Practically disowned by Columbia when new, Orson Welles’ baroque noir thriller is now regarded as one of the studio’s top achievements, and Sony has released it as a solo 4K attraction. Starring Welles’ ex-wife Rita Hayworth and a raft of eccentric players in strikingly effective roles, the film fronts a pretzel-twisted storyline that takes multiple viewings to untangle (we’re still working on that). Welles’ noir tale is a crazy-house of romantic delirium, and not even Harry Cohn’s editorial interference can dull its impact… it’s still a classic.

The Lady from Shanghai 4K
4K Ultra HD
Sony
1947 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 87 min. / Street Date July 30, 2024 / Available from Moviezyng / 30.99
Starring: Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders, Ted de Corsia, Erskine Sanford, Gus Schilling, Evelyn Ellis, William Alland.
Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Art Directors: Stephen Goossón, Sturges Carne
Costume Design: Jean Louis
Special Effects: Lawrence W. Butler
Film Editor: Viola Lawrence
Original Music: Heinz Roemheld
Executive Producer: Harry Cohn
Associate producer: Richard Wilson
Second Unit Director, associate producer and uncredited writer: William Castle
From a novel by Sherwood King
Written, Produced and Directed by Orson Welles

Did Orson Welles ever make a dull movie?  His audiovisual roller coaster The Lady from Shanghai remains one of his most entertaining thrillers … even with its indecipherable plot line. A romantic/hardboiled film noir directed in a whirl of fast-paced action, Shanghai’s visual flourishes frequently verge on the experimental. Despite a recut by studio meddlers, most scenes communicate intense moods and bizarre extremes of character. Justly famed surreal set pieces express the dark psychological forces churning below every character confrontation. Welles’ later  Touch of Evil plays as a festering nightmare, while Shanghai resembles a crazy house of greedy schemes gone mad.

Cited by studio wags as a prime example of why the talented powerhouse should be banned from the industry, The Lady from Shanghai is as brilliant as it is frustrating. A lot of the frustration stemmed from the interference of studio head Harry Cohn … or is ‘punitive vengeance’ more accurate?  The mogul could claim that Welles double-crossed him, doing irreparable harm to his top sex symbol Rita Hayworth, by cropping her hair and dyeing it blond. Welles would quietly ask why the film was taken away from him, re-cut with added retakes by others, and his notes for the music scoring ignored.

 

Welles begins his story almost as if setting up a dirty limerick: “There was a young lady from Shanghai…”  Ashore in New York City, rootless merchant seaman Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) rescues a mysterious beauty (Rita Hayworth) in Central Park. A day or so later, the famous but handicapped San Francisco attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) hires Michael to crew on his yacht — at the request of his wife Elsa, Michael’s ‘mysterious lady.’  Michael signs on anyway. En route to the Caribbean he must put up with insinuations from Arthur’s associate Sid Broome (Ted de Corsia) and business partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders). Their taunts and Arthur’s impotent insults drive Elsa and Michael together. By the time the yacht reaches Acapulco, everyone knows they are an item. Michael is tempted when Grisby asks him for help in faking his death for insurance purposes. The $5,000 offered would allow Michael and Elsa to run away together. No sooner does the yacht reach San Francisco than the whole setup explodes in murder plots and counter-murder plots, all of which converge on Michael as the prize all-time fall guy.

 

The Lady from Shanghai entertains so thoroughly, we never worry about following its convoluted twists and turns. We naturally try to figure out which re-take bits Orson Welles didn’t direct. Michael O’Hara is introduced in a weak scene rescuing Elsa Bannister from some thugs; if Welles wasn’t present as an actor we’d wonder if the scene was a reshoot, by Welles acolyte William Castle, maybe.

For viewers that haven’t already seen the movie, our advice is to not bother to pay attention to story details. They get in the way of the marvelous visual storytelling designed to keep the audience two steps behind the third-act cascade of plot twists. It takes at least a couple of viewings to get a purchase on the story’s various double-crosses. We’re not sure they ever really clear up, anyway.

Once again, Welles stars in his own movie. He tries to play Michael O’Hara as not exceptionally bright, as a prime Noir Loser and self-appraised sap who (sigh) just can’t say no to a ravishing blond at the center of a pack of human sharks. There is always some fan grousing about Orson Welles’ lead performance. By 1946 he was still a potential candidate for romantic leads, despite starting to put on weight. Frankly, any mortal that married Rita Hayworth and was the lover of Dolores Del Rio can’t have been too much of a slacker.

 

Michael may be easily tricked, but he can also whip up an evocative philosophical speech or two. Michael’s little parable about kill-crazy sharks eating each other is the film’s overall opinion of mankind. Welles smoothly integrates this theme with his visuals: a later visit to an aquarium becomes an artful echo when superimposed fish seemingly feed off an image of Elsa. References to an atomic apocalypse chime in with the same idea. Welles’ narration talks about a “bright, guilty world” that also seems perilously unstable, a key preoccupation of film noir. Superior storytelling puts across themes that would be pretentious in most any other context.

If this were a standard ‘femme fatale vs. noir loser’ tale, the suspense would revolve around when the cuckolded Arthur discovers that he’s been cuckolded. That’s a foregone conclusion here, as the romantic triangle is just the first of a number of plots and schemes, some of which are con jobs. As is typical with Welles, the trickery is spread among a number of colorful supporting characters. Bannister’s associates verbally explain (or complicate) things at the damndest times, such as when George Grisby buttonholes Michael on a narrow rampart high above the Acapulco Cliffs. Grisby expresses his traumatic fear of a nuclear holocaust, which is fairly prescient thinking for 1946. The camera holds him in a creepy, unpleasant wide-angle close-up. It’s a case of claustrophobia / agoraphobia; Grisby stares into the sun as if already blinded by a nuclear blast. Glenn Anders’ brilliantly weird outburst should have been nominated for an Oscar.

