The Lady From Shanghai (1947) Director: Orson Welles
“Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her. Maybe I’ll die trying.“
★★★★★
Based on a 1938 novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King, Orson Welles’s puzzling moody noir masterpiece The Lady From Shanghai for Columbia Pictures stars Welles alongside his soon to be ex-wife, Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles himself (controversially, Welles had Hayworth cut and dye her famous red hair. platinum blond for this film). Hayworth memorably plays a vicious menacing character, disguising herself as a lovely lady –a siren luring Welles’s character to his death. This dreamy, surrealist film takes us on a boat tour from New York to the West Indies and the coast of Mexico before finally landing in San Francisco. Shot almost entirely on location, The Lady From Shanghai reveals a gritty, dark, dangerous world with numerous close-ups of ghastly, untrustworthy characters (in other words, this is not the velvet beauty of Hitchcock’s San Francisco as shown in Vertigo). In much the same way the movie ends, The Lady From Shanghai is itself a kind of funhouse mirror –many of the character appear to be pathological liars, even the titular allusion to Shanghai plays almost no significance in the film.
In the film, Welles plays Michael O’Hara, an Irish sailor –the film’s questionably reliable narrator– who rescues a blonde woman one evening from assailants attacking her carriage in Central Park, NY. He playfully calls “Princess Rosalie” (Rita Hayworth) through he later learns her name is Elsa, and that she is married. She claims not to smoke, that her parents are White Russian, and that she was born in Zhifu on the coast of China (she used to work in ‘wicked cities’ like Macau and Shanghai). While Michael suspiciously tries to avoid the police –as a ruffian and “notorious waterfront agitator,” he has clearly faced trouble all over the world, including once serving jail-time for killing a man in Spain –a Franco spy in Murcia. Elsa and Michael then muse about jails in America. Michael is also privately writing a novel. He comments on a story he read about a man in “Frisco” who accidentally killed his wife mistaking her for a burglar. Was his name “Bainbridge” or something? Elsa corrects the record: the man was Arthur Bannister. Since Michael is a sailor, Elsa invites him to work on her yacht with her husband as they set sail for the West Coast in the morning. As they part ways and Elsa starts up her car, Michael hands her gun back to her –she nervously claims to have left it in her bag deliberately for Michael to find. As she drives away, a passerby comments on how he husband –Arthur Bannister– has sent a car all the way to New York just for her. Michael is disturbed to hear the name Arthur Bannister…
The next morning, a mysterious disabled man with crutches (Everett Sloane) wanders around the docks looking for Michael “Black Irish” O’Hara claiming to be Mr. Arthur Bannister (Michael earned the nickname “Black Irish” for what he did to those “finks back in ’39”). They share drinks together before returning a drunken Mr. Bannister to his yacht (he only ever calls his wife “lover”), and Elsa begs Michael to stay on the yacht as they sail to the West Indies. They are planning to sail down the Panama Canal and up to San Francisco, enjoying music, coastal towns, and the delights of the idle rich. Notably, the yacht “Zaca” (which was used in the film) was owned by actor Errol Flynn who can be glimpsed in the background during a scene filmed at a cantina in Acapulco. Reluctantly Michael agrees to join for the trip. Then, Mr. Bannister’s eccentric business partner George Brisby (Glenn Anders) mysteriously arrives and he persistently beckons Michael join in a dark plot –to stage a fake killing of himself (Brisby) in exchange for $5,000, which would allow he and Elsa –secret lovers– to run away together. But Michael remains skeptical, he wants to quit his job aboard the boat, even though there are others aboard the boat, like Bessie (Evelyn Ellis), who are willing to accept Mr. Bannister’s money for whatever he requests. Soon they arrive at last in San Francisco, parking the boat in Sausalito. By this point, Elsa is learning to become a smoker.
However, privately, Brisby actually intends to kill Mr. Bannister and then frame Michael as the murderer. A private investigator named Broome (Ted de Corsia) discovers the plot, but he is suddenly shot by Brisby –through the bullet wound does not kill him. He crawls his way to a nearby house and warns Elsa that Grisby is intending to frame Michael and claim an insurance fraud. As gunshots are heard and Michael goes running, Mr. Bannister suddenly appears, and it is Grisby who has been killed! Michael has apparently been doubly framed by this strange group. The case is brought to trial in a dramatic sequence, but Michael attempts to commit suicide using Mr. Bannister’s painkillers (something Elsa has considered many times), and in the ensuing commotion he manages to escape hiding among a different jury. Elsa manages to trace Michael to a performance in a Chinese theatre –a tense sequence wherein Michael reaches into Elsa’s purse to find a gun– he soon discovers that Elsa was the true killer of Brisby. Michael faints after consuming all the pills, and Elsa’s Chinese servant Li secretly stashes Michael in a nearby abandoned madhouse –a place filled with funhouse mirrors and rife with stylistic Expressionist cinematography. The movie concludes with a dramatic climactic and famous shootout in the shadowy boardwalk hall of mirrors, as Mr. Bannister suddenly arrives to confront his wife, and with confusion about where they stand in this disorienting madhouse, both spouses shoot each other as the mirrors begin to shatter in a hail of bullet fire. In the end, both spouses shoot each other –both Bannister and Elsa are mortally wounded– while Michael quietly leaves the scene with Elsa screaming in pain, fearful of dying. The film closes with his words: “
“Everybody is somebody’s fool. The only way to stay out of trouble is to grow old, so I guess I’ll concentrate on that. Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her. Maybe I’ll die trying.”
This was sadly the one Rita Hayworth film nobody went to see. The Lady From Shanghai was praised upon its release in Europe, but largely overlooked in the United States. Many never forgave Welles for chopping and coloring Rita Hayworth’s signature red hair –not least of which was bombastic president of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, who was infatuated with Hayworth (he apparently sexually harassed her for years)– but by now, Welles’s time in Hollywood was nearly at an end. Orson Welles’s thick Irish brogue (which occasionally comes and goes in the film) serves to highlight Michael’s working class demeanor in contrast to the upper-class frivolities of Arthur, Elsa, and Grisby –Michael remains a troublingly elusive character who paints himself to be the sympathetic victim of this strange affair. Do we trust him? Equally, Elsa also remains a shadowy, a-moral character. And like their ill-fated characters in the film, Welles and Hayworth had also grown apart by the of this film’s completion. According to Peter Bogdanovich, Hayworth was evidently a deeply troubled woman who had suffered child abuse. Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce shortly after the release of The Lady From Shanghai. As was typical for Welles, he walked off the film before post-production was finished and the movie was cut down to an 88-minute picture rather than the 155-minute extravaganza. After the fallout following Citizen Kane, Welles became more drawn to poetic inspiration, as opposed to traditional narrative coherence. And the occasionally confusing plot in The Lady From Shanghai reflects this vision. What might have happened if Welles’s originally intended film had survived today? Apparently, he was most disappointed with the famous closing sequence in the hall of mirrors, which he intended to be an extensive tour-de-force. Notably, there are several scenes with absurdist tongue-in-cheek comedy in the film –such as a jury member continually sneezing and coughing during the trial sequence, the judge comically playing chess in his quarters, or the pair of old ladies who spot Welles and Hayworth kissing at the aquarium (who also reappear at the trial). Welles would go on to make one more film in Hollywood –a unique bargain movie interpretation of Macbeth for Republic Pictures shot on sets for Western movies. While wildly under-appreciated in its heyday, I am happy to acknowledge The Lady From Shanghai as another brilliant masterpiece from Orson Welles.