The Lady from Shanghai

Rating:
Summary: A quintessentially noir opus that is Welles done.
Review: Orson is the master. The Acapulco beach scene alone is worth the price of admission. Factor in the House of Mirrors denoueument, superb cinematography and Rita Hayworth and you've got one of the quirkiest, most engrossing films of the last fifty years.

Rating:
Summary: Orson goes Irish
Review: Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in a weird film noir. Welles plays Mike O'Hara, a/k/a "Black Irish", who falls in love with Hayworth, the trophy wife of a wealthy trial lawyer. The story has a few too many twists to be plausible but the style has the stark urgency that made Welles famous.

Rating:
Summary: A Ridiculous Fascination
Review: Orson Welles is in the peculiar position of having gained a reputation as one of America's greatest filmmakers by adapting some of the trashiest and most nonsensical plots in film history. Which can only be evidence of the vision and talent he possessed.

Yes, sadly, several minutes were edited from Welles' "director's cut" of "The Lady From Shanghai". But it's hard to imagine those scenes making a terrific difference in this ridiculous plot. I don't recall who said that appreciating art requires a suspension of disbelief, but the line certainly comes to mind in watching this film. The characters are generically evil, there are staggering contradictions in character motivations, and Welles' overblown Irish accent uttering cliche after cliche lends his character the air of an embittered leprechaun.

All that said, however, it can be added that Welles always valued plot and characterization less than style and depth, and the latter (once you've gotten past the embarrassing opening half hour) are in abundance here. Welles' dark philosophy of human nature comes through in spite of its dramatization by cardboard characters, and at any rate, the uniquely Wellesian use of background and brilliant camerawork emphasize his ideas much better than the characters can.

In short, this film has a visual fascination that's hard to look away from, fine performances doing what they can with a poor script, and the definite traces of brilliance here and there that demonstrate Welles' presence. "The Lady From Shanghai" is a must-see for anyone interested in classic Hollywood, or in a director making movies in the face of great obstacles. Just prepare to suspend disbelief--a lot.

Rating:
Summary: EVEN BUTCHERED, WELLE'S GENIUS SHINES THROUGH!
Review: Orson Welles was a man ahead of his time. Today he may very well have been placed on the pedestal reserved for the likes of David Lynch or David Cronenberg. Unfortunately, during his tenure, Welles generally ticked off the ruling class and as a result, all of his masterpieces suffered at the hands of lesser men, determined to ruin Welle's screen legacies by chopping them up. Such is the case with "The Lady from Shanghai", a convoluted thriller about a guy who meets a woman who may want to have her husband killed or may not and sets up another guy to frame Welles for....oh, hell! Trust me, it's a real mind twister and just like "The Big Sleep" the ending makes no sense. Columbia executives took Welles' masterpiece apart after he had already departed for greener pastures and what remains is a 98 min. movie that really makes no sense. Having said that, the film left a lasting impression on me and a favorable one.
Welles genius lays in his camera work, his ability to create mood and an unsettling atmosphere that can rival any film noir of his day or the present. Rita Hayworth, who by this time was ending her marriage to Welles, is the lady in question, her hair cut short and dyed blonde - both of which infuriated Columbia studio boss, Harry Cohen who put Hayworth on suspension shortly thereafter.
Columbia Home Video has done a remarkably fine job on the transfer of this movie. Contrast level is superb. Clarity is remarkable, even to the most minute detail in costume and set design. The moody film noir atmosphere is well represented. The audio, though mono, is also exceptionally well represented. No extras, save a brief little featurette and some stills. This is not a jam packed DVD but one that will definitely impress nevertheless. BOTTOM LINE: As vintage "Welles" its a classic bar none (except for Citizen Kane)!

Rating:
Summary: One of the best noir films!
Review: Orson Welles' "The Lady from Shanghai" to me, starts out a bit slow, but once it gets started there's nothing else like it. Welles stars as Michael O'Hara, a man that has fallen for another man's wife. But when that woman is Rita Hayworth, can you blame him? Welles based his screenplay on the novel "If I Die Before I Wake Up" by Sherwood King, I have never read this book (I usually read French and Russian literature) but Welles gives this movie a creepy, dark, mysterious mood, that makes great noir films what they are. Arthur Bannister played by Everett Sloane is one of the most famous lawyers around, mostly because he's a crook. And his wife Elsa (Hayworth) wants her husband to try and influence Michael to come along with them. You see the day before Michael saved Elsa's life while she was being attack in a park. For his reward he gets to work on their boat. After some debate Michael agrees. But is that a mistake? Soon Michael is accused of a murder he never commited. And wants to leave with Elsa. While Arthur tries to defend him as his lawyer. Right when everything seems as if Michael will go down, a small glimmer a hope arises.
"The Lady from Shanghai" proves Welles was a great director, and that "Citizen Kane" was not a fluke. There is good timing between Welles and Hayworth, I believe they were married when this was made. And the ending is a classic, in the fun house. Who can forget those two famous lines: "I'm pointing at you, lover!" & "Killing you is killing myself,but,you know,I'm pretty tired of both of us." "Shanghai" will prove to be a treat for those who love noir films. It ranks among the best!

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant.
Review: Rita Hayworth is ravishingly beautiful, and Orson Welles is looking nice as well. Other people complain about the story being convoluted, and how they didn't really 'get it'. This is because they, or perhaps you, are extremely stupid. Any fan of Orson Welles needs this, it's his most underrated film. Just listen to Grisby talk about armageddon, it's effing insane.

Rating:
Summary: Gut-wrenching Masterpiece
Review: Saying a Welles film is a masterpiece is pretty silly at this point. It is encouraging that people in the US are waking up to the fact that the dominant view of Welles (one hit wonder who then produced a string of forgettable garbage) is ABSURD!! I believe that this movie is more revolutionary than Kane. The emergence of artifice, combined with the dark comedic undertone is the beginning of a process that ultimately led to Godard, Pasolini, and Oshima (read: and everyone else of interest to lesser degrees).

Welles apparently read Brecht's article about Chinese theatre and the Alienation Effect right before filming this and the results are staggering. The whole concept of the drama is turned inside out: rather than submit the work to be considered by the audience, the film turns the viewer's attention instead to the concept of reality and reveals it to be a threadbare patchwork production put on by hucksters and charlatans who vie for the right to determine how events will be interpreted. The climactic scene in the court room brings it all to a head as Bannister cross examines himself and then Michael's fate (for murder) ends up hinging on a kiss (seduction=damnation). The story about Cohn offering to pay anyone who could explain the plot is perfect: the whole point of this movie is that the plot is a construct that was used to sucker the protagonist and he was so busy being seduced, he didn't notice that it was absurd. From here you can draw a direct line to 'Kiss Me Deadly', one of the last great statements in this genre (along w/'Touch of Evil').

Welles was not only one of the great artists of the century, his works contain limitless philosophical depth.

Rating:
Summary: Orson Welles' Tale Withstands the Test of Time...
Review: Several films in the history of cinema either become timeless or fade away in time. Lady from Shanghai is one of these timeless contributions to film history, but it is not ageless due to its story. The true ambitiousness of the film is the cinematography and the mise-en-scene, which reaches its pinnacle at the end of the film in the fun house where Orson Welles uses his magical touch in order to elevate the story into timelessness. Welles' artistry in cinema has later been studied and used repeatedly in order to enhance the cinematic experience of a mass of films. This is what makes Lady of Shanghai a masterpiece, as it can withstand the test of time.

The film opens with a narration by Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles), a seaman with something of a dubious past, where he introduces how he got into the mess that he is about to enter. One night in a park O'Hara is taking a night stroll as he encounters a beautiful woman, Rosalie (Rita Hayworth), that is riding in a coach. Infatuated O'Hara approaches her and offers her a cigarette, which she accepts even though she does not smoke. Shortly after Rosalie has left, three strangers attack her. Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, O'Hara discovers Rosalie's situation and comes to her rescue. This is the foundation for a treacherous tale of murder, deceit, and greed.

The Lady from Shanghai has several elements that make it a good film. The cinematography, mise-en-scene, and the script offer moments of Welles' brilliance. The first two have already been mentioned, but the script has portions of delicate planning as well as creative metaphors. One of the metaphors used is another reason why the film is considered a masterpiece. O'Hara gives Rosalie, her husband Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), and George Grisby (Glenn Anders) descriptive analogies to their behavior in regards to a shark he once caught on a hook while fishing where the shark is attacked by other sharks around that began to eat each other in a frenzy.

Orson Welles, who then was married to Rita Heyworth, the films female protagonist, brings real emotional tension between them. This could probably be true tension, as the two got divorced the following year. Nonetheless, Welles and Heyworth offer the audience great performances as the independent O'Hara and the stunning Mrs. Bannister.

Lady of Shanghai does not measure up with Welles' previous masterpieces Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) as these two stories offer deeper and more developed insights into humanity. The film studio might be to blame for why Lady of Shanghai did not reach the same level as his two earlier films, as they cut down Welles' original 155-minute version to 86 minutes. Nonetheless, Welles got out some of his socioeconomic messages in the film, but they might feel somewhat interrupted as his full vision never was released. The climatic ending in the fun house was also severely truncated by the studio where Welles displays a marvelous way of depicting the true nature of each character through the use of mirrors. Ultimately, Lady from Shanghai offers a good cinematic experience; however, having the knowledge of the massacre on the artistry in the film brings to light the film's possibilities.

