| The Lady from Shanghai | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Orson Welles |
| Screenplay by | Orson Welles Uncredited: William Castle Charles Lederer Fletcher Markle |
| Based on | If I Die Before I Wake 1938 novel by Raymond Sherwood King |
| Produced by | Orson Welles |
| Starring |
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| Cinematography |
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| Edited by | Viola Lawrence |
| Music by | Heinz Roemheld |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
Release dates |
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Running time | 88 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | 1,564,609 admissions (France)[1] |
The Lady from Shanghai is a 1947 Americanfilm noir produced and directed byOrson Welles and starringRita Hayworth, Welles,Everett Sloane, and Glenn Anders.[2] Welles's screenplay is based on the novelIf I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King.[3]
Although theColumbia Pictures film initially received mixed reviews, it has grown in stature over the years. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registry by theLibrary of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[4][5]
Irish sailor Michael O'Hara meets a woman named Elsa as she rides ahorse-drawn coach inCentral Park. When three hooligans waylay the coach, Michael rescues Elsa and escorts her to her car. Michael reveals he is a seaman and learns Elsa and her husband, disabled criminal defense attorney Arthur Bannister, are newly arrived in New York City from Shanghai. They are on their way to San Francisco via thePanama Canal. Michael, attracted to Elsa despite misgivings, agrees to sign on as anable seaman aboard Bannister's yacht.
They are joined on the boat by Bannister's partner, George Grisby, who proposes that Michael "murder" him in a plot to fake his own death. He promises Michael $5,000 and explains that since he would not be actually dead and since there would be no corpse, Michaelcould not be convicted of murder (reflectingcorpus delicti laws at the time). Michael agrees, intending to use the money to run away with Elsa. Grisby has Michael sign a confession.
On the night 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 to murder Bannister, frame Michael, and escape 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 ground to draw attention to himself. Meanwhile, Broome, mortally wounded but still alive, asks Elsa for help. He warns her that Grisby intends to kill her husband.
Michael makes a phone call to Elsa, but finds Broome on the other end of the line. Broome warns 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 find evidence implicating Michael, including his confession, and take him away.
At trial, Bannister acts as Michael's attorney. He feels he can win the case if Michael pleadsjustifiable homicide. During the trial, the incompetent judge quickly loses control of the proceedings. Bannister learns of his wife's relationship with Michael. He ultimately takes pleasure in his suspicion that they will lose the case. Bannister also indicates that he knows the real killer's identity. Before the verdict, Michael escapes by feigning a suicide attempt (swallowing pain relief pills Bannister takes for his disability), causing a commotion in which he slips out of the building with the jury for another case. Elsa follows and she and Michael hide in aChinatown theater. Elsa calls some Chinese friends to meet her. As Michael and Elsa wait and pretend to watch the show, Michael realizes that she killed Grisby. Michael passes out from the pills he took just as Elsa's Chinese friends arrive; they carry the unconscious Michael to an emptyfunhouse.
When Michael wakes, he realizes that Grisby and Elsa had been planning to murder Bannister, and for Grisby to appear to be the only culprit, who would then disappear using the un-provable murder ploy, but that Broome's involvement ruined the scheme and that Elsa had to kill Grisby for her own protection. This had ruined Elsa's plan, that with her husband and Grisby out of the way, and Michael cleared of murder, they could be happy together.
During a shootout in ahall of mirrors ("the Magic Mirror Maze"), Elsa is mortally wounded and Bannister is killed. Heartbroken, and apparently ignoring Elsa's pleas to save her life, Michael leaves fearing that Elsa will die before he can get medical help to her, but pleased to have been told by Bannister in the hall of mirrors that Bannister had left a letter that clears him of any crimes. He contemplates, "Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her. Maybe I'll die trying."
In the summer of 1946, Welles was directingAround the World, a musical stage adaptation of theJules Verne novelAround the World in Eighty Days, with a comedic and ironic book by Welles, incidental music and songs byCole Porter, and production byMike Todd, who would later produce the successfulfilm version withDavid 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 that were being held, he convincedColumbia Pictures presidentHarry Cohn to send him the money to continue the show and in exchange Welles promised to write, produce, and direct a film for Cohn for no further fee.
