“A director is a man who presides over accidents.”
“When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little can stop me. If I’d known where it would end, I’d never let anything start—if I’d been in my right mind, that is. But once I’d seen her, once I’d seen her, I was not in my right mind for quite some time...me, with plenty of time and nothing to do but get myself in trouble. Some people can smell danger, not me.”
Both of these sound-bites come from Orson Welles: the first, from real life; the second, from reel life. I don’t know when Mr. Larger-Than-Hollywood-Life uttered those first words (perhaps after the unnatural disaster of It’s All True, Welles’ biggest, never-completed flop?), but the “fool” dialogue opens the writer-director-producer-star’s 1948 movie The Lady From Shanghai. After watching this great-but-flawed flick, I’m convinced the two quotes go hand-in-glove quite nicely.
The Lady From Shanghai is indeed an accident, a mangled car wreck of a movie, from which the passengers were lucky to walk away alive (though not unscratched). Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King, the movie was first called Take This Woman, then Black Irish—both of them equally dim as the eventual title on the marquee. Welles took his first misstep by casting his then-estranged wife, Rita Hayworth, as the femme fatale of the picture. The two of them divorced before The Lady From Shanghai was released and their cooling relations are evident on the screen. Then Welles insisted that lovely Rita cut off her famous red tresses and do a bob-and-bleach for the role. Then Hayworth got sick and production came to a halt for a month until she recovered. Columbia Pictures studio chief Harry Cohn was horrified at how Welles was tarnishing the reigning pin-up girl’s image. Convinced that he had a doomed movie on his hands, Cohn delayed its release for nearly two years (Town and Country, anyone?). Adding insult to Welles’ injury, the final cut was an hour shorter than the director’s original version—thus turning a baked potato into hash browns.
But let’s face it, Welles was dogged by cinematic accidents his entire career, with The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil topping the list. Even Citizen Kane seems to be just two or three slices of the editor’s blade away from incoherence. What makes those three films such strong pillars of moviedom (each of which I’d quickly put on my Top 20 list) is the fact that Welles’ restless, over-ambitious energy is bound together by something very closely resembling a good plot. Each of those pictures is permeated by an air of artificiality, a loud, showy style that threatens to distract and overwhelm. Citizen Kane—arguably the greatest use of celluloid the world has ever seen—is a veritable triumph of style. But it’s also, accidentally or not, a triumph of narrative and pacing.
By comparison, The Lady From Shanghai limps along with a gait that’s as awkward as the movie’s crippled husband. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plot a-plenty in The Lady From Shanghai, but it’s nothing that we haven’t seen before (or since) in other, better film noir classics. All the standard elements are here in full force: tough guys, slapped dames, smoking, drinking, cheating, killing. But the story moves in fits and starts, never engaging us in its web like, say, Double Indemnity or even the generally-lousy The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Welles plays Michael O’Hara, a ne’er-do-well drifter who must have found an abandoned Irish accent along the Boulevard of Tangled Tongues, then picked it up and put it in his mouth (Welles’ bad brogue is the stuff legends are made of). After the opening credits and his voice-over narration (“When I start [stahrrrt] out to make a fool of myself [meself]…”), we see the blarney bloke taking a nightly stroll in New York City. He’s a real devil-may-care fellow with no destination in mind, other than to walk into the frame and start the movie rolling.
He spies a blond-haired beauty (Hayworth) riding in the back of a horse-drawn carriage and, in the tradition of noir ne’er-do-wells, decides he must have her. Don’t ask me why these tough guys see a dame and, ignoring all the “Danger! Curves Ahead!” signs, shove a cigarette in their mouths then approach the lady with some rat-a-tat dialogue. This is just one of the rules of noir. Most of the time it works (I’m thinking especially of that perfect-as-clockwork exchange between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck at the beginning of Double Indemnity). But sometimes it comes off as nothing more than false Hollywood, a forced flirtation that has nothing to do with reality. Guess which camp The Lady From Shanghai falls into?
O’Hara offers the lady a cigarette and engages in more scripted repartee, thus sealing his doom. The dame’s name is Elsa Bannister and, unbeknownst to O’Hara, she’s the wife of a famous San Francisco lawyer, Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane). This does not bode well for Irish Mike, since he’s already confessed to Elsa that he’s got a shady past which, he claims, includes murder. That only seems to turn her on (in true noir) fashion. She invites him to join her and Arthur on their yacht as they sail to the West Coast via the Panama Canal and Mexico. Danger, Mike! Curves ahead!
Once on the yacht (which, by the way, was owned and skippered by Errol Flynn), trouble starts to smolder like the tip of a half-forgotten cigarette. Arthur, crippled from the waist down, is an odd bird (and, with Sloane’s bug-eyes and beak-like nose, he even resembles one). He’s a bitter rich man who seems to derive his greatest pleasure from making cruel, cutting remarks to his wife. He and Elsa never show any affection for each other and sexual relations are a moot point since he is dead below the waist. And yet she remains in his controlling clutches. Elsa, it seems, has been smoldering for a guy like O’Hara for years.
In typical Welles fashion, there is no such thing as understatement in The Lady From Shanghai. The characters are cut-from-cloth figures whose main purpose is to serve the director’s gleefully energetic style of extreme camera angles and compositions. Hayworth doesn’t say much, but she doesn’t have to—enough is said with the way Welles caresses her with the camera. The film is cluttered with sultry shots of Rita: here she is sunning herself in a black one-piece in the West Indies; here she is lying on-deck underneath a starry sky crooning a torch song, “Please Don’t Kiss Me;” here she is pressing up against O’Hara in a clandestine meeting at an aquarium where she pleads, “Will you carry me off with you into the sunrise?...Just take me there. Take me quick. Take me.” Sure, baby, just let me pick up my bullet-proof vest from the cleaners first, okay?
As it proceeds, the movie gets more and more labyrinthine as Mike is drawn into the Bannisters’ strange web of corruption. Like most movies of its genre, there are more twists than a typical day at the pretzel factory—none of which I’ll spoil for you here, but if you’ve seen more than a couple of dangerous-dame stories, you won’t be too surprised at what happens during The Lady From Shanghai.
What makes this troubled (and troubling) film so unmistakably compelling is the brash manner in which Welles commandeers the camera, and thus our attention. In these 90 minutes, there are scenes that will be forever scorched on my memory:
* The rendezvous in the aquarium where the lovers appear in silhouette while giant turtles and moray eels swim behind glass in the background.
* The murder plot that is hatched while two characters are standing on a crumbling parapet and Welles thrusts their faces toward the camera while the background falls into a dizzy vertigo of cliffs, rocks and crashing waves below.
* The famous climax in the funhouse hall of mirrors where O’Hara and the Bannisters end up confronting each other in a shootout that turns into a kaleidoscope of multiple reflections and shattered glass.
Unforgettable.
If you can overlook the hobbled pace of the movie and the occasional line of Bad Dialogue (“Give my love to the sunrise,” says one dying, bullet-riddled character), then The Lady From Shanghai is worth a 90-minute trip down the dark streets of yester-noir.
Complexly woven, offbeat mystery concerning Irish sailor and faked murder plot. Fans of cerebral, deliberately plotted mysteries love this classic. Da...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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