The Lady from Shanghai
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Movie Reviews of The Lady from Shanghai
Movie Review: Beware of blondes in the park (and the consequences that follow...)
Summary: 5 Stars
Orson Welles has done it again. For $50,000 and a promise to Columbia to direct a book with a different title, he was able to save the costumes for his "Around the World in 80 Days" theater performance as well as give us another butchered masterpiece. Being a relative "newbie" to Welles, one always argues that "Citizen Kane" remains his magnum opus, but after watching "The Magnificent Ambersons" (a stronger, more genuine film) and now, "The Lady from Shanghai", the argument seems a bit too one-sided. Welles is a powerful director, a decent actor, and a detailed storyteller; one doesn't need to argue that all day. Yet, it is impressive that he is known only as a one-film man, when everything else watched has continued to get stronger and stronger. "Magnificent Ambersons" proved that he could tackle the family drama as well as a social commentary on the wealthy, and with "Shanghai" he proves that he can transform a movie star from pin-up girl to sadistic lover. Part noir, part travelogue, part confusion, "Shanghai" was an experience all within itself. Harry Cohen, head of Columbia, has stated that if anyone could tell him what this film was about, he would pay $1000. That speaks volumes about the ability that Welles had to construct an intelligent, gripping noir. "Shanghai" is about love, it is about revenge, is about mirrors, and it is about the law - all brought together in a way only Orson Welles could do it.
Originally two and a half hours, the version viewed was under 90-minutes, meaning quite a bit of Welles vision was lost in the editing room. One even hears stories that his original score was cut and replaced with cartoon music and constant repetition of the theme song. It would be hard to imagine what Welles' original vision would have produced, but even with his missing elements - "Shanghai" proves thought-provoking, entertaining, and downright diabolical. It begins with two actors, Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, together in a park, learning that even the most beautiful women come with baggage and history. From the very bizarre car park sequence, we soon get the impression that this isn't going to be your normal film. Welles pulls you in with the unknown, and unique characters. His portrayal of Michael O'Hara is possibly the weakest element to this film, as his accent fades in and out of existence with each scene. Welles is good as an actor, but adding the Irish element to his voice diminished the ability to truly believe who he was meant to be. On the other hand, Rita Hayworth was phenomenal. Her transformation in this film could be likened to a modern day Theron's "Monster" or Swank's "Boys Don't Cry", shedding her long red hair for a short platinum look. She was not only impressive physically, but as mysterious as noir women come. From the opening scene, she is always someone she is not - and when Glenn Anders looks at her from his binoculars several scenes later - it is as if Welles is saying, we all need to be watching her. Up until the final moments, we don't know where her loyalties remain, and that speaks value of both the director and the actor.
With Hayworth giving her best, Welles taking strides behind the camera (not quite in front of), the other one to watch is Everett Sloane, who plays the handicapped Arthur Bannister. Welles gives Sloane this meaty character who drinks, worries, plans, and is the best lawyer in town - yet has this crippling physical attribute which creates this darker, more diabolical character. Sloane was my favorite character in this film, because, like Hayworth, we were never quite sure what his next play was, or who he was doing this all for. With "Shanghai" Welles has crafted this amazing noir that keeps you guessing from beginning to end, impressively shot, and delivers an ending that remains a cult favorite - attempted to be recreated time and time again, but always lacks that panache only Welles could film.
VIDEO: The film was impressive. It takes you from a park, to the open sea (look for Errol Flynn), to a native island, back to San Francisco. The images are sharp to coincide with the power of Welles choice of actors and ability to carry a scene. The only downfall, this was originally filmed (like most Welles) around 2+ hours, and the version I watched was under 90 minutes. What did we miss? How amazing could this film have been?
VISUAL: Stunning black and white imagery. Welles is not afraid to give us the long shot or the intense close up. In hot places, everyone was sweating. Was it due to the heat, or their knowledge of what was to come?
