The Bottom Line: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, despite flaws, has memorable performances (especially by Glenn Anders), fine location sequences, and Orson Welles' personal/societal parable of his World at Mid 20th Century.
Whatever fan magazine myth swirled around him in 1948, when handsome 31 year-old Orson Welles came to write, direct, and star in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI with his estranged wife Rita Hayworth, he was, in truth, a bitter man. He had much to be bitter about, and he poured his despair into this potentially extraordinary noir-thriller.
With Elsa Bannister, the LADY in question, he created a femme fatale who joins a line which begins with Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Huston, THE MALTESE FALCON, 1941); and continues with Judy Barton (Hitchcock, VERTIGO, 1958) and Evelyn Mulwray (Polanski, CHINATOWN, 1974) to the present. These are unreliable heroines, let down by men hired to protect them.
Some younger people must wonder why, after the perfection of CITIZEN KANE (1941), a few of us make such a fuss about Welles' seemingly haphazard later works. The reason is that every film he made between . . . KANE and . . .SHANGHAI, plus most of those afterwards, were cut by about 30 minutes: THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (Welles' edit, 132 minutes; released at 88), JOURNEY INTO FEAR (Planned for 100 minutes; released at 69), IT'S ALL TRUE (Shot in three countries, projected at over two hours, aborted; remainder released in 1993 as part of an 89 minute documentary), THE STRANGER (carefully scripted and shot at 120 minutes; released at 95). What remains of these films is often extraordinary; what is not satisfactory, often proves to be the work of other hands. But today, we can only imagine what they might have been. What's more, as proven by the 1998 restoration of TOUCH OF EVIL, some of these films, by some miracle, may still be redeemed.
That may be true of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, shot at 155 minutes, of which we have an 86 minute travesty, partly re-shot by Welles on Columbia Studio orders, a carless music score added, and gaps in the continuity just ignored. The fact that the film still stands alone so well is a credit to what it might have been.
While completing . . . AMBERSONS in 1942, Welles was full of ideas, at the height of his powers and prestige. (He was participating simultaneously in two movies, directing a New York stage play, writing a daily column, doing two radio shows of social comment weekly, plus The Mercury Theater on the Air, and crafting political speeches for President Franklin Roosevelt.) It was at that point, an old New York acquaintance, Millionaire Nelson Rockefeller, Jr., then Under Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, persuaded him to go on A Mission to Brazil as a Good Will Ambassador.
To accommodate, Rockefeller, his old friend, (perhaps with an eye to a political career), and given RKO's encouragement, Welles incorporated the trip into his plan for a new project, IT'S ALL TRUE. He postponed a romance with Star Rita Hayworth, and flew to Rio. When he returned several months later, his career was in tatters, never to recover. Both Rockefeller and RKO abandoned him and the project; and although he did marry the iconic Hayworth the next year, and tried to toe the line for the studios in directing THE STRANGER, his real control over projects was a thing of the past. That loss ate into his relationships with Hayworth and the members of the Mercury Players, who had sustained him.
And so in late 1946, estranged from Hayworth, in debt to Columbia's Harry Cohn over a musical production of AROUND THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DAYS, Welles performed a hoop dance to wipe out his chit, reunite the Mercury Players, and perhaps regain Rita. He wrote over a weekend a screenplay based on Sherwood King's novel, If I Should Die Before I Wake. He cast the film, and was ready to shoot in three weeks. He completed the film, largely on location (rare, then) in New York, Hollywood, Acapulco, and San Francisco, within 98 days.
The film bore little relation to its source because Welles shaped the story as a surrealistic parable concerning the men he feared (quite rightly) would ruin the promise of the Peace after World War II: fascists, people of immense wealth, rightwing politicians, lawyers, judges, and studio heads, people of immense power in general; Nelson Rockefeller, in particular. In other words, the people he blamed for the ruin of his life and work in the previous four years. Unfair perhaps, but artists often think this way.
In addition to Rita Hayworth, playing the femme fatale Elsa Bannister, he cast Mercury Regulars Everett Sloane (Elsa's Criminal Lawyer Husband Arthur Bannister), Erskine Sanford, Gus Schilling, Frank Readick, etc. Two non-regulars were the brutally sinister Ted DeCorsia (another radio actor, who a year later made a memorable villain in Jules Dassin's NAKED CITY ) and New York actor, sometime Mercury radio player, Glenn Anders.
Anders, who had lost a number of contracts over morals clause violations, had not worked in two years and was acting as house guest/ escort for Tallulah Bankhead. One day in early October 1946, they were just heading out to a party, when a maid called from the balcony that Orson Welles was on the line. Anders thought it was a joke at first, but he was soon offered a job, if he were prepared to come immediately to San Pedro pier in a suit, hat and overcoat. On his arrival, an assistant told Anders that he was dead and to lie down on a stretcher, close his eyes, and put his hat on his chest.
It was one of the first set ups shot for the film.
Afterwards, Welles gave Anders his part, a contract for $1,250 a week, and explained that he was to imitate their old friend Nelson Rockefeller.
