war cinema ...

Welles did not miss a chance throughout the whole film to counterpoint the words and actions with visual detail which enriched the texture and heightened the atmosphere... His camera seemed almost to caress Rita Hayworth as the sun played with her hair and her long limbs while she playfully teased the young seaman into her web...

January 4, 2007

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