Steve D
Not my taste but well done in every respect.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/20/24
Full Review
Alec B
Yeah, the studio interfered but it feels like a decent portion of Welles' vision mostly remains intact. If you can get past his awful Irish accent the movie is filled with some delightfully weird stuff.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/08/24
Full Review
Matthew B
The average Orson Welles movie often feels to me like it is a love affair with himself. Many of his famous film involve a flawed but great man (played by Welles of course) whose behaviour is so transcendent of the other characters that the movie almost justifies his worst actions.
The Lady from Shanghai is refreshing in that it reads more like a love affair with Rita Hayworth, who at the time was married to Welles, but not for much longer. The camera lovingly dwells on her face and body. The movie's hero (Welles) is fascinated by her, and her allure draws him into questionable deeds as he tries to win her favour.
This time the woman has the personality of the male Welles hero – a figure who is dangerous and morally compromised, but irresistible. And who better to play the role than Rita Hayworth, an actress of great charisma and beauty.
Yet Welles changed Hayworth's appearance for the role in a manner that shocked many at the time. Gone was the long red hair, the actress's most distinctive feature, and in its place was a shorter blonde hairdo instead. What was Welles doing? Was he trying to sabotage the success of his wife at a time when their marriage was breaking apart?
A more likely explanation is that Welles was conforming (for once) to a traditional film noir archetype – the femme fatale with the cheap and artificial blonde hair colour. Billy Wilder applied the same treatment to Barbara Stanwyck when he cast her in Double Indemnity. Stanwyck wore a blonde wig that was intended to make her seem trashy, and I think Welles was doing the same with Hayworth. In any case, we could not see Hayworth's red hair in a black-and-white feature.
As for Welles, he plays a character very different from the one he plays in his most familiar roles. Michael O'Hara is not a great man. He is a sap, and he knows he is a sap. Like the protagonist of another film noir, Out of the Past, O'Hara constantly berates his own idiocy, but not to the point of changing his actions for the better.
The Lady from Shanghai had a curious inception. Welles made the film on the spur of the moment in order to raise money to pay for a stage production that he was working on. However he was unable to help giving in to his usual excesses, and filming more material than was usable. The studio was left with two-and-a-half hours of footage. The final hall of mirrors scene lasted for twenty minutes.
As a result, the studio was left with the task of editing the movie to a more acceptable length. Welles was asked to re-shoot many scenes. An hour of footage was removed, and the hall of mirrors scene was reduced to just three minutes. Welles also disliked the music score that the studio insisted on adding.
This is the kind of story that Welles enthusiasts will indignantly tell as another example of how the mainstream film industry butchered his films. However does anyone really believe that a 150-minute Lady from Shanghai would have been an improvement, or that the climactic scene of the movie should have occupied a full twenty minutes of screen-time?
It is easy to complain about these excesses in Welles, but let us not be too ungrateful. There are many impressive film noirs, but there are also plenty that were shot cheaply and with little imagination or flair. Here is Welles making a throwaway movie to raise money for another project, and yet The Lady from Shanghai is chock full of brilliant cinematic touches.
The sum total may add up to a sometimes confusing and muddled film, but the individual components are breathtaking. Let us have a look at a few. First a few general comments on the style of the movie. Unusually for film noirs of the time, Welles is expansive and open in his visuals. Rather than the boxed-in effect of many film noirs, Welles filmed most of The Lady from Shanghai outdoors and on location.
The director uses long takes and long shots where possible. When Welles does use close-ups, he uses wide-angle lens to make the faces seem distorted. What is more, the close-ups are too close, giving a disconcerting and uncomfortable feel to the images. It is as if the ugly characters are standing too close to our faces while they talk to us.
Other scenes reinforce the distorted and disoriented world of the characters. At one point, O'Hara and Elsa secretly meet in an aquarium. The clandestine nature of their extra-marital affair is emphasised by the use of silhouette, and by the presence of a class of schoolchildren causing the lovers to break apart. Welles also uses trickery to make the sea creatures in the aquarium look larger and more monstrous, another example of animal imagery in the film.
However the most memorable scene is the final one in the Crazy House. O'Hara, Bannister and Elsa are caught in a world where everything is distorted and slanted like the sets in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. In the middle of this is a large slide that O'Hara tumbles down. The ground literally gives out under his feet, just as it has metaphorically done throughout.
Earlier we viewed the actors' faces slightly distorted by the camera. Now they are hideously contorted by the mirrors in the Crazy House. Welles used over a thousand mirrors in the scene. Reality breaks down, and amidst the dozens of reflections we no longer know who the real Elsa or Bannister is. Perhaps we never did.
I wrote a longer appreciation of The Lady from Shanghai on my blog page if you would like to read more: https://themoviescreenscene.wordpress.com/2020/06/22/the-lady-from-shanghai-1947/
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
08/28/23
Full Review
Stephen C
Orson Welles delivered a cracking film noir despite a wobbly Irish accent and studio interference.
The film stands on the wonderful hall of mirrors sequence and the fact the plot is more dense than the population of London
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
07/12/23
Full Review
CKB
Welles wrote/produced/directed this film for free (to get funding for another film he was working on), based on a book he had not read before agreeing to film it. He also stars in it, uncomfortably, with his estranged wife Rita Hayworth (they divorced soon afterwards). He convinced her to cut her trademark red-dyed hair short and change it to blonde for this role, in which she was profoundly miscast as an ultra-manipulative Claire Trevor-style bad girl -- she just didn't have the acting chops for such a part. Welles' character, an intellectual/brawling/world-weary sailor who really wants to be a novelist, seems absurd, and he speaks his lines with a ridiculously bad Irish accent. There is a silly courtroom scene, and a famous shootout scene in a hall of mirrors (symbolic!). Welles applies his usual dazzling visual style, which seems rather pointless here. The plot is just too convoluted/goofy and the characters too empty/unappealing/annoying for this film to be engaging. And, as usual, the studio seriously messed with the film after Welles completed it. The result is decidedly less than the sum of its mixed bag of parts.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
09/29/22
Full Review
red t
A Solid Noir Drama & A Welles Classic with Significant Flaws. To start with what is done right: The acting is solid overall but can be out of place sometime and the pacing overall is solid. The cinematography on a scene by scene level is very well done. Now comes the grey area features. The biggest problem with this movie is the Editing. The editing feels very uneven at times. The sound editing will change in quality, long takes all of a sudden go to up close quick edits that feel very out of place, and there are scenes that feel like information is missing that would make certain plots points seem less farfetched. The cinematography suffers because of how uneven the editing is at times. The plot is very very farfetched with a bizarre setup but is still entertaining despite some light plot holes and questionable motivations. This is a very original noir that has a lot of unique ideas and the ambition does shine through despite the editing, sound and plot problems. While not my favorite noir it still is a good one and worth watching if your a fan of the genre or Welles. I would say this is a Classic Welles Movie and a Flawed but Solid Noir Overall. If the editing was not a issue this would more than likely be a all time classic.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
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