Welles worked closely with Rita Hayworth, a huge star among servicemen as a result of her widely distributed pinups as well as her previous film, the great hit, GILDA (Charles Vidor, 1946). Rita wanted to be regarded as a true actress, much to the displeasure of Harry Cohn, who preferred she remain a sex symbol. Dissatisfied with the Studio attitude, and already unhappy over her estrangement from Welles, she recognized that Cohn was hiring svelte newcomers as possible replacements should she prove recalcitrant. She fell ill, prompting the only hold ups in the subsequent production. It was to establish her independence as an actress that Welles had her long hair bobbed and bleached for her part, a fashion later adopted by Alfred Hitchcock for his blonde heroines like Grace Kelley, Doris Day, Tippi Hedren and Kim Novak.
Exploited and abused for many years by her family, her first husband, and the Studios, Rita Hayworth was to be a new Hayworth in the film, a lady from Shanghai, an escapee from the Chinatowns of Hollywood.
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, then, on its surface, is simply a yarn told by a sailor of fortune, Mike O'Hara, about the beautiful blonde Elsa Bannister he rescued from thugs in Central Park. She persuades her saturnine husband, Arthur Bannister (Sloane -- who drags himself around on two canes), to hire O'Hara as skipper of Bannister's yacht, The Circe, for a passage through the Panama Canal from New York to Acapulco. O'Hara enters into an affair with Elsa under the eyes of not only Bannister but his law partner George Grisby (Anders) and his thuggish factotum, Sidney Broome (De Corsia). After a decadent stay in Mexico, they sail (actually on The Zaca, commanded, uncredited, by Errol Flynn) to San Francisco, where the rest of the action takes place.
In a disjointed plan laid out at a meeting in Sausalito, Grisby, convinced that the people he represents legally will nuke the World, asks O'Hara to pretend to murder him for a large sum of money so that he can escape The Bomb to some faraway island refuge.
Grisby turns up dead, and the basically innocent O'Hara must spend the rest of the picture trying to clear his name.
That is what we can discern from what is left of the film, for as it turned out, Welles' brilliant 155 minute work suffered the same fate as his others. Cohn, unhappy with it, held it up for over a year. He forced Welles to insert close ups of Hayworth in a bikini singing a song "Please Don't Kiss Me," which Cohn had optioned and made the basis of the film's musical score. Cohn then had the film radically re-cut, perhaps recognizing the surrealistic depiction of Rockefeller's betrayal of Welles, his own relationship with Hayworth, and the part he and fellow moguls had undertaken in the ruination of both Welles and Hayworth. LADY FROM SHANGHAI was released on May 30th, 1948 -- length, 86 minutes.
Laudable, as it stands, is that THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI holds our attention (as if in a hung over nightmare) through certain superb scenes and performances. The symbolic story of greedy people who are going to spoil the World is there for those who look for it.
Welles is not at his best as Mike O'Hara, two fisted adventurer, but he carries it off through his gift for narration, and by a particularly mordant scene in which he describes a shark attack off Fortaleza (on the Brasilian coast) to Bannister and company, the human sharks he's with. (Fortelesa is where Welles shot some of IT'S ALL TRUE, and the scene is thought to have inspired Robert Shaw to write his speech on the sinking of U.S. Indianapolis for Spielberg in JAWS, probably the best thing in that film.)
Rita Hayworth, due to her emotional and physical illnesses, is not at her best either. During much of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, she appears thin and drawn, but her condition may actually be an asset in the spectacular shoot-out in Funland-at-the-Beach, on the Ocean Shore of San Francisco. (This one scene was to run 15 minutes.)
All Anders' scenes are electrifying, especially if we recognize his mimicking of future Presidential Candidate and Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller was famous for his hail fellow manner and high pitched voice. Rockefeller, as Grisby does in the film, often squeaked: "Hi-ya, Fella!"
Glenn Anders is dead on with his creepy interpretation.
In the end, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI did not help Welles, Rita Hayworth's career, nor their marriage. Welles had to move to Europe shortly after the film's indifferent release. Rita divorced Welles, and her days as a sex symbol were nearly over. She made only one or two successful films in the remainder of her career.
Some years ago, in the bar of a quaintly beautiful hotel on the beach at Mazatlan, I ran into an old Hollywood cinematographer, who had moonlighted in Mexican films. The cinematographer was there to hide his classic LaGonda automobile from his 73 year-old wife, who was divorcing him. He looked around the lonely bar, and said,"You know, I can't get people in Hollywood to realize, 40 years ago, this is where it was at! I sat in this very bar with Gary Cooper, Kate Hepburn, lots of the best. Right where you're sitting, young sir, in 1946, Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth were trying to patch up their marriage. They had flown up from Acapulco. Welles was shooting . . . THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI with . . . who was it . . . Rudy Mate? Yeah, nice kids. But they didn't make it. Too bad."
Too bad, indeed. As Mike O'Hara puts it to Lawyer Grisby, looking down on the incomparable Harbor of Acapulco: "It's a bright, guilty world."
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
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.