 

Michael soon realizes that he’s become the chump in a multilevel frame-up. Who tried to murder who first is never really resolved. The trickster Welles continues his policy of slipping important verbal exposition into scenes so distracting, we cannot possibly pay full attention. In the famed mirror scene, does the hyper-cryptic dialogue really add up to an explanatory wrap-up?  The kaleidoscopic sequence goes beyond show-off filmmaking. The visuals all but mesmerize audiences; it is arguably one of the most accomplished cinematic constructions in film history.

People shatter like panes of glass, crashing as they die.The spectacular crazy house conclusion can’t even be dissed as ostentatious — its visual fireworks express the violence required to penetrate Michael O’Hara’s thick skull and pop the foolish romantic bubble inside. By the time Michael staggers away from his dead and dying companions, the only hint that he won’t throw himself into San Francisco Bay is the melancholy in Welles’ final burst of poetic narration.

 

Our favorite stretch of The Lady from Shanghai begins in the courtroom. Just when we expect some more fancy cross examination dialogue, the action suddenly jumps into lunatic action mode, for a dizzying manhunt in Chinatown. Welles constructs an impressive Chinese theater scene from shots of apprehensive faces noting the quiet arrival of the police. Elsa Bannister suddenly transforms from helpless love object to savvy operative, fully capable of taking care of herself and Michael as well. Stuck in a tight spot, Elsa summons her driver at the right moment and uses her knowledge of Cantonese to slip backstage at the theater. Is this savvy lady from Shanghai just a new edition of Hammett’s adventuress  Brigid O’Shaughnessy?  Has Elsa been part of the setup for the frame all along?

It’s fairly obvious why Harry Cohn was furious with Welles. His number one female attraction wasn’t getting any younger, and that &#&@% Welles wasted a year of her services indulging his artistic whims. Cohn surely wanted to exploit the hyper-sensual image Hayworth projected in Charles Vidor’s big success  Gilda.  Hayworth is excellent in Shanghai but her Elsa Bannister couldn’t be less like the sensual Gilda Mundson. Welles doesn’t try to top Gilda’s striptease scene — is it possible that he was trying to do his ex-wife a career favor by toning down an erotic charge that no actress could sustain?

 

So much in The Lady from Shanghai plays as honest-to-goodness directorial strokes of genius. Welles’ techniques encourage audience participation, as we take in his increasingly non-standard storytelling methods. Shots are seldom arranged in a predictable continuity; new information is introduced with almost every cut. One sequence is a series of views through telescopes, ‘telescoping’ a ten-week voyage down to an expressionist travelogue. The cruise pauses several times for on-shore dramatic scenes, each with a music change. One detour seems a repeat of the ‘little picnic’ episode in  Citizen Kane.

Orson Welles had years of creative experience in radio. Reading about his ideas for Touch of Evil’s soundtrack makes us curious to know what experimental audio he had in mind for this film. Based on various accounts, some detail work in the finished film was not Welles’ doing at all. A radio broadcast with a stupid ad jingle comes through at one point, followed by a snippet of Elsa singing a song. We’re told that Cohn imposed the singing scene after Welles had been ejected from the studio. But the grating radio snippet sounds exactly like what Welles might add to shake things up.

 

The Lady from Shanghai shook up Columbia all right. Not counting his oddball  Macbeth project over at Republic, it marked the end of Orson Welles’ conventional Hollywood career and the beginning of his European exile. Among the dozens of half-filmed and unfinished projects that followed, were a number of features that did find final form. But the director spent most of his career acting in other people’s movies. He performed in almost three times as many movies as he directed/tried to direct.

Still there’s nobody remotely like Welles, and The Lady from Shanghai is without doubt one of his top titles.
Forty years after his death, new films crediting him as director are still appearing — various unfinished projects finalized by others, yet demanding our attention.

 

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Sony’s 4K Ultra HD of The Lady from Shanghai 4K pulls the maximum out of Columbia’s print materials … the picture looks so flawless, so silky smooth, we don’t know whether to applaud the restoration or to wonder if grain removal software was applied. There’s no evidence of detail being erased; if anything, we admire the way Welles frequently has his characters step into areas of relative darkness — the Ultra HD image shows us plenty of contrast detail even the the darkest parts of the frame. The optical work in this show is very sophisticated, especially so in the crazy house hall of mirrors scene.

Buyers need reminding that this is a 4K – only presentation … no Blu-ray is included in the package.

 

On a reasonably sized monitor, The Lady from Shanghai is almost as overpowering as it was on big theater screen, especially when Welles and cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. move the camera through those Acapulco sets, or bring out the wide-angle lenses. Various sources claim that Errol Flynn is briefly visible in a cantina sequence — it was Flynn’s yacht that Welles leased to film the movie in Mexico. Friend Randall William Cook tells me that Joseph Cotten can be spotted for a split second as well, tipping his hat. Good hunting.

Sony repeats its standard extras, both with the late Peter Bogdanovich, a full commentary and an interview featurette. An original trailer is included as well.

The Lady from Shanghai has been released on Blu-ray by several labels. Charlie Largent covered a very good Blu just last year, from Kino Lorber.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

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The Lady from Shanghai 4K
4K Ultra HD rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Commentary by Peter Bogdanovich
Featurette A Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich
Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD in Keep case
Reviewed: August 3, 2024
(7171shan)

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