Rating:
Summary: Horrible!
Review: So you think you've discovered a lost Orson Welles gem.
Think again! This is the most horrible, nonsensical piece of... ever committed to celluloid. For the first half-hour almost nothing happens. It's like Proust without the poetic quality. It just sits there and sits there. You just won't believe it. None of the characters makes sense, their motivations are virtually nonexistent, the plot is so forced it makes you laugh. How could Welles have made this? In one scene, Welles grabs for a man's medication because the jury's about to come in in a murder case (Welles is the defendant) and Welles wants to take an overdose and die. The only problem is that that doesn't square with his personality, NOT TO MENTION the fact that he just said he thinks the jury will find him innocent. In another, equally bizarre scene, Welles beats a guy to a pulp on the street, then immediately runs into a nearby empty building and begins to dance with his girlfriend (of course there's no music). Umm...don't you think you should get the hell out of there, Orson? This isn't the time to dance. It's just ludicrous, like a Saturday Night Live skit. A remake should star Chevy Chase.

Sometimes the camera work is also utterly confused. A man, standing on a cliff, says, "I want to pay you to kill me," then we see the man from above, just above his head, as he turns his face to the sky and laughs, and vanishes off camera.

Well, we all thought he'd jumped off the cliff, but he hadn't. He had just walked away, abruptly, that's all. Very odd and confusing.

If you must see every Orson Welles film, then fine. But if you haven't, see everything else he made first, because this is not only the worst Welles film, but one of the worst films by anyone.

Rating:
Summary: "Innocent is a big word--Stupid is more like it"
Review: Stupidity--not innocence, not heroism, not any virtue at all--is the major theme of *The Lady from Shanghai*. Therefore, to some viewers this film will appear to be a stupid movie. That's unfortunate, but that's Orson Welles.

Everybody--EVERYBODY--is stupid in *Lady*! The Welles character, Michael O'Hara, admits he is stupid right off the bat. Elsa, played by Rita Hayworth, seems to be the cleverest of them all until the end...when she and her husband Arthur Bannister die together in the Crazy House, her husband gasping at her, "For a clever girl you make a lot of mistakes." Arthur, "the world's greatest lawyer", obviously has brains and knows what's going on through the whole story, but he's so grotesque (practically crawling through his scenes like a daddy longlegs spider) that his intellect is self-defeating: he's just one of the sharks that Welles describes in the beach scene, ravenously devouring himself. And the Grisby character...take one look at this guy and it's hard to believe *Lady* was made in 1946. Grisby's right out of David Lynch, or more like it, David Cronenberg! The judge, the folks in the courtroom...all STUPID and distorted, just like the images in the funhouse mirrors!

Portraying American people in that unflattering light was just not "on" in the early postwar period. No wonder Orson Welles was being watched by the FBI during those years. Even today, many filmgoers expect movies to give them at least one or two heroic characters that they can identify with. Sorry, friends, *Lady* jumps right into your face and right into your space (like the scene with O'Hara and Grisby overlooking the ocean) and blurts drunkenly, "Yer STOO-pid too, FELLAH!"

But why on earth is Orson Welles telling us we're all stupid? That's made very clear. We are blissfully living out our grubby little lives on the brink of self-destruction. "Do you believe the world is gonna end?" asks Grisby of O'Hara in that ocean overlook scene. That's the question Welles tells us we should be asking ourselves. But just as O'Hara was too stupid to ask himself a few simple questions, like "how can Grisby collect the insurance money if he's declared legally dead?", we don't ask ourselves the important questions that overshadow our silly little existences.

A lot of people won't like it. They sure didn't when *Lady* was released in '48.

But I love it! *Lady* was "postmodern" before postmodern was cool (before anybody knew what postmodern was)! It is deliciously self-referential: the scene in the Shanghai Low Chinese theater, with the strange Oriental play being performed onstage, instantly reminds one of all the strange characters and goings-on in the "real" story, the movie itself. But the movie itself is not real either, of course--it too is a play that reflects the bizarre world of human events, OUR world, the world of the moviegoer who seeks meaning in film and theater. House of mirrors! Movies of the '40's were just NOT self-referential, they really tried to create an alternative world that the audience could escape from its troubles into. Almost all movies then, and still most today, do not hold up a mirror to the audience. But *Lady* does. And still today many people aren't going to like what they see. "It's a bright guilty world," sayeth Welles/O'Hara.

The close-ups of Rita Hayworth singing "Please Don't Kiss Me" establish her as THE most beautiful woman to have ever graced the silver screen. Sorry Marilyn, Lana, Bette, and you too Nicole. "Rita Hayworth gave good face" indeed. I'd have paid the price of the whole DVD just to have those few seconds of film. But there's so much more in *Lady* that's worth watching than the lady.

Peter Bogdanovich's interview and commentary is pretty good, though as a Welles/Hayworth fan there was a good deal of stuff I already knew. But some stuff I didn't know, so I appreciated Peter's contribution.

*The Lady From Shanghai* and *Gilda*...movies just don't get any better!