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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 unimaginative movie. That’s wretched, but that’s Orson Welles.
Everybody–EVERYBODY–is insensible in *Lady*! The Welles character, Michael O’Hara, admits he is dead apt off the bat. Elsa, played by Rita Hayworth, seems to be the cleverest of them all until the destroy…when she and her husband Arthur Bannister die together in the Crazy House, her husband gasping at her, “For a clever girl you compose a lot of mistakes.” Arthur, “the world’s greatest lawyer”, obviously has brains and knows what’s going on through the whole memoir, but he’s so grotesque (practically crawling through his scenes like a daddy longlegs spider) that his intellect is self-defeating: he’s objective one of the sharks that Welles describes in the beach scene, ravenously devouring himself. And the Grisby character…capture one peek at this guy and it’s hard to own *Lady* was made in 1946. Grisby’s apt out of David Lynch, or more like it, David Cronenberg! The contemplate, the folks in the courtroom…all Lifeless and distorted, unprejudiced like the images in the funhouse mirrors!
Portraying American people in that unflattering light was honest not “on” in the early postwar period. No wonder Orson Welles was being watched by the FBI during those years. Even today, many filmgoers ask movies to give them at least one or two daring characters that they can identify with. Sorry, friends, *Lady* jumps moral into your face and fair into your situation (like the scene with O’Hara and Grisby overlooking the ocean) and blurts drunkenly, “Yer STOO-pid too, FELLAH!”
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But why on earth is Orson Welles telling us we’re all unimaginative? That’s made very obvious. We are blissfully living out our grubby shrimp lives on the brink of self-destruction. “Do you own the world is gonna ruin? ” asks Grisby of O’Hara in that ocean overlook scene. That’s the query Welles tells us we should be asking ourselves. But unprejudiced as O’Hara was too wearisome to ask himself a few simple questions, like “how can Grisby win the insurance money if he’s declared legally tiresome? “, we don’t ask ourselves the vital questions that overshadow our funny minute existences.
A lot of people won’t like it. They determined didn’t when *Lady* was released in ‘48.
But I worship it! *Lady* was “postmodern” before postmodern was wintry (before anybody knew what postmodern was)! It is deliciously self-referential: the scene in the Shanghai Vulgar Chinese theater, with the curious Oriental play being performed onstage, instantly reminds one of all the unusual characters and goings-on in the “trusty” yarn, the movie itself. But the movie itself is not valid 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 unprejudiced NOT self-referential, they really tried to develop an alternative world that the audience could sprint from its troubles into. Almost all movies then, and mild most today, do not acquire up a mirror to the audience. But *Lady* does. And aloof today many people aren’t going to like what they peruse. “It’s a intellectual guilty world,” sayeth Welles/O’Hara.
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The close-ups of Rita Hayworth singing “Please Don’t Kiss Me” save her as THE most delicate woman to have ever graced the silver mask. Sorry Marilyn, Lana, Bette, and you too Nicole. “Rita Hayworth gave noble face” indeed. I’d have paid the effect of the whole DVD unbiased to have those few seconds of film. But there’s so powerful more in *Lady* that’s worth watching than the lady.
Peter Bogdanovich’s interview and commentary is lovely profitable, though as a Welles/Hayworth fan there was a trustworthy 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 impartial don’t derive any better!
The more one reviews the Welles’ oeuvre, the more painful it becomes to examine his eternal attempts to disguise himself. This may seem a rather determined 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 hasten 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 fake beard of “Mr. Arkadin” all the intention to the volumes of onerous padding that bloat his Captain Quinlan in “Touch of Sinful”, 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 blooming Rita Hayworth, two and one-half years estranged from her, composed pseudo-blacklisted after “Kane”, unbiased returning from a much-publicized theater flop (”Around the World”), and like always, ready and confident in his ability to voice something that no one had ever seen before.
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Welles was able to execute this ambition with relative frequency because of his complete fascination with film and complete view 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 beget objective the perfect duration, and this essentially being a film about adore 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 legend. A man coughs ceaselessly in a courtroom, oversized marine life intrude on the central admire scene, and finally, in the most conspicuous eruption, the three central characters are arbitrarily led into a hall of mirrors, where they travel to blow the entire spot 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 celebrated 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 feeble, 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 extinct and “coherent” legend perform, should suggest that. Both the allure and danger of the Welles canon is its destructive tumultuous self-romance and destructiveness, and “Lady from Shanghai” is no exception.
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