Shanghaied - Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth And The Other Lady In Their Lives
The out-there thriller, the husband-and-wife who made it, and the producer who used the feature's failure to curtail his director's career in the US.
The Lady From Shanghai was made in 1946 and released in American in 1948. It was written, produced and directed by Orson Welles for Columbia pictures.
Until relatively recently, the film was among the least popular of Welles’ better-known productions. Even stalwart supporters of Welles found it hard to say too many positive things about the picture. Indeed, one of the its harshest critics is Barbara Leaming, Orson’s approved biographer.
In spite of this widespread criticism, The Lady From Shanghai remains very much in the public eye. This is in part due to the film’s breathtaking shoot-out ending. Interest in the film might also be attributable to the fact that The Lady From Shanghai helped cement Orson Welles’ reputation as an extravagant filmmaker.
Ever since Citizen Kane had gone $120,000 over budget, Hollywood had come to associate the Orson Welles’ name with recklessness and profligacy. Welles didn’t really deserve such a reputation. In fact, by deciding to start filming Kane 10 days before shooting was scheduled to begin, he actually saved RKO a significant sum of money. One might also like to consider John Huston’s claim that, “Orson is among the most economical filmmakers I have seen.”
Unfair as the allegations might be, Welles became anxious to dismiss the reputation he’d acquired, even making the low-budget, low-key thriller The Stranger (1946) to prove that he could “say ‘action!’ and ‘cut!’ as well as the next guy.” Alas, his efforts to promote himself as a reliable, work-a-day director were destroyed at a stroke by The Lady From Shanghai.
A film equal parts magnificent, appalling and weird, the best things about The Lady From Shanghai are the aforementioned finale and a few of the performances. Rita Hayworth - separated from Welles at the time of shooting but still on relatively good terms with her husband - is particularly good as the mysterious Elsa Banister. Glenn Anders is likewise excellent as the grasping Grisby. A stage actor by profession, Anders was apparently terrified at the thought of appearing opposite Hayworth and Welles. As his amazing, ‘to-the-edge’ performance proves, he had no need to worry.
Orson Welles, on the other hand, is less significantly impressive, his ‘Oirish’ sailor Michael O’Hara being but one element of the picture that doesn’t work. Other troublesome aspects include a string of absurd plot twists, and a visual style located somewhere between travelogue and film noir.
There are scenes in The Lady From Shanghai that are as extreme as any in off-the-wall noirs like Joseph H Lewis’ The Big Combo or Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly. The climactic shootout is a case in point - it’s a wonderfully cinematic creation that’s both breathtaking and baffling.
Upon seeing The Lady From Shanghai for the first time, Columbia boss Harry Cohn offered $1,000 to anyone who could understand it. When nobody stepped forward to collect the reward, Welles’ reputation for recklessness was set firm.
Although Touch Of Evil (1958) was his last ‘official’ American film, Orson Welles’ career as a Hollywood director effectively ended the day he finished shooing The Lady From Shanghai. BBC documentary filmmaker Leslie Megahey observed that the film so cemented Welles’ image “as a rebel, an uncontrollable sort of anarchist who didn’t fit within the system… it looked as if no one would ever touch another Welles project.”
With all of this being the case, it’s strange it took people so long to figure out what went wrong with The Lady From Shanghai. Although the film’s been dismissed as
“an ill-timed, ill-conceived attempt to transfer Brecht onto the big screen” (John Russell Taylor), it was a while before the cause of the problem - Welles’ mistreatment at the hands of major studios - fully eclipsed the symptoms.