Orson Welles wasn’t very good at making movies. I mean, sure, his cinematography is breathtaking, his sense of pacing thrilling, his ability to turn any plot into an entertaining story unparalleled. And, sure, he got great performances—often the greatest performances of actor’s careers.
But, look, for his first film, he took a swing at the guy whose newspapers were going to have to advertise his show. To say nothing of reviewing it. For his second film, he crafted a broody, dark epic during wartime.
And for his third film, Lady from Shanghai, he encouraged “The Love Goddess” Rita Hayworth to cut her iconic hair. Hot off of Gilda. Harry Cohn (head of Columbia, who had given Welles this chance after the disastrous Ambersons) was pissed, and understandably so.
Hideous! Who could love such a woman?
Well, this wasn’t his third film, exactly. With Welles, it’s always complicated. (And his fans have kind of polluted his IMDB page with unfinished projects, so it’s not really a great resource.) He did a film just prior to this called The Stranger for International Pictures. The head of IP gave the editor free-rein to cut all of the Welles-y stuff out and of course the artiste hated it—but it’s allegedly the only movie he made that made money. (They probably all have by this point, of course.)
So, once again, we have Welles doing his thing, and the studio cutting out forty minutes to an hour and recycling it. Take that future art historians!
The Lady from Shanghai is generally regarded as a noir, and it has many of the hallmarks of such. The plot is that Elsa (Hayworth), encounters spirited sailor Michael (Welles) who saves her from being gang-raped. The sparks fly and Elsa solicits Michael to join her for a sea voyage on her husband’s yacht.
The turtle, who is just an extra here, would ultimately go onto star in “Finding Nemo”.
Her husband Arthur (Everett Sloan) is a major creep who demeans Elsa constantly, and there’s a strong implication that he’s blackmailed her into marrying him. Adding to the creep factor is Grisby, Arthur’s “friend” (played by stage and vaudeville actor Glenn Anders, doing a Nelson Rockefeller impression). Arthur and Grisby are lawyers and they have a successful law firm, dedicated to getting really, really guilty people off,
Michael of course falls for Elsa but realizes she can’t really marry an itinerant sailor. Grisby offers Michael $5,000 if he’ll commit one little murder—that of Grisby himself. And we are off to the races, as nothing is what it seems, and nothing really matters much because everything looks so cool and spooky and even though their marriage was coming to an end, Hayworth and Welles spark in every scene.
It’s a very noir plot and Welles’ visuals were always in that dramatic deeply lit style, but it doesn’t really feel like a noir. Noir evolved from melodrama, and this movie is practically the opposite. While the images are dramatic, the acting is really pretty low-key. If anything, people are under-reacting to things.
It’s also very funny in parts. And positively lunatic in others, as when Elsa and Michael meet in an aquarium and walk past the tanks, which are rear projections of ridiculously large moray eels making moray eel faces.
And of course the classic end in the funhouse, with mirrors and what-not being shot up.
Mirrors and some camera tricks.
The cuts are sometimes jangly as a consequence of things being rather brutally excised, like a lot of that funhouse scene. A few of the musical cues are complete misses. The studio wanted a hit song so they had Rita Hayworth sing “Please Don’t Kiss Me”—and then had Anita Ellis dub it. Ellis also dubbed Hayworth for “Put The Blame On Mame,” but Hayworth had a decade-plus long track record of singing on film.
Hollywood is weird.
According to our host, Stanley Sheff, who worked on Welles’ last completed project “The Orson Welles Show,” it was Welles himself who painted the final set—the carnival outside the funhouse. Like everything else with his hand in it, it’s distinctive and memorable, and you’re sort of surprised one person could do it. (I think there are competing stories involving a painter’s strike, but I’ll take a secondhand account from an unreliable narrator over the Internet any day.)
I could see it again. There’s always so much to see in Orson Welles’ films, and you kind of have to wonder, if he could’ve worked within the system better, would we have more finished projects? And if he had finished those projects, would they be the caliber of even the unfinished/mangled works he left behind?
Hollywood made some good-looking couples back in the day. And some classic heartbreaks.