The Lady from Shanghai

Plot synopsis:
Irish sailor Michael O'Hara (Welles) meets the beautiful blonde Elsa (Rita Hayworth) as she rides a horse-drawn coach in Central Park. Three hooligans waylay the coach. Michael rescues Elsa and escorts her home. Michael reveals he is a seaman and learns Elsa and her husband, disabled criminal defense attorney Arthur Bannister (Sloane), are newly arrived in New York City from Shanghai. They are on their way to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Michael, attracted to Elsa despite misgivings, agrees to sign on as an able seaman aboard Bannister's yacht.
They are joined on the boat by Bannister's partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders), who proposes that Michael "murder" him in a plot to fake his own death. He promises Michael $5,000 and explains that since he would not really be dead and since there would be no corpse, Michael could not be convicted of murder (reflecting corpus delicti laws at the time). Michael agrees, intending to use the money to run away with Elsa. Grisby has Michael sign a confession.
On the eve of the crime, Sydney Broome (Ted de Corsia), a private investigator who has been following Elsa on her husband's orders, confronts Grisby. Broome has learned of Grisby's plan to actually murder Bannister, frame Michael, and escape by pretending to have also been murdered. Grisby shoots Broome and leaves him for dead. Unaware of what has happened, Michael proceeds with the night's arrangement and sees Grisby off on a motorboat before shooting a gun into the air to draw attention to himself. Meanwhile, Broome, injured but alive, asks Elsa for help. He warns her that Grisby intends to kill her husband.
Michael makes a phone call to Elsa, but finds Broome on the other end of the line. Broome warns Michael that Grisby was setting him up. Michael rushes to Bannister's office in time to see Bannister is alive, but that the police are removing Grisby's body from the premises. The police find evidence implicating Michael, including his confession, and take him away.
At trial, Bannister acts as Michael's attorney. He feels he can win the case if Michael pleads justifiable homicide. During the trial, Bannister learns of his wife's relationship with Michael. He ultimately takes pleasure in his suspicion that they will lose the case. Bannister also indicates that he knows the real killer's identity. Before the verdict, Michael escapes by feigning a suicide attempt. Elsa follows. Michael and she hide in a Chinatown theater. Elsa calls some Chinese friends to meet her. As Michael and Elsa wait and pretend to watch the show, Michael realizes that she killed Grisby. Elsa's Chinese friends arrive and take Michael, unconscious, to an abandoned Fun House. When he wakes, he realizes that Grisby and Elsa had been planning to murder Bannister and frame him for the crime, but that Broome's involvement ruined the scheme and that Elsa had to kill Grisby for her own protection.
The film features a unique climactic shootout in a hall of mirrors involving a multitude of false and real mirrored images in the Magic Mirror Maze, in which Elsa is mortally wounded and Bannister is killed. Heartbroken, Michael leaves presuming that events which have unfolded since the trial will clear him of any crimes.

Tags: murder, bleak, intrigue, atmospheric, romantic, suspenseful, storytelling

Review:
After all, you do not go to an Orson Welles movie to see a nice simple little plot and a burnishing of the image of a happy-ever-after starYou go to see theatrically heightened characters locked in conflict against colorful and unusual settings, lighted and scored imaginatively, photographed bravely, and the whole thing peppered with unexpected details of surprise that a wiser and duller director would either avoid or not think of in the first place As usual, as well as directing, Welles wrote the script and he also played the hero  a young Irish seaman who had knocked about the world and seen its evil, but still retained his clear-eyed trust in the goodness of others Unfortunately for him, he reposed this trust in Rita Hayworth, whose cool good looks concealed a gloomy past and murderous inclinations for the future She was married without love, to an impotent, crippled advocate, acted like a malevolent lizard by the brilliant Everett Sloane There is a youthful romanticism underlying it all, and this quality came into exuberant play in "The Lady from Shanghai." Before the inevitable happened, Welles escaped  to a final triangular showdown in a hall of mirrors, which has become one of the classic scenes of the post-war cinema  Welles did not miss a chance throughout the whole film to counterpoint the words and actions with visual detail which enriched the texture and heightened the atmosphere His camera seemed almost to caress Rita Hayworth as the sun played with her hair and her long limbs while she playfully teased the young seaman into her web.
There's no point in photographing a scene on a real boat if you make it sound as though it all happened in front of a process screen...At the start of the picnic sequence...in the temporary score, we used a very curious, sexy Latin-American strain...This has been replaced with a corny "dramatic" sequel--bad stock stuff...This sort of music destroys that quality of strangeness which is exactly what might have saved Lady from Shanghai from being just another whodunit...There is a big musical outburst after Grigsby's line, "I want you to kill him." This is absurd...The Hawaiian guitar music which comes out of the radio...was supposed to be corny enough to make a certain satirical point.
Orson Welles' "The Lady From Shanghai" does not have the brilliant screenplay of "Citizen Kane," e.g., but Charles Lawton, Jr.'s cinematography, the unforgettable set pieces (such as the scene in the aquarium, the seagoing scene featuring a stunning, blonde-tressed Rita Hayworth singing "Please Don't Love Me," and the truly amazing Hall of Mirrors climax), and the wonderful cast (Everett Sloane in his greatest performance, Welles in a beautifully under-played role, the afore-mentioned Miss Hayworth--Welles' wife at the time--at her most gorgeous) make for a very memorable filmgoing experience.
The story in The Lady from Shanghai has the prime elements of a film-noir: average-Joe lead, femme fatale, conspicuous supporting characters, and a comprehensible if somewhat convoluted plot structure.
It is an entertaining ride, and it's filled to the brim with Welles' unique gifts as a director, but there are scenes that tend to just not work, or don't feel complete in what was Welles' full vision (the latter is unfortunately too true- executive producer Harry Cohn and the Columbia execs are to blame for that).Welles co-stars with his then wife, the profoundly gorgeous Rita Hayworth, as Mike O'Hara, an Irish worker who can and does get angry at the right people.
Yet as the plot unfolds, O'Hara is drawn into a scam that Grisby is planning for insurance money, with results that I dare not reveal (although they have been discussed over and over by others).Whatever liabilities pop up here and there in the mystery part of the story (and those few noticeable moments where shots were studio dictated), the performances and the look of the film are what remains striking after over fifty-five years.
The Lady from Shanghai is worth checking out, especially for Welles, Hayworth, or film-noir buffs (fans of the Coen brothers might find this fascinating as well).
This film is a flawed Welles, but worth every minute of it because one can see the greatness of perhaps America's best motion picture director of all times!We can see the toll it took on Orson Welles the filming of this movie.
The finale at the Funhouse and House of Mirrors showcases Welles brilliant direction.All in all, the mood and atmosphere of this film noir and the periodically brilliance of Welles fail to make up for the choppy viewing experience of this erratically, over-edited movie.
I personally think that while it maybe started off as a quickie stop-gap thriller for Welles, he unquestionably picked it up and ran with it as only he could and even if Harry Cohn and his cohorts did hijack the finished article in the interests of commerciality, Welles' talent and verve transcend even the skewered and compromised cut we see here.Sure there are lots of strange, even occasionally surreal aspects to the film, Welles' "Oirish" accent, that he's almost always in three-quarter profile facing the left, the massive close-ups and occasional crazy-cutting, the talking in Chinese to name but a few, but it also contains memorable, bravura scenes which only Orson could devise, like his deconstruction of the clichéd courtroom scene, his and Rita Hayworth's rendezvous at the aquarium with massive shape-shifting marine life glowing and glowering behind them, the upshot in the Chinese Theatre and of course the terrific climax in the hall of mirrors.The motives of the characters and consistencies of the plot are at times seemingly thrown to the wind but somehow you're swept along, rather like Welles Black Irish Michael O'Hara, like a cork on the sea and left at the end deposited on the shore, breathless, confused but exhilarated.
And there's more, those close-ups showing the sweat, dread bewilderment and blankness of his characters' faces, the great dialogue, especially the analogy of humans with sharks, the little dots of humour with the various reactions of the public in the gallery of the court scene ("You're kidding, right?") and the chase scenes so reminiscent of "The Third Man", to name but a few.Someday I'd love to see the film Welles had in his head, but then you could say that about almost all his projects going right back to "Citizen Kane".
At the point in time that The Lady from Shanghai was being made, the marriage of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth was disintegrating.
This may have soured him on the picture as he joined the legion of studio bosses who saw Welles's vision of independent film making a threat to their power.Stage actor Glenn Anders plays Sloane's partner Grisby who is one slimy dude, he winds up a corpse.
The way it veers from telling a story to suggesting one, the way it shows reactions by heightening them to the point of surreal drama, the way scenes that are improbable and invented and made fabulous, as in some kind of dream, all of this is great movie-making, and makes for an interesting movie, too (the one not always leading to the other).If you asked Godard, he would say this is Welles's best film, and I'm inclined to at least see why.
And this is what the main character experiences, the man called Michael played by Orson himself (with a terrible and irritating accent that is an attempt at a brogue).There are fascinating tidbits behind the movie, but maybe the one that you need to know for it's layering of meaning is that the leading woman, Rita Hayworth, had just ended a relationship with Welles.
Fascinated by gorgeous Mrs. Bannister (Rita Hayworth), a somewhat naive seaman Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) joins a sea cruise along with a seductive and amoral wife , her lawyer husband (Everett Sloane) , his colleague (Glenn Anders) and ends up mired in a complex murder plot .
At the final takes place a riveting and known climax in the hall of mirrors at San Francisco's old Oceanfront Playland .Noir film with a twisted and offbeat intrigue in which an Irish man becomes involved a pawn in a game of killing .
Orson Welles' decision to have Rita Hayworth cut her hair and bleach it caused a storm of controversy, and many in Hollywood believed it contributed to the film's poor box-office returns .
Evocative and atmospheric cinematography in black and White by Charles Lawton Jr , including usual lights and shades from Noir Cinema .Lady from Shanghai was well directed by Orson Welles , a genius who had a large and problematic career ; though Orson Welles' original rough cut of this picture ran 155 minutes, numerous cuts made by Columbia Pictures executives included a shortening of the famous "funhouse" final ; in fact these scenes were supposed to be unscored, to create the sense of terror.
This could be well have been THE definitive film noir of all time, had not the Columbia Studios cut so much of Orson Welles's original.
What we are left with is a flawed, yet brilliant film that showcases the overwhelming talent of Welles as an actor/director and Rita Hayworth as a serious dramatic talent.'The Lady From Shanghai' is film noir at it's most sizzling and confusing.
Welles, with an uneven accent, portrays Michael O'Hara, a journeyman Irishman, who, after a fateful encounter with the seductive, dangerous Elsa Bannister (Hayworth, in a GREAT performance)finds himself virtually coerced into accepting a job as a crewman on her and her crippled husband's (Everett Sloane) yacht.
It is also an unlikely success, but sometimes films come together despite their mishaps and disparate elements--"The Wizard of Oz" comes to mind.Reading the trivia notes in IMDb about the film, one would have to say that the odds were against TLFS being a consistent and successful entity, but somehow it became a wonderful piece of art noir.Starring Rita Hayworth as Elsa Bannister, the beautiful wife of a very successful but bitter attorney played by Everett Sloane, the story is told by central character Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles), a tough but vulnerable seaman with a fatalistic point of view.
The film is really a mystery about the true nature of Elsa, but it hinges on a point of law (like "Double Indemnity") that is questionable, but irrelevant in the biggest scheme of things.Welles' decision to cut and color the luscious locks of his estranged wife Hayworth was severely criticized at the time, but for my money it gives her a look that is more severe, more dangerous, more inscrutable--but just as beautiful--adding to her mystery.
Revered as an exemplary film-noir by today's cinephiles and critics, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI was a calamitous project of prodigy Welles battling with Hollywood studio system, so much so that its behind-the-scene anecdotes (including the fickle relationship with his then wife Hayworth, they divorced in 1948) have somewhat eclipsed the film itself.The plot is rather convoluted considering that there are only four main characters involved, Welles plays Michael O'Hara, an Irish sailor in New York, gets involuntarily smitten with the titular blonde Elsa (Hayworth).
But it will undergo an unexpected turn in terra firma, yet, at any rate, Michael ends up as the fall guy.Narrated by Michael's sedate voice-over, and it is his angle we closely follows, the film imposes a distinctly visual allure of its chiaroscuro atmosphere, sharp facial close-ups with grotesque mannerism, or striking silhouettes between tête-a-tête, up until the climatic shoot-out in an abandoned Fun House, highlighted by the hall of mirrors where the all the masks and lies are bared, and leaving audience for a second, wonder who will be the sole survivor, out of its dashing and juxtaposed editing proficiency, it is an indelible flourish in Welles' machination, in fact, this 92- minute original theatrical edition has been vastly re-edited by the decisions of Columbia Pictures executives, whereas Welles' original cut runs around 155 minutes, that's why Welles is uncredited as the director, so one might conjecture what could have been, if everything had went through according to Welles' idea thoroughly.A shortened masterpiece, one might call it, in its succinct characterisation, the film depicts the underbelly of a world full of sharks, lines like - "Everybody is somebody's fool", "The world's greatest criminal lawyer could also be the world's greatest criminal", or "I don't know how to fire a gun", says a coy Elsa.
A wandering seaman joins an odd couple - aged millionaire husband and glamorous wife - for a bizarre cruising journey that ends up in a murder plot.Ineffably silly story tarted up with brilliant cameraworks, good performances and undeniable flair; this now strongly reputed, heavily expressionist film noir thriller betrays uncertain handling and hasty production, so that it finally gives the impression of being found out while making.
From the offbeat decision to change Rita Hayworth's hair, to the weird behavior of some of the main characters, to the bizarre courtroom scenes, all set off with Welles's trademark assorted camera angles and other techniques, it is fascinating to watch even if it does not come up to the standard of Welles's best films.The story is often overshadowed by the atmosphere, but it's interesting in its own right, with Welles playing a young man whose ego and whose infatuation for Hayworth's character allows himself to become entrapped in a web of deceit and crime before he realizes everything that's involved.
The finale with its special effects is an impressive bit of film-making, and it also is very appropriate in setting off some of the main themes of the story.Though it is fair to criticize this movie for its faults, it's still a distinctive classic that deserves to be seen and remembered..
Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) himself doesn't really know what is going on, he is as confused as the viewer is, and that is wonderful to watch as he is pulled all over the place by pretty much everyone in the film.
Obviously being pulled by the heart strings by a femme fatale of such beauty as Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) has its moments, but you just know that things are going to go pear shaped.So many wonderful things in the film, it has Welles visual style all over it, see a scene in an aquarium that is marvellous and the ending sequences in a fun house are majestic on the eye.
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI is proof that the great genius Orson Welles could direct a "mainstream" movie if he wanted to.
Engrossing film noir scripted & directed by Orson Welles about an Irish drifter (Welles) beguiled by the beautiful wife (Rita Hayworth) of a successful attorney (Everett Sloane).
***SPOILERS*** "The Lady from Shanghai" is undoubtedly Orson Wells' best Film-Noir movie even though at the time of it's release back in 1947 he was very upset with how the studio, Columbia Pictures, edited the films final print without his knowledge or permission.
An interesting, original, maybe even unique plot; beautiful Rita Hayworth (I heard that this is her only movie where she was blonde) and magnificent Orson Welles (it is unbelievable how easily this man can change his voice); great visual beauty of the movie; some good dialogues - those are the good sides of ''The Lady from Shangai''.
Like a lot of Orson Welles directed films, The Lady from Shanghai was a victim of studio meddling leaving it rather choppy.
Both are set in the sea, both have crippled husbands of beautiful young ladies playing mind games with innocent men, & in both the director's wives play important roles.Anyway, like almost everyone else who commented here, I too found this movie long on style but short on story (tho' I don't know if Harry Cohn is to blame for that!).
The cast are all dislikeable with the exception of Rita Hayworth's character and Orson Welles affects an annoying Irish accent throughout the film.
It just seems like a film with disjointed camera angles to make things look weird and a very under-played, calm Orson Welles.There are good scenes, eg, the finale in the Amusement Park; and bad scenes, eg, the court scene towards the end of the film which is played for humour and is unrealistic.
The hall of mirrors conclusion is a classic scene and is well known even if you haven't seen the film.Welles is good as star but his Oirish accent is a little thick at times, at occasionally he has been re-dubbed really badly.
Harry Cohn was fearful for Rita's image and held back the release of this movie for one year.The plot concerns an Irish sailor, Michael O'Hara, who falls in love with Else (Hayworth, stunning with short blond hair).
What a sad life for such a vibrant beauty.Any film that Orson Welles directed is worth seeing, and "The Lady from Shanghai" is no exception.
The romance material, for which the Aquarium serves as one backdrop, is interestingly tempered with a kind of unease throughout the film, but on the other hand, that makes the romance never quite work as romance.Surely serious Welles fans will appreciate The Lady from Shanghai much more than I did, and of course it's worth a watch if you love Rita Hayworth.
Orson Welles, one of the most celebrated film makers in history, directed, acted, as well as wrote this movie like he did so many others.
This classic Welles film will having your guessing what going to happen till the very end.This film is a murder mystery with a dynamic plot with lots of twist and turns.The lighting in this film is what makes it so mysterious and suspenseful.Up until there at sea the whole film is very dark shots except for every time the soon in on Rita Hayworth's face.
This classic film noir has it all – a tight script, great scenes on location, and the seductive and beautiful Rita Hayworth.
If you are a fan of film-noir or Orson Welles, this is a great watch..