Posted by Don Malcolm
on 10/24/2009, 12:37 pm
96.251.89.110 | Message modified by user Don Malcolm 10/24/2009, 10:36 pm
NOIR OF THE WEEK 10/26/09
from ChiBob’s A Reference Guide to the American Film Noir 1940-58
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948)
Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Orson Welles, adapted from the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King
Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Lead actors: Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane
Supporting actors: Glenn Anders, Ted DeCorsia, Erskine Sanford, Gus Schilling, Harry Shannon, Evelyn Ellis
It took nearly two years for The Lady From Shanghai to get released; it underwent substantial re-editing, because Columbia president Harry Cohn could not understand the story.
This is a film that Welles apparently never really wanted to make, but Cohn had loaned him $60,000 for an unsuccessful stage venture [Around the World in 80 Days], in return for making a film at Columbia.
For Welles, The Lady From Shanghai was “an experiment—in what not to do.”† This certainly is a harsh judgment, for the film is one of Welles’s most enjoyable and an excellent example of the film noir theme of the naïve male becoming involved in a murder scheme, because of his infatuation with a femme fatale.
The complex but conventional plot machinations are delivered through hallucinatory visuals, the whole movie becoming a satiric dream-work or magic show based upon a standard thriller. Michael O’Hara (Welles), a philosophical Irish seaman, meets Elsa Bannister (Hayworth) in New York and is seduced by her into accepting a job as captain of her husband’s yacht on a cruise to San Francisco.
Shortly after leaving, O’Hara witnesses the machinations of Elsa, her wealthy lawyer husband (Sloane), and his balmy law partner Grisby (Anders). On the trip, O’Hara relates a prescient, metaphorical story about a pack of sharks and how they devour each other:
Do you know, once off the hump of Brazil, I saw the ocean so darkened with blood it was black, and the sun fadin' away over the lip of the sky. We put in at Fortaleza. A few of us had lines out for a bit of idle fishin'. It was me had the first strike. A shark it was, and then there was another, and another shark again, till all about the sea was made of sharks, and more sharks still, and the water tall. My shark had torn himself from the hook, and the scent, or maybe the stain it was, and him bleedin' his life away, drove the rest of 'em mad. Then the beasts took to eatin' each other; in their frenzy, they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust and murder like a wind stingin' your eyes. And you could smell the death reeking up out of the sea. I never saw anything worse--until this little picnic tonight. And you know, there wasn't one of them sharks in the whole crazy pack that survived.
Despite his notions about some sinister goings-on, he stays with them until they disembark in San Francisco.
At this point O’Hara becomes caught up in a nightmare, as his involvement with Grisby in a phony murder scheme leads to a complex “triple-cross” among the three “sharks,” who are all trying to dispose of one another.
O’Hara’s confusion in becoming tapped in circumstances beyond his control is perfectly captured in the concluding “hall of mirrors” scene, shot at San Francisco’s Fun House. In this brilliantly edited sequence, Elsa and her husband shoot one another admist a maze of mirrors, while O’Hara escapes physically unscathed, but emotionally battered. He leaves Elsa to die, and in the final scene he walks out into the grey dawn and tells us:
The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I’ll concentrate on that. Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her--maybe I’ll die trying.
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† Review in Time, June 27, 1948
Trailer at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvhoeL3Vv-c
Tim Dirks walks us through the action and dialogue at AMC: http://www.filmsite.org/ladyf.html
More detail on the post-production history of the film at 10 Shades of Noir: http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/infocus/shanghai.htm
Jason Mark Scott re/deconstucts the film at Bright Lights: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/58/58lady.html
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