SOUND: Gunshots were loud, the courtroom scene was intense, and the waves were present. Even though his original score wasn't used, it worked. With his stark visuals, the sound only collaborates with Welles. He may not have liked it, but for this edited version, it worked.
EXTRAS: Surprisingly, not bare boned. There is an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich which gives us quite a bit of detail on this film, but he uses the same material again for his audio commentary. I liked what Bogdanovich had to say, but when he just starts reading from his book instead of giving us insight on the scene, it gets a bit dull to hear. The visuals and him rambling on saying "he said, then I said", just didn't pan out. Good, but not great. We wrap up with a couple of trailers and language options. Overall, pretty well rounded.
This is a character driven film, and despite my flimsy nature on Welles the actor, the other background characters have enough heart to carry what he lacks. The power of Hayworth, Sloane, and Anders alone is worth watching. Who are these guys? How did they choose O'Hara? Why be so elaborate? The twist and turns continue to come, and "Shanghai" has that repeatable feel that your DVD player will love. I cannot wait to rewatch this film and see what was missed. There had to be more clues, something in the background that the virgin eye would miss. This was noir at, well, maybe its best looking, but well represented.
Thank you Mr. Welles for continuing to impress me with each passing film.
Grade: ***** out of *****
Movie Review: "Innocent is a big word--Stupid is more like it"
Summary: 5 Stars
Stupidity--not innocence, not heroism, not any virtue at all--is the major theme of *The Lady from Shanghai*. Therefore, to some viewers this film will appear to be a stupid movie. That's unfortunate, but that's Orson Welles.Everybody--EVERYBODY--is stupid in *Lady*! The Welles character, Michael O'Hara, admits he is stupid right off the bat. Elsa, played by Rita Hayworth, seems to be the cleverest of them all until the end...when she and her husband Arthur Bannister die together in the Crazy House, her husband gasping at her, "For a clever girl you make a lot of mistakes." Arthur, "the world's greatest lawyer", obviously has brains and knows what's going on through the whole story, but he's so grotesque (practically crawling through his scenes like a daddy longlegs spider) that his intellect is self-defeating: he's just one of the sharks that Welles describes in the beach scene, ravenously devouring himself. And the Grisby character...take one look at this guy and it's hard to believe *Lady* was made in 1946. Grisby's right out of David Lynch, or more like it, David Cronenberg! The judge, the folks in the courtroom...all STUPID and distorted, just like the images in the funhouse mirrors!
Portraying American people in that unflattering light was just not "on" in the early postwar period. No wonder Orson Welles was being watched by the FBI during those years. Even today, many filmgoers expect movies to give them at least one or two heroic characters that they can identify with. Sorry, friends, *Lady* jumps right into your face and right into your space (like the scene with O'Hara and Grisby overlooking the ocean) and blurts drunkenly, "Yer STOO-pid too, FELLAH!"
But why on earth is Orson Welles telling us we're all stupid? That's made very clear. We are blissfully living out our grubby little lives on the brink of self-destruction. "Do you believe the world is gonna end?" asks Grisby of O'Hara in that ocean overlook scene. That's the question Welles tells us we should be asking ourselves. But just as O'Hara was too stupid to ask himself a few simple questions, like "how can Grisby collect the insurance money if he's declared legally dead?", we don't ask ourselves the important questions that overshadow our silly little existences.
A lot of people won't like it. They sure didn't when *Lady* was released in '48.
But I love it! *Lady* was "postmodern" before postmodern was cool (before anybody knew what postmodern was)! It is deliciously self-referential: the scene in the Shanghai Low Chinese theater, with the strange Oriental play being performed onstage, instantly reminds one of all the strange characters and goings-on in the "real" story, the movie itself. But the movie itself is not real either, of course--it too is a play that reflects the bizarre world of human events, OUR world, the world of the moviegoer who seeks meaning in film and theater. House of mirrors! Movies of the '40's were just NOT self-referential, they really tried to create an alternative world that the audience could escape from its troubles into. Almost all movies then, and still most today, do not hold up a mirror to the audience. But *Lady* does. And still today many people aren't going to like what they see. "It's a bright guilty world," sayeth Welles/O'Hara.
The close-ups of Rita Hayworth singing "Please Don't Kiss Me" establish her as THE most beautiful woman to have ever graced the silver screen. Sorry Marilyn, Lana, Bette, and you too Nicole. "Rita Hayworth gave good face" indeed. I'd have paid the price of the whole DVD just to have those few seconds of film. But there's so much more in *Lady* that's worth watching than the lady.
Peter Bogdanovich's interview and commentary is pretty good, though as a Welles/Hayworth fan there was a good deal of stuff I already knew. But some stuff I didn't know, so I appreciated Peter's contribution.
*The Lady From Shanghai* and *Gilda*...movies just don't get any better!
Movie Review: The Chimera from Shanghai
Summary: 5 Stars
The more one reviews the Welles' oeuvre, the more painful it becomes to watch his eternal attempts to disguise himself. This may seem a rather obvious observation, given the intrinsically autobiographical nature of Welles' art, but the boy genius was always cognizant of this confessional, which makes it all the more difficult and compelling. It seems that, for every film made after "Citizen Kane", the urge to dissemble becomes more pronounced, more helpless in its transparency and failure. From a desperate Irish accent in "The Lady from Shanghai" to the patently false beard of "Mr. Arkadin" all the way to the volumes of onerous padding that bloat his Captain Quinlan in "Touch of Evil", Welles has created the ultimate gallery of character refractions in cinema. The character of Michael O'Hara in "Shanghai", however, holds a special uniqueness in its reliance on and combination of youth, attractiveness, vigor, restlessness, sexual yearning, and finally, shrugging resignation and pessimism. This was 1948, Welles was 33 years-old, five years wed to the stunning Rita Hayworth, two and one-half years estranged from her, still pseudo-blacklisted after "Kane", just returning from a much-publicized theater flop ("Around the World"), and like always, ready and confident in his ability to deliver something that no one had ever seen before.
Welles was able to accomplish this ambition with relative frequency because of his complete fascination with film and complete understanding of it as a transformative medium. There are moments of rapture and "pure cinema" in "The Lady from Shanghai" to rival "Kane". Where else can something as ineffably sensual as the camera's flight over Hayworth's unrequited cigarette ballad on Bannister's yacht, or as ephemeral as the procession of barcos and torches to the bass thump of "Baia" in Acapulco be found on celluloid? Welles always bemoaned the brevity of the film post-studio cutting, but in truth, these moments possess just the perfect duration, and this essentially being a film about love interrupted, thwarted, and finally imploding, I suspect that Welles' pacing of most of the scenes in the movie was not entirely different.
Interruption and all its cosmic ramifications seem to be a primal force and theme in "The Lady from Shanghai". Many of the most indelible moments erupt or are born out of seemingly nowhere. The wordless scene in which a gloriously clad Hayworth sprints desperately through the deteriorating arches of an Acapulco street against the strains of a Mexican band lasts nearly half-a-minute and emanates almost inexplicably from the narrative. A man coughs ceaselessly in a courtroom, oversized marine life intrude on the central love scene, and finally, in the most conspicuous eruption, the three central characters are arbitrarily led into a hall of mirrors, where they proceed to blow the entire place apart. In short, whether the interruption is obstructive or cathartic, it throws the equilibrium off balance, and that may be why this film is so emotionally turbulent, why the playing of Welles and Hayworth at times resembles the rupturing of two adjacent membranes against one another, unable to touch without bruising themselves. The accepted interpretation of the film as a comment on the two's marriage, as a confession of the boy genius' inability to mantain a relationship with a mature, robust woman should therefore not imply that the experience of making or watching such a film is a fluid or healing one. Not even the fluidity of the film making, blithely inconsiderate of conventional and "coherent" narrative form, should suggest that. Both the allure and difficulty of the Welles canon is its destructive tumultuous self-romance and destructiveness, and "Lady from Shanghai" is no exception.
