While in his interviews Welles claimed that The Stranger made him want to leave studio film-making, he did it one last time with The Lady From Shanghai, famously made at Columbia under its notoriously difficult mogul Harry Cohn. Columbia put out a lot of great, truly dark noir at the time, and Lady From Shanghai is best seen as Welles doing his own treatment of that drama. I am a noir lover and watching this film again I realized what an excellent example it is of the genre. It makes me wish Welles has tried other genres, like making a Western or sci-fi film because he takes the genre conventions but gives them a real spark on uniqueness.
Like many noirs the plot is a maze, and maybe besides the point. If I can restate in generally, Welles plays an Irish sailor who gets tangled in a web of intrigue, adultery, and murder spun by a hotshot lawyer and his femme fatale wife, leading to dramatic deaths in the finale. Like the best noirs it deals with the cruelty of fate. The sailor gets drawn in by actually doing a good thing by rescuing the Rita Hayworth title character from an assault. After World War II, where some lived and some died and there did not seem to be any morality behind the hand of fate, narratives like this made a lot of sense. In our current moment, where the world also feels inexplicable, they resonate again.
Notably, Welles' marriage to Hayworth was falling apart at the time. For this film he had her sheer her long wavy red hair, and then dyed it blonde. This enraged Cohn, who knew it would drive audiences away (which it did.) Knowing their own relationship difficulties gives this an extra edge, as does the unspoken pain that's always on the title character's face. She seems haunted and desperate and despite being a villain in the end, I never stopped sympathizing with her. Due to her stunning looks, it's easy to underrate Hayworth as an actor. This movie shows that she really had the chops, especially in tackling noir.
I was also struck by the performance of Everett Sloan as her husband. He played the ebullient Mr Bernstein in Kane, here as the lawyer he is a menacing viper who makes every scene that he is in. Through this character and his corrupt partner Welles also makes several digs at the legal system, which is shown to be a tool of the wealthy and connected. This is a truly down and dirty noir, with little sympathy to go around, since even the sailor seems to be lacking a moral center.
Of course, not all is well. As I mentioned, the plot is hard to follow even by the standards of the genre. The scenes in San Francisco's Chinatown are gorgeously shot, but also full of cheap Orientalism. Welles' character is Irish and despite his deep love for that country and the time he spent living there, Welles' brogue is notably deficient. The thing is, you forget that all at the end with the shootout scene in the funhouse, for my money the best cinematic montage in the entire noir genre. It's a moment when the sheer thrilling inventiveness of Kane is back and on full display. It's Welles last scene in a studio picture, and it's a helluva way to go out.
According to Welles' story, he did this movie to quickly get money to pay off debts so his stage production of Around the World in 80 Days could proceed, and the source material was a random novel he saw while he was literally on the phone with Cohn to get financing. Had he had more time and better source material Welles may have filmed an even better noir, but I'll take this one.
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