THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (Columbia Pictures 1947)

D: Orson Welles. P: W: Orson Welles, (uncredited) William Castle, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle. Ph: Charles Lawton Jr, (uncredited) Rudolph Maté, Joseph Walker. M: Heinz Roemheld. St: Orson Welles (Michael O’Hara), Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister), Everett Sloane (Arthur Bannister), Glenn Anders (George Grisby), Ted de Corsia (Sidney Broome)

 

 

“Once I’d seen her... I was not in my right mind for quite some time”

As Michael O’Hara, the Irish sailor seduced by Rita Hayworth’s siren, Orson Welles speaks for a legion of film noir protagonists when he acknowledges that he is no longer the master of his fate. The same is true, of course, of the more hubristic characters with whom O’Hara becomes ensnared, once their cruel and murderous schemes are set in motion.

The hero’s self-deprecating voiceover (he repeatedly refers to himself as a “fool”, a “boob”, a “fathead”)is no exaggeration. If one can forgive him for falling for Hayworth’s luscious Elsa, the unhappy wife of the brilliant, crippled attorney Arthur Bannister, his naivety when he agrees to “murder” Bannister’s paranoid partner, George Grisby– a ruse to help the latter start afresh elsewhere – would scarcely be credible were his brains not addled already. (Columbia chief Harry Cohn was flummoxed by the screwy plot; predictably, the French New Wave critics adored it.)

 

 

The first half takes noir out of the city, but the sense of entrapment remains, with the principals in uncomfortable proximity aboard the Bannisters’ luxury yacht (named Circe, an oblique tribute to Elsa), exchanging barbs on a swelteringly tense “leisure cruise” – O’Hara compares his companions to “sharks that took to eatin’ each other… mad with their own blood”. Elsa is beholden to Bannister for rescuing her from the fleshpots of the Orient; he, much older, flaunts her like a trophy – compensation, almost, for his impairment. Grisby conspires with Elsa to kill off Bannister, and also gets his hooks into the hapless O’Hara, whose rash boast of being a free agent is undermined at every turn of the plot.

As O’Hara intuits, the central characters are conjoined on a deeper level, gripped by collective madness – “I must be insane, or else all these people are lunatics. ”A kind of delirium colours the entire production, spreading out from Welles’ direction – it was his stated intention to create “something off-centre, queer, strange”. We can recognise this in the character of Grisby – shot in wide-angle close-ups that make his face loom from the screen, whether he’s gazing lasciviously at Elsa or ranting about nuclear apocalypse – and in the almost surrealistic use of backdrops: the aquarium, where O’Hara and Elsa have an assignation while eerily amorphous shapes swim behind them; the off-season amusement park where O’Hara hides from the police, a triumph of expressionistic set design.

 

 

Society itself seems to be infected, as demonstrated by O’Hara’s farcical murder trial – Grisby’s plan inevitably has backfired and he really has been killed, although not by O’Hara, whose signed confession strengthens the case against him. In any event, it is clear he will get no justice here. The proceedings are interrupted by sneezing jurors, coughing and fits of laughter from the audience; Bannister, defending O’Hara in the knowledge he is Elsa’s lover (“This is one case I’ve enjoyed losing”), cross-examines himself, the tone becoming increasingly absurd. The denouement is chaotic: O’Hara, on a nod from Elsa, swallows a handful of Bannister’s painkillers and is rushed out of court, taking advantage of the ensuing confusion to effect his escape.

Except, of course, there can be no escape. The undertone of hysteria achieves hallucinatory intensity once O’Hara, feeling the effects of the drugs, makes his way through the “crazy house”, tumbling woozily down a gigantic slide before encountering Elsa and Bannister for the last time in a house of mirrors. This bravura scene exemplifies one of noir’s primary visual and thematic tropes – the psychological connotations of mirrors and reflective surfaces, symbolic of duplicity, fractured minds and, in this case, the shattering of plans, as Elsa and Bannister shoot each other to death. (Welles’ staging evokes the haunting image of multiple Kanes in Citizen Kane, and was inspired perhaps by the famous house-of-mirrors set piece in Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus – Welles was one of Chaplin’s greatest admirers. Fear in the Night [1947] may have been the first noir to utilise a room lined with mirrors, but director Maxwell Shane was no Orson Welles when it came to realizing its potential.)

 

 

Like its production context – Welles and Hayworth’s crumbling marriage – the immediate fate of the film is well known: the reshoots ordered by Cohn; the excision of more than an hour’s footage from Welles’ first cut; its critical and commercial failure. Its afterlife has been far happier, and its broadly positive reputation is justified. Apart from its dynamic visual design, as indelible as anything Welles created, his script has some of the spikiest dialogue in noir (“He was as helpless as a sleeping rattlesnake”), as well as finely etched fatalistic observations – “Everything’s bad… everything. You can’t escape it or fight it.” Welles, Oirish lilt notwithstanding, and Hayworth, her signature red mane cropped and dyed an icy blonde, are fine in their roles, Hayworth locating the vulnerability and sadness beneath Elsa’s regal exterior. Everett Sloane and Glenn Anders, meanwhile, sculpt two of noir’s great grotesques in Bannister and Grisby respectively; the former vindictive and imperious, the latter a churning mass of greed, delusion and atomic-age angst.
 
Knowledge of Elsa’s culpability appears to free O’Hara from her embrace, but not even her death releases him completely: “Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her; maybe I’ll die trying."
Kevin Grant