Movie Review: Misunderstood Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
The most tragic aspect of Orson Welles' career is the accepted wisdom that he only made three good films. In fact he made 13 films in a 40 year career (a tragically small number in itself) and ten of them were arguably masterpieces. That's a track record that bears comparison with anyone. The Lady from Shanghai is a classic example of a misunderstood Welles masterpiece. The studio didn't understand the plot and the film got buried; in addition it was put forward that Welles intended revenge on his ex-wife Rita Hayworth by casting her as the bad girl (in fact Welles only interest was in making a great film and Hayworth's astonishing performance merely consecrates his success).
Welles fully understood the attractions, both of film noir themes (jealousy, greed, paranoia) and the mandatory visuals that go with the genre. The great cinematographer Stanley Cortez once said of Welles that he understood lighting better than anyone in the Cinema. Many scenes stand out as examples of Welles' brilliant visual invention - the lovers meeting at the aquarium and the final "hall of mirrors" shootout are just two outstanding set pieces amongst a miasma of unsettling camera angles, close-ups and deep, overbearing shadows. Welles' unique talent was in reinventing himself with every film, so whilst there are familiar Wellesian hallmarks in Shanghai (overlapping dialogue, deep focus etc) it is still a work of stunning visual originality, albeit shot in 16mm.
What the french call "mise en scene" (literally "composition") was everything to Welles, so the plot (an innocent man is drawn into a web of intrigue by a woman) was less important, save to the extent that it enabled Welles to delve into the emotional dynamics of the characters. For example, the fracturing relationship between Welles' (the actor) and Hayworth's characters is dealt with in an uncommonly sophisticated manner for what is essentially a femme-fatale/innocent-chump storyline.
So buy this and marvel at the work of Cinema's only natural (and greatest ever) inventor. And while you're at it, see The Trial, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, F for Fake, Macbeth and The Stranger as well.
Movie Review: Misunderstood Genius...
Summary: 5 Stars
The review of A. Guidici just a couple before mine serves as a sad encapsulation of all of the garbage and misrepresentations thrown at Orson Welles over the years before AND after his death. The scope of his life's work is only now beginning to truly sink in. To say he did nothing worthy after Kane is to dismiss not just this film but The Magnificent Ambersons, which could have been better than Kane if RKO had lived up to their agreement and allowed him to finish its editing, and later masterpieces like F For Fake and Chimes at Midnight- and everything in between. Poor or unfinished? Give me a break. All of his films are worthy of mention alongside Citizen Kane. Do yourselves a favor and don't settle for the usual lazy, middlebrow entertainment journalism. The true story of his career is still coming to the light of day; read Orson Welles at Work, Discovering Orson Welles, This Is Orson Welles, Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life and other more fair-minded material, rather than the vindictive -and sex-obsessed- writings of people like David Thomson. Nothing is worse than a 'biographer' complaining about a supposed lazy, undisciplined artist who gets more accomplished in a single day than they will in an entire lifetime. Most directors don't stay up all night painting their own sets, only to be harangued for a lack of focus or fear of completion! And btw Guidici complains that Lady from Shanghai loses comprehensibility of dialogue even tho the studio cut out an hour, as if losing an hour of material is going to CLEAR UP plot! This is exactly the wrongheaded thinking that prompted many studios to take Orson's films away from him and have someone else edit them in an effort to make things more logical. This always has the opposite effect, as anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of filmmaking knows. I can only be grateful to him for continuing and getting as many films completed as possible, no matter the odds. Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Stranger, Lady From Shanghai, MacBeth, Othello, Mr Arkadin, Touch of Evil, The Trial, Chimes at Midnight and F for Fake, among others...