The post-mortem re-evaluation of Orson Welles' filmography has taken us down many a tenebrous corridor (Mr. Arkadin, The Trial), but the latest work from the great to find embrace in the arms of his enthusiasts was a big studio thing made in good commercial faith. As Peter Bogdanovich tells us--more than once--on the DVD release of 1948's The Lady From Shanghai, Welles promised a picture to Columbia head Harry Cohn in exchange for completion financing on a Broadway adaptation of "Around the World in 80 Days", and their deal effectively lifted the unspoken blacklist against the genius behind Citizen Kane: Charles Foster Kane was now a director for hire, ready to give mainstream piffle an edge.
Sometime after its production, Cohn said that The Lady From Shanghai marked the last instance he'd bankroll a project whose lead is also the co-writer, producer, and director--Cohn couldn't fire anybody that way. And Welles offered plenty of defense for Cohn's negativity; he didn't, after all, stop bombshell Rita Hayworth, star of the box office smash Gilda, from cutting her hair to bits and dying it Hitchcock platinum, rendering her virtually unrecognizable to fans. (Bogdanovich adds that nor was it Welles' suggestion to wreck her locks in the first place, but Hayworth's.) As well, The Lady From Shanghai initially clocked in at over two hours, a gratuitous length for a noir thriller, spoke the times. More scissors took care of that, which was nothing new for Welles. (Let's not even start hearts breaking again by recounting the Magnificent Ambersons debacle here.)
Fifty-two years after the fact, The Lady From Shanghai is receiving better notices than it did upon original release, where it failed to catch the public's imagination. But if we can remove those rose-tinted hindsight glasses for a moment, it must be writ that the film's editing scars have not entirely healed; the stylistic moxie Welles brings to the table ends up seeming compensatory, which was not the intention, for a thin screenplay, rather than another piece of the whole. Watching The Lady From Shanghai is tantamount to a pan-and-scan video presentation: we're often left contemplating what we just missed as opposed to what we just saw. To wit, no story flips from courtroom hysterics to funhouse hysterics on a dime by design.
Welles stars as Michael O'Hara, an Irish thug seaman who rescues Elsa Bannister (Welles' then-estranged wife Hayworth), an enigmatic blonde, from rapists and accepts a grateful invite to work on her crippled husband's yacht. Mr. Bannister (Everett Sloane) also ushers unstable law partner Grisby (a wily Glenn Anders) aboard, and in private, Grisby poses a $5000 offer that hard-luck (and in love, with the woman he saved) O'Hara be the scapegoat in Grisby's plan to fake his own death.
Thereafter, the plot thickens to a pea soup fog, and character motivation (beyond genre norms (Jealousy! Betrayal!)) become increasingly incomprehensible. Yet I can't deny the impact of the film's visuals, especially in its Hall of Mirrors climax, without which there would be no similar sequence in either Enter the Dragon or Woody Allen's underrated Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Welles is that rare breed of theatre vet who experiments in any medium, be it the movies or radio drama, instead of transposing stage techniques to the various forms. Hayworth, too, is a sight to behold in The Lady From Shanghai--she teems with subtextual melancholia, particularly in a lone song number called "Please Don't Kiss Me". (She performs it almost as a lullaby to herself.) Bogdanovich is right to worship Welles; it's too bad that Welles' lifelong artistic persecution has left us with only a partial portrait of a master's worth.
The Lady From Shanghai has been preserved on DVD unpolished. All kinds of print damage mars the black-and-white, full-frame image (its 1.37:1 composition hugging the sides of the frame during a bar scene in chapter four), and choppy splices abound. However, the contrast is rich, often brilliant, and an overall clarity excites our eyes. The 2.0 mono sound exhibits acceptable fidelity. (Note that a quick perusal of the closed captions revealed multiple drop-outs in the text on my preview copy.)
In addition to vintage advertising, trailers (for The Lady From Shanghai, A Man For All Seasons, The Last Hurrah and The Loves of Carmen), and Welles/Hayworth bios, the disc features a Laurent Bouzereau-produced, twenty-minute chat with Bogdanovich, who wrote the book on Welles (literally--This Is Orson Welles), and a commentary by same in which he reads from his tome. While Bogdanovich's lack of humility shines through (the first gossip he spills during the commentary is that a monograph he penned on Welles was hailed by Orson himself as "the truest words ever written about me in the English language"), the anecdotes and historical information he provides is frequently priceless. An engaging must-own in the end.
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