FILM NOIR | The Lady from Shanghai
About Sharks and People...
Hollywood’s child prodigy, and later its outcast—Orson Welles (whose phenomenal and inventive debut was *Citizen Kane*, 1941)—followed up the overly “studio-driven” *The Stranger* (1946), he shot his next film noir, which unmistakably bears his visual signature.
Irish sailor Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles), after a brief encounter with a charming woman, is hired as a crew member on the yacht of prominent lawyer Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), sailing from New York to San Francisco. In addition to Bannister’s wife, Elsa (the divine Rita Hayworth), his business partner Grisby (Glenn Anders) is also on board. Michael and Elsa fall for each other during the exotic voyage, and our hero, lured by the prospect of a $5,000 reward, agrees to Grisby’s crazy plan—to fake his own murder so he can disappear. Mike, on the other hand, wants to disappear with the blonde. The story is an adaptation of Sherwood King’s “If I Die Before I Wake.”
Welles had the lead actress, Rita Hayworth (Gilda)—his wife at the time (1943–1947)—boldly cut her hair short and dye it blonde. It didn’t detract from her beauty—on the contrary, it made her even more striking. The film also stands out for the chemistry between the noir underdog and the femme fatale, a whole host of precisely typecast, slimy characters, and witty dialogue.
*The Lady from Shanghai* above all abounds in visual extravagance: the camera pans imaginatively even during the opening dialogue; later, it composes striking low-angle and high-angle shots, creates dynamic, extended tracking shots, works with multi-layered mise-en-scène and depth of field without the need for cuts, and delivers sharp cuts to close-ups of faces—often beaded with sweat—or silhouettes shot in profile. The final scene in “The House of Fools” is a tribute to German Expressionism, and the pinnacle of Welles’s directorial virtuosity is the final showdown in the mirrored maze, which remains breathtaking even after nearly 80 years. (Michal Šmajda, I Love Film Noir)
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