The Lady from Shanghai (1947) - film review

In San Francisco, drifter Michael O’Hara falls under the spell of Elsa Bannister, a beautiful young blonde who is grateful when he saves her from some marauding thugs.  As a reward, she persuades her husband, the crippled lawyer Arthur Bannister, to offer him a job as a deckhand on his next yachting cruise.  During the cruise, Elsa and Michael find it hard to keep their burgeoning love affair from Arthur Bannister.  Bannister’s business partner, George Grisby, then makes Michael a strange proposal.  He offers him $5000 if he will sign a confession to having murdered him (i.e. Grisby), so that Grisby can pocket his own insurance money and start a new life.   When she learns of this, Elsa warns Michael that he is walking into a trap.  She is right...

Perhaps no film better demonstrates the strengths and failings of Orson Welles as a filmmaker than his spectacular film noir The Lady from Shanghai.  It is a film which combines the most dazzlingly inventive cinematic style with a plot so muddled and convoluted that even Welles himself couldn’t explain it.  The impression you get watching this film is that Welles was so preoccupied with technique and design that telling a coherent story which anyone could follow was just about his lowest priority.

Anyone familiar with classic American film noir of the early 1940s will know that plot complexity was just one of the devices that filmmakers employed to distract an audience from the low production values - typified by cheap sets and high turn around.  Even when film noir acquired respectability and budgets to match, the absurdly complicated plots prevailed.  The production values on The Lady from Shanghai could hardly be bettered, to the extent that these actually distract us from the plot, a curious reversal of film noir technique.  

The dreamlike cinematography employed by Welles is typical of late 1940s film noir, with extreme expressionist lighting and contrived use of shadows adding to the impression of the central character being caught in a web of intrigue from which escape looks increasingly unlikely – a foretaste of Welles’s later masterpiece The Trial (1960).   The film is best remembered for its climactic showdown in the Hall of Mirrors, with multiple reflections of the protagonists creating a spectacularly surreal sequence which is utterly chilling to watch.

Welles stars in the film alongside his former wife Rita Hayworth. who had to have her famous long red hair cut and dyed blonde.  This was one of the earliest film noirs to make extensive use of real locations, here San Francisco and Acapulco.  The yacht seen in the Acapulco scenes belonged to none other than Errol Flynn, who piloted it during the shoot.  

In true Wellesian fashion, the film’s production became fraught as costs ran out of control, much to the annoyance of Columbia executive Harry Cohn, who had hired Welles to direct this film so that Welles could repay an earlier favour.  The director’s first cut was far too unwieldy for a commercial release and was hacked down from 155 minutes to 90 minutes.  Cohn loathed the film and could make no sense of the plot, and Welles loathed the final edit with its tawdry score.  The cinema-going public was also unimpressed when it was first released – just one of Welles’s many box office disasters – and critical reaction was mixed.  Today, the film is regarded in a far more favourable light.  The Lady from Shanghai isn’t faultless, but it has great style and offers several moments of sheer cinematic brilliance – of the kind that Orson Welles alone could deliver.

© James Travers 2008

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