A Very Orson Welles Christmas: The Lady from Shanghai (Dir Orson Welles, 1h28m, 1947)

The Mercury Wonder Show is not where one would expect this review to start: a 1943 magic-and-variety show, directed, and compeered by Orson Welles, who dubbed himself, flatteringly, as "Orson the Magnificent", and largely for the morale of US troops about to head abroad, it would have remained a footnote of Welles' guilt in not being able to serve, a compulsion leading back to hounding on Citizen Kane's press tour, and his life-long fascination with magic, but for one reason. Welles' co-star, at least for the opening night, would be forces sweetheart, Rita Hayworth, though Welles had been writing her fan-mail for months, whilst working in Brazil. Welles would marry her barely a month into the show's run, the two polar opposites-the mercurial Welles, the bankable Hayworth craving stability after divorce from the domineering promoter, Edward C Judson,  drawing Welles and Hayworth together in a relationship the press would label "Beauty and the Brain". A single film would mark their time together as husband and wife, an adaption of the noir novel, If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King: The Lady from Shanghai.

Stranger still is how Welles ended up making the film in the first place: once again, we find Orson Welles in a tight spot; 1946, and Welles has ended up back on Broadway, writing the book for Around the World, a lavish musical adaption of the Jules Verne novel with music and lyrics by Cole Porter, still two years from his triumphant comeback with Kiss Me, Kate, lavish special effects, including FOUR mechanical elephants and George Méliès-inspired sets, and a cast of unknowns as Welles had run out of money for big-name actors. When a backer pulled out of the production, Welles would, not for the last time, agree to make a film for the financial support of Columbia president, Harry Cohn-Around the World would fold anyway, and Welles would consequently end by losing much of his savings from previous acting roles and directing jobs. Welles' own version of how If I Die Before I Wake was chosen is a typically Wellesian bit of storytelling, the book supposedly being read by a theatre ticket seller when Cohn made the original deal, somewhat more fanciful than Welles being approached by the book's rights holder to direct. Despite the film being made to order, Cohn allows Welles a degree of creative freedom, though he and Welles will end up disagreeing on the film’s editing and score.

The Lady from Shanghai is the first of a loose trio of noirs that we will cover over the remaining three weeks of this season: Welles, certainly, can be considered an American master of the genre, his love, and adoption of the stark lighting and heavy shadows of German expressionism, clear from Kane onwards, together with the narrative uncertainty and doomed protagonists of The Lady from Shanghai, The Stranger, and Touch of Evil. Welles begins The Lady from Shanghai in typical noirish fashion: he plays Irish sailor Michael O'Hara, soon to encounter Elsa (Hayworth), being beset by thugs. Hayworth has undergone a transformation which will make her the archetypal blonde femme fatale; her usually flowing red hair has been shorn short and dyed peroxide blonde, this drastic change of image in one of Hollywood's most famous stars unfairly given as the reason the film underperformed.

Here, another element that is typical for noir cinema enters; these are events recalled by O'Hara, his first lines, in Welles' admirable, if occasionally outright missing Irish brogue voice, placing us in a moment future to what we are seeing: "But once I'd seen her, once I'd seen her" he says, his doom in place from the film's opening shots, "I was not in my right mind for quite some time." Soon, indeed, O'Hara finds the pull of Elsa irresistible. There is just one snag: Elsa is already married to the disabled, and eccentric Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane, one of many Mercury Theatre on the Air cast members Welles would include in the film),a criminal barrister by profession. Agreeing to work on Bannister's yacht, as it sails down the coast from New York, via Panama, to San Francisco, so the next section of the film takes on the guise of a warped travelogue, with sequences on the water shot aboard Errol Flynn's yacht, piloted between takes by the actor, and in Acapulco, many sequences shot in the Mexican city granted stark, noirish shadows by the natural light.

It is here that the narrative does one thing, the film's visual language does another, and where in the words of Time Magazine, Welles has to "divert a head-on collision of at least six plots". First is the most pressing; O'Hara is tasked with the murder of Bannister's partner in the legal firm the duo run, Grisby (Glenn Anders, later to appear in Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of M). This, it quickly transpires, is a sham, as Grisby plans to fake his own death, but the duo have O'Hara sign a would-be confession, using a legal loophole; if Grisby's corpse is not found, then O'Hara will be acquitted, with O'Hara agreeing due to the $5,000 promised, the seaman intending to use the money to run away with Elsa. This is complicated by Bannister's own suspicions of his wife, with an unpleasant and chilling private investigator, Broome (Ted de Corsia, later to appear in The Naked City in 1948), becoming involved. This complication will have fatal results, and take the film from a mere noir to an outward explosion of plotlines, Welles juggling a murder-mystery, a court drama, and a noir among others as Grisby's faked death turns horrifyingly real.

As this web of plots spool outwards, so the visuals also become more complex; the cinematic language of the nascent noir fragments; when the film reaches San Francisco, O'Hara finds himself at the centre of a Kafkaesque legal case where mistaken identity and tangled webs of intrigue have ensnared him. The imagery, with cinematography once again by Charles Lawton Jr, becomes more surreal. Close-ups become tighter and tighter, the influence of French poetic realism also, quite literally, entering the frame, the characters surrounding the unfortunate able seaman becoming grotesques, the courtroom scenes, as the judge loses control of the room, becoming a confused mass of faces and actions from which O'Hara escapes, only to find Elsa's involvement in the affair is less than innocent. In dizzying moments, we move from chase to Chinese theatre to warped fun-house. Each are more alien, more visually distorted, more abstracted. The darkness of the theatre, the strangeness, to a 1940s audience, of this Othered space, gives way to the distortion of the self.

Here, once more, Welles' vision must contend with his old adversary. Much of the eight minute sweep of the sequence through the funfair, including artwork executed by Welles himself, is consigned to the cutting room floor. What remains is still striking, the Hall of Mirrors sequence imitated or homaged in everything from The Man With the Golden Gun to Enter the Dragon, and it remains perhaps one of the greatest sequences of Welles' career. It is the capstone of the film, a quintessentially noirish piece of cinema in which, much like The Big Sleep, released the year previously, sees our protagonist entrapped in an increasingly labyrinthine tale. Welles' quality is to match this narrative complexity with the visual, and create a noirish tangle from which his sailor hero must escape-or die.

Hayworth and Welle was very short. They would divorce in 1947, Hayworth citing Welles' workaholic habits as the reason for the breakdown of the marriage. Despite this, they would remain lifelong friends, Hayworth later telling Welles, according to her biographer Barbara Leaming that she had been happiest with Welles. The Lady from Shanghai remains one of Welles' most influential films, a quintessential piece of noir cinema in which Welles collaborates, for the only time, with one of the loves of his life, to construct a genre-bending piece of cinema.

Rating: Must See

The Lady from Shanghai is available via streaming on Apple TV, and on DVD and BluRay from Sony

Next week we arrive in Vienna as we consider Orson Welles as actor as Harry Lime steps from the shadows in The Third Man

Sources for this review include:

Celebrity break-up – why Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth split: https://www.aenigma-images.com/2018/01/orson-welles-and-rita-hayworth/

Cinema: The New Pictures, Jun. 7, 1948: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,854429-1,00.html

The Lady From Shanghai: Field Day for the Camera: https://theasc.com/articles/the-lady-from-shanghai-field-day-for-the-camera