| The Lady from Shanghai | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Orson Welles |
| Produced by | Orson Welles |
| Written by | Novel: Sherwood King Screenplay: Orson Welles Uncredited: William Castle Charles Lederer Fletcher Markle |
| Starring | Rita Hayworth Orson Welles Everett Sloane |
| Music by | Heinz Roemheld |
| Cinematography | Charles Lawton Jr. Uncredited: Rudolph Maté Joseph Walker |
| Editing by | Viola Lawrence |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) | December 24, 1947 (France) June 9, 1948 (US) |
| Running time | 87 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
The Lady from Shanghai is a 1947 film noir directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, his estranged wife Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane. It is based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King.
Contents |
Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) meets the beautiful blonde Elsa (Rita Hayworth) as she rides a horse-drawn coach in Central Park. Shortly thereafter three hooligans waylay the coach, Michael rescues her and escorts her home. Michael reveals he is a seaman and learns Elsa and her husband, the famous disabled criminal defense attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), are newly arrived in New York City from Shanghai. They are on their way to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Michael, attracted to Elsa despite misgivings is persuaded to sign on as an able seaman aboard Bannister's yacht.
After setting sail, they are joined on the boat by Bannister's law partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders), who proposes that Michael "murder" him in a plot to fake his own death and collect the insurance money for himself. He promises Michael $5,000 and explains that since he wouldn't really be dead and thus there would be no corpse, Michael couldn't be convicted of murder (reflecting corpus delicti laws at the time.) Michael agrees to this, intending to use the money to run away with Elsa, with whom he's begun a relationship. Grisby has Michael sign a confession.
On the eve of the crime, Sydney Broome, a private investigator who has been following Elsa on her husband's orders, confronts Grisby. Broome has learned of Grisby's plan and that he is actually intending to murder Bannister, frame Michael for the crime and escape suspicion by pretending to have also been murdered. Grisby shoots Broome and leaves him for dead. Unaware of what has happened, Michael proceeds with the night's arrangement and sees Grisby off on a motorboat before shooting a gun into the air to draw attention to himself. Meanwhile, a severely injured Broome goes to Elsa for help and warns her that Grisby is intending to kill her husband.
Thinking the plan is done with, Michael calls to inform Elsa but is surprised to find Broome on the other end of the line. Broome's dying words are to warn Michael that Grisby was setting him up. Michael rushes to Bannister's office in time to see Bannister is alive but that the police are removing Grisby's body from the premises. The police instantly find evidence that Michael was the killer, including his confession, and take him away.
At trial, Bannister has offered to act as Michael's attorney and feels the case is more likely to be won if he pleads justifiable homicide, due to all the evidence against his client. As the trial progresses Bannister learns of the extent of his wife's relationship with Michael and ultimately takes pleasure in his suspicion that they will lose the case. Bannister also indicates that he knows the real killer's identity. Michael is able to escape from the courtroom by feigning a suicide attempt before the verdict is to be announced. Elsa follows and she and Michael hide out in a theater in Chinatown. Elsa calls some Chinese friends to meet her. As Michael and Elsa wait and pretend to watch the show, Michael discovers that she had killed Grisby. Elsa's Chinese friends arrive and take Michael, unconscious, to an abandoned Fun House. When he wakes, he realizes that Grisby and Elsa had been planning to murder Bannister and frame him for the crime, but that Broome's involvement ruined the scheme and obliged Elsa to kill Grisby for her own protection.
The film features a surreal climactic shootout in a hall of mirrors, the Magic Mirror Maze, in which Elsa is mortally wounded and Bannister is killed. Heartbroken, Michael leaves presuming that events which have unfolded since the trial will clear him of any crimes.
In the summer of 1946, Welles was directing a musical stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days, with a comedic and ironic rewriting of the Jules Verne novel by Welles, incidental music and songs by Cole Porter, and production by Mike Todd, who would later produce the successful film version with David Niven.
When Todd pulled out from the lavish and expensive production, Welles financed it. When he ran out of money and urgently needed $55,000 to release costumes which were being held, he convinced Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn to send him the money to continue the show and in exchange Welles promised to write, produce, direct and star in a film for Cohn for no further fee. As Welles tells it, on the spur of the moment, he suggested the film be based on the book a girl in the theatre box office happened to be reading at the time he was calling Cohn, which Welles had never read.[1] However, according to the daughter of William Castle, it was her father who had purchased the film adaptation rights for the novel and who then asked Welles to pitch it to Cohn, with Castle hoping to receive the directoral assignment himself. She described her father as greatly respecting Welles' talents, but feeling nonetheless disappointed at being relegated to serve merely as Welles' assistant director on the film.[2]
The Lady from Shanghai was filmed in late 1946, finished in early 1947 and released in the U.S. on June 9, 1948. Release was delayed due to heavy editing by Cohn's assistants at Columbia, who insisted on cutting about an hour from Welles's final cut. Welles was particularly aggrieved by the cuts to the funhouse sequence at the end of the film. Intended as a climactic tour-de-force of editing and production design, the scene was cut to fewer than three minutes out of an intended running time of twenty. As with many of Welles' films over which he did not have final cut, the missing footage has not been found and is presumed to have been destroyed. Surviving production stills show elaborate and expensive sets built for the sequence which were entirely cut from the film.
Welles cast his wife Rita Hayworth as Elsa and caused controversy when he made her cut her famous long red hair and bleach it blonde for the role.
In addition to the Columbia Pictures studios, the film was partly shot on location in San Francisco. It features the Sausalito waterfront and Sally Stanford's Valhalla waterfront bar and cafe,[3] the front, interior, and a courtroom scene of the old Kearny Street Hall of Justice, and shots of Welles running across Portsmouth Square, escaping to a long scene in a theater in Chinatown, then the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, and Whitney's Playland amusement park at the beach for the famous hall of mirrors scene (shot on a soundstage).
Other scenes were filmed in Acapulco. The yacht Zaca, where many scenes take place, was owned by actor Errol Flynn, who skippered the yacht in between takes, and can also be seen in the background in one scene at a cantina in Acapulco.[4]
When he saw the rushes, Cohn detested the picture; he couldn't figure out what it was about and offered $1000 to anyone who could explain it to him. Even Welles could not explain the plot to him.
Reviews of the film were mixed. Variety magazine found the script wordy and noted that the "rambling style used by Orson Welles has occasional flashes of imagination, particularly in the tricky backgrounds he uses to unfold the yarn, but effects, while good on their own, are distracting to the murder plot."[5]
A more recent Time Out Film Guide review states that Welles simply didn't care enough to make the narrative seamless: "the principal pleasure of The Lady from Shanghai is its tongue-in-cheek approach to story-telling."[6] One recent book on Film Noir praises the film for its pervasive atmosphere of malaise and its impressive, extraordinary technical mastery.[7]