The Lady from Shanghai
The Lady from Shanghai
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1946 / B&W / 1.33: 1
Starring Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane
Written by Orson Welles
Directed by Orson Welles
To those who know him, Michael O’Hara “… has got a lot of blarney in him.” That also applies to Orson Welles, the man who created that smooth-talking Irishman and plays him in The Lady from Shanghai, a labyrinthine guessing-game written and directed by Welles in 1946. Welles’s enigmatic co-stars include Everett Sloane as Arthur Bannister, “the world’s greatest lawyer or the world’s greatest criminal”, and Rita Hayworth as Bannister’s wife, an unknowable beauty hiding behind a plutonium hairdo.
Hayworth is not the only one wearing a disguise—like any noir, everyone has two or more personas, but Welles’s film is no ordinary noir, and for better and for worse, The Lady from Shanghai is no ordinary movie. The film, both haphazard and inspired—sometimes in the same moment—could be a figment our hero’s own imagination; his story ends in an avalanche of shattered glass but O’Hara’s world is a splintered shambles long before that.
Welles himself narrates the movie with a vaudevillian accent which tests our patience from the beginning, but it’s somehow appropriate to the poetic/tough-guy dialog and unstable atmosphere (though Welles took credit for the screenplay other writers may have helped here and there). O’Hara, a merchant seaman just landed in New York, is wandering Central Park when he lays eyes on a solitary blonde in a buggy—her name is Elsa Bannister. After some awkward small talk they part but seconds later O’Hara is coming to her rescue; a gang of thugs has surrounded her in a nearby grove. O’Hara makes quick work of the four—count ’em, four— attackers, throwing each one over his shoulder with a flourish worthy of The Incredible Hulk. It’s quite a sight, in fact, it’s unbelievable.
In 1942 Welles set out to blend fact and fiction in the unfinished It’s All True. In 1973 he turned the truth on its head in F for Fake—so who knows if O’Hara’s heroics are meant to be believed? One way to understand this cockeyed movie is that O’Hara is just another unreliable narrator, a born fabricator, and Welles is engaged in a kind of cinematic jam session, blurring the line between artful improvisation and just making things up as you go along.
O’Hara is initially put off by Elsa’s married status but he allows himself to be seduced not only by her, but her husband as well. Arthur Bannister is a partly-paralyzed man who wields his crutches like a cowboy wears his six-shooters and if O’Hara doesn’t already smell a rat, he will soon soon enough; before he knows it he’s plucked down on a yacht surrounded by Bannister’s helpmates who prowl the deck like a particularly sinister pirate crew. They’re all “colorful” characters but one seafarer stands out, Arthur’s partner, George Grisby, played by Glenn Anders (Anders is usually framed in alarming close-ups, bug-eyed and sweaty—he looks like a hard boiled egg about to crack).
Grisby has a proposition for O’Hara, he’ll give the Irishman 5,000 dollars to help fake his death. Of course there’s more to it than that, but the ever-growing tendrils of Welles’s mystery only obscure the storyline and finally become tangled beyond reason. According to Welles he dreamed up this movie on the spot when he was stuck in a phone booth trying to raise money for another project… did he remember to look before leaping? Most great artists don’t.
O’Hara may not be a great artist but he shares Welles’s brash manner. And after one—or maybe two—of the main characters is shot to death, the Irishman winds up in front of a judge with Bannister as his lawyer. He’s found guilty but uses the same method to free himself that he used in his Central Park dust-up; the action is as acrobatic as any of Errol Flynn’s escapes but O’Hara’s gymnastics are played like a farce… so why not end the film in a real funhouse?
Some films contain sequences that play so well by themselves that an unforgiving editor might be tempted to delete the rest of the movie. Psycho‘s shower scene redefined film making. J. Hoberman advocated for a full length movie in the frenetic style of Saving Private Ryan‘s D Day scene. A more recent example is the looking glass ballet in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, which may have been inspired by Welles’s own adventures down the rabbit hole.
Set in the hall of mirrors of an empty amusement park, the finale of The Lady from Shanghai is a shattering experience, a fractured montage that explains the two, three, and four-faced Elsa better than any screenwriter. If the sequence resembles a particularly violent lover’s quarrel, it’s worth noting Welles and Hayworth’s own marriage would end that same year. The director poured his heart into this moment—a literal break-up—and was finally able to merge fact with fiction; O’Hara’s story becomes Welles’s story. It’s all true.
Kino Lorber has released The Lady from Shanghai on a very good-looking Blu ray with a nice selection of extras including two newly recorded audio commentaries; one from film historian Imogen Sara Smith, and the second from novelist and critic Tim Lucas. There’s also an archival commentary from Peter Bogdanovich and an interview with the late director in A Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich from 2000. Noir expert Eddie Muller appears with three short on-camera commentaries and the extras wrap with a group of noirish trailers from Kino’s vault.
Here’s Joe Dante on The Lady from Shanghai: