THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948)
"Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her. Maybe I'll die trying."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders, Ted de Corsia; Written & Directed by Orson Welles, from a novel by Sherwood King; Cinematography by Charles Lawton, Jr.
Orson Welles's THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI reveals, as usual, a director much enamoured of his own genius. It dresses up its plot with spectacular flourishes which frame and punctuate and sometimes overshadow the action. Crucial scenes are backdropped by the Acapulco coastline, an aquarium filled with very predatory seeming fish, a play in a Chinese theatre, and an abandoned amusement park. But Welles has the talent to flaunt his own skill and get away with it, and he does, for the most part: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI is a wonderful film to look at.
The story itself is classic noir fare, and must have seemed rather routine even in 1948. Welles plays worldly Irishman Michael O'Hara, who falls for a beautiful enigmatic dame, Elsa, who, as played by Rita Hayworth, is so blonde, imperial, and frigid she could be a Hitchcock heroine. Elsa is married to Arthur Bannister, a rich crippled lawyer (the scene-stealing Everett Sloane). Michael, after rescuing Elsa from ruffians, is hired as bosun on the Bannisters' yacht, where his life is complicated by his infatuation with Elsa, the schemes of Bannister's partner, and the suspicion of his detective. The cruise from San Francisco to Mexico and back is rife with tension. Everyone's double-crossing everyone, unsurprisingly.
We are given variations on the eternal noir themes: lust, greed, corruption, betrayal. One can sense Welles tweaking the material, trying to put his own spin on it, adding clever touches in the background. It's entertaining as hell, with tart dialogue and extravagant performances, but it seems somewhat forced. At times the director's grandstanding is too distracting, no more so than in a wildly overplayed courtroom scene, which features preposterous plot twists (Bannister cross-examines himself on the witness stand) and odd comical twitches (a juror whose sneezes keep interrupting the prosecutor). It deflates the doom-laden atmosphere which has been building thus far.
Never mind: the film soon recovers. The famous finale--a gunfight staged in a hall of mirrors--is a magnificent piece of virtuoso film-making, with faces fracturing and multiplying and overlapping other faces in kaleidoscopic patterns. The fragmentation of images perfectly dramatizes the disintegration of the characters' identities, as they fail to resolve the contradictory roles they have enacted in pursuit of their tangled schemes.
But, again, the directorial brilliance is too much. It takes the emphasis off the tense confrontation which lies at the heart of film noir, when illusion is stripped away, when characters are forced to reckon with the deceptions they have wrought and the lies they have believed. As a stage director, Welles should know when to let his actors do the work rather than his camera, but as hearts are being laid bare, he is still showing off. It's mighty impressive, but lacks the stark immediacy of, say, THE MALTESE FALCON.
There are blackly intense scenes to be found, nonetheless. The relations amongst Bannister and his wife and his partner betoken a deep cynicism about human behaviour, verbalized by Michael in a showy but effective monologue about sharks killing each other in a feeding frenzy. There is a quiet conversation between Bannister and Michael while awaiting a trial verdict that goes straight for the gut in its unsoftened representation of hate and moral bankruptcy. But although it's noir, it's not noir enough: as a whole, the movie feels like the work of an inspired director elaborating on material he doesn't quite believe in. The touch of evil is never truly felt.
Review by David Dalgleish (subjective.freeservers.com) -- January 25th, 2000
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