Orson Welles casts himself in the most unlikely role of his career—as a goodhearted sailor who falls prey to the conniving plots of wealthy social piranhas—in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), perhaps the most baroque film in the annals of film noir.
Irish sailor Michael O’Hara (Welles) is a misguided vagabond and would-be writer who unwittingly, but not entirely unwillingly, becomes involved in a complex murder plot full of backstabbing and dirty deals. Ostensibly street-smart, he proves himself a working-class innocent when he gets tangled up with Elsa (a bleached-blond Rita Hayworth, Hollywood’s girl-next-door auburn beauty turned cold-killer bitch) and her Iago-like grotesque-of-a-husband, attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane, rocking along with canes and leg braces).
Smitten with Elsa, Michael soon finds himself at the mercy of the lies, false faces, and scheming plots of the couple, a guppy swimming in the waters of wealthy social piranhas. It turns on one of the most unbelievable—and at times inexplicable—plots, with Bannister’s eternally-soused partner Grisby (Glenn Anders) hiring Michael to help him fake his own death.
Ostensibly adapted from a novel by Sherwood King, Welles pretty much reimagined the story in his rewrite, and continued to revise as he took the production on location on a sailboat leased from Errol Flynn. The studio hated it and hacked the film down, making it even more incomprehensible. Even the narration, by Welles with an Irish brogue that drifts throughout the film, does little to clear it up.
So no, it doesn’t much sense, and it doesn’t really seem to matter if you let yourself get carried away with the cinematic brio of it all. It’s a strange portrait in a career of corrupt figures, shady charlatans, and tragic fools, yet this unlikely Welles project is a wonderfully Wellesian film, a nightmare world of labyrinthine danger culminating in a dazzling hall of mirrors. He shatters and distorts the world with the bravura of a visual artist at the height of his craft, and in the process essentially ended his directing career in the United States. The film lost money and “tarnished” Columbia Pictures star Hayworth, who divorced Welles during the shoot.
Eternal film noir heavy Ted de Corsia plays as Bannister’s hatchet man Sidney Broome and Welles regulars Gus Schilling, Erskine Sanford, and Harry Shannon costar.
It was added to the National Film Registry in 2018.
Black and white
Also on Blu-ray and DVD and on SVOD through Amazon Video and/or other services. Availability may vary by service.
The Lady from Shanghai [Blu-ray]
The Lady from Shanghai [4K UHD + Blu-ray]
The Lady from Shanghai (Sony) [DVD]
The Lady from Shanghai (Collector’s Choice) [DVD]
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