As Welles told it, on the spur of the moment, he suggested the film be based on a book that he happened to see in front of him during his call with Cohn, one a girl in the theatre box office was reading at the time. Welles had never read it.[6] However, according to the daughter ofWilliam 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's talents, but feeling nonetheless disappointed at being relegated to serve merely as Welles's assistant director on the film.[7]
The Lady from Shanghai began filming on 2 October 1946, and originally finished filming on 27 February 1947, with studio-ordered retakes continuing through March 1947—but it was not released in the U.S. until 9 June 1948. Cohn strongly disliked Welles's rough cut, particularly what he considered to be a confusing plot and lack of close-ups (Welles had deliberately avoided these, as a stylistic device), and was not in sympathy with Welles'sBrechtian use of irony and black comedy, especially in a farcical courtroom scene. He also objected to the appearance of the film. Welles had aimed for documentary-style authenticity by shooting the film almost entirely on location (making it one of the first majorHollywood pictures to be shot in this way) inAcapulco,Pie de la Cuesta,Sausalito, andSan Francisco), and by using primarily long takes, while Cohn preferred the more tightly controlled look of footage lit and shot in a studio. The release of the film was delayed due to Cohn's order for extensive editing and reshoots. Whereas Welles had delivered his cut of the film on time and under budget, the reshoots Welles was ordered to do meant that the film ended up over budget by a third, contributing to the director's reputation for going over budget. Once the reshoots were over, the heavy editing ordered by Cohn took over a year to complete; editorViola Lawrence cut about an hour from Welles's rough cut.[8][9]
Welles was appalled at the musical score, and he was particularly aggrieved by the cuts in the climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse at the end of the film. Intended as a climactic tour-de-force of editing and production design, the scene was cut to less than three minutes out of an intended running time of twenty minutes. As with many of the films over which Welles did not have control over the final cut, the missing footage has not been found and is presumed to have been destroyed. Surviving production stills show elaborate and expensive sets that were built for the sequence and which were entirely cut from the film.[10]
Welles cast his wifeRita Hayworth as Elsa and caused a good deal of controversy when he instructed her to cut her long red hair and bleach it blonde for the role. "Orson was trying something new with me, but Harry Cohn wanted The Image—The Image he was gonna make me 'til I was 90," Rita Hayworth recalled. "The Lady from Shanghai was a very good picture. So what does Harry Cohn say when he sees it? 'He'sruined you—he cut your hair off!'"[11]
In addition to theColumbia Pictures studios, the film was partly shot on location in San Francisco. It features theSausalito waterfront and Lee Kahn's Valhalla waterfront bar and cafe,[12] the front, interior, and a courtroom scene of the old Kearny StreetHall of Justice, and shots of Welles running acrossPortsmouth Square, escaping to a long scene in a theater inChinatown, then theSteinhart Aquarium inGolden Gate Park, and Whitney'sPlayland-at-the-Beach amusement park atOcean Beach for the hall of mirrors scene, for which interiors were shot on a soundstage.
Other scenes were filmed inAcapulco. The yachtZaca, on which many scenes take place, was owned by actorErrol Flynn, who skippered the yacht in between takes and can also be seen in the background in one scene at a cantina in Acapulco.[13]
The film was considered a disaster in the U.S. at the time of its release, although the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors has since become one of the touchstones of film noir. Not long after the film's release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce.
William Brogdon ofVariety found the script to be "wordy and full of holes" while also noting 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."[14]Bosley Crowther ofThe New York Times similarly found the murder plot to be a "thoroughly confused and baffling thing. Tension is recklessly permitted to drain off in a sieve of tangled plot and in a lengthy court-room argument which has little save a few visual stunts. As producer of the picture, Mr. Welles might better have fired himself—as author, that is—and hired somebody to give Mr. Welles, director, a better script."[15] Alternatively,Time wrote that the "big trick in this picture was to divert a head-on collision of at least six plots, and make of it a smooth-flowing, six-lane whodunit. Orson brings the trick off."[16]Harrison's Reports felt "the action, at times, is confusing, but it seems as if the confusion was purposeful. Some of the photographic effects with their lights and shadows are highly ingenious; they enhance the effect of the action, whether dramatic or melodramatic."[17]
Among retrospective reviews,Time Out Film Guide states that Welles simply didn't care enough to make the narrative seamless: "the principal pleasure ofThe Lady from Shanghai is its tongue-in-cheek approach to story-telling."[18] One recent book on film noir praises the film for its pervasive atmosphere of malaise and its impressive, extraordinary technical mastery.[19]David Kehr has subsequently declared the film as a masterpiece, with him calling it "the weirdest great movie ever made."[20]
In theBritish Film Institute's 2012Sight & Sound poll, six critics each ranked it one of the 10 greatest films of all time.[21] Review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes reports the film has an 85% approval rating based on 52 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Energetic and inventive,The Lady from Shanghai overcomes its script deficiencies with some of Orson Welles's brilliantly conceived set pieces."[22]
The Lady from Shanghai was preserved by theAcademy Film Archive, in conjunction withSony Pictures, in 2000.[23]
A remake of the film came close to production at the turn of the century from a screenplay written byJeff Vintar, based both on Welles's script and the original pulp novel, produced byJohn Woo andTerence Chang, and starringBrendan Fraser, who wantedMichael Douglas andCatherine Zeta-Jones to co-star. Although the screenplay was considered highly successful, and Fraser was coming off the highly praisedGods and Monsters, the project was abandoned when the head ofSony Pictures,Amy Pascal, decided to concentrate on teen films.[citation needed]
The climactic hall of mirrors sequence has entered the narrative of cinema as atrope, replicated often in both film and television.[25] Examples include:
