The Lady from Shanghai is a 1947 film noir directed by Orson Welles and starring Welles, his then-estranged wife Rita Hayworth, and Everett Sloane. It is based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King.
Plot
Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) meets the beautiful blonde Elsa (Rita Hayworth) as she rides a horse-drawn coach in Central Park. Shortly thereafter, three hooligans waylay the coach. Michael is able to rescue her, after which he escorts her home. Michael reveals he is a seaman, and learns Elsa and her husband, the famous, handicapped criminal defense attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), are newly arrived in New York City from Shanghai. They are on their way to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Michael, who is attracted to Elsa, despite misgivings, is persuaded to sign on as an able seaman aboard Bannister's yacht.
After setting sail, they are joined on the boat by Bannister's law partner, George Grisby (Glenn Anders), who proposes that Michael "murder" him in a plot to fake his own death and collect the insurance money for himself. He promises Michael $5,000 and explains that since he wouldn't really be dead and thus there would be no corpse, Michael couldn't be convicted of murder. Michael agrees to this, intending to use the money to run away with Elsa, with whom he's begun a relationship. Grisby has Michael sign a pre-typed confession.
On the eve that the crime is to be carried out, Sydney Broome, a private investigator who has been following Elsa on her husband's orders, confronts Grisby. Broome has learned of Grisby's plan and that he is actually intending to murder Bannister, frame Michael for the crime, and escape suspicion 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, a severely injured Broome goes to Elsa for help and warns her that Grisby is intending to kill her husband.
Thinking the plan is done with, Michael calls to inform Elsa, but is surprised to find Broome on the other end of the line. Broome's dying words are to warn Michael that Grisby was setting him up. Concerned, Michael rushes to Bannister's office just in time to see Bannister is quite alive but that the police are removing Grisby's body from the premises. The police instantly find evidence that Michael was the killer, including his signed confession, and take him away.
At trial, Bannister has offered to act as Michael's attorney and feels the case is more likely to be won if he pleads justifiable homicide, due to all the evidence against his client. However, as the trial progresses, Bannister learns of the extent of his wife's relationship with Michael and ultimately takes pleasure in his suspicion that they will lose the case. Michael reveals to Bannister that he knows who the real killer was. Without Elsa's knowledge, Michael is able to escape from the courtroom by feigning a suicide attempt before the verdict is to be announced. Elsa follows, and she and Michael hide out in a theater in Chinatown. Elsa calls some Chinese friends to meet her. As they wait and pretend to watch the show, Michael discovers that she was in fact the one who 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 obliged Elsa to kill Grisby for her own protection.
The film features a surreal climactic shootout in a hall of mirrors, the Magic Mirror Maze, in which Elsa is mortally wounded and Bannister is killed. Heartbroken, Michael leaves, presuming the events that have transpired since the trial will clear him of any crimes.
Cast
Production
In the summer of 1946, Welles was directing a musical stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days, with a comedic and ironic rewriting of the Jules Verne novel by Welles, incidental music and songs by Cole Porter, and production by Mike Todd, who would later produce the successful film version with David Niven.
When Todd pulled out from the lavish and expensive production, Welles supported the finances himself. When he ran out of money at one point and urgently needed $55,000 to release costumes which were being held, he convinced Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn to send him the money to continue the show, and in exchange Welles promised to write, produce, direct and star in a film for Cohn for no further fee. As Welles tells it, on the spur of the moment, he suggested the film be based on the book a girl in the theatre box office happened to be reading at the time he was calling Cohn, which Welles had never read.[1]
The Lady from Shanghai was filmed in late 1946, finished in early 1947, and released in the U.S. on June 9, 1948. Release was delayed due to heavy editing by Cohn's assistants at Columbia, who insisted on cutting about an hour from Welles's final cut. The film was purported to have links to the Black Dahlia murder at the time as the scenes cut from the film made significant references to the murder, months before it happened.[2] The studio was also located near two areas (one a restaurant) the victim often frequented before she was murdered.
Welles cast his then-wife Rita Hayworth as Elsa, and caused controversy when he made her cut her famous long red hair and bleach it blonde for the role.
Filming locations
In addition to the Columbia Pictures studios, the film was partly shot on location in San Francisco. It features the Sausalito waterfront and a waterfront bar and cafe reported to be the Sally Stanford's Valhalla, the front, interior, and a courtroom scene of the old Kearny Street Hall of Justice, and shots of Welles running across Portsmouth Square, escaping to a long scene in a theater in Chinatown, then the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, and Whitney's Playland amusement park at the beach for the famous hall of mirrors scene (shot on a soundstage).
Other scenes were filmed in Acapulco. The yacht Zaca, where many scenes take place, was owned by actor Errol Flynn, who skippered the yacht in between takes, and can also be seen in the background in one scene outside a cantina.[citation needed]
Critical reaction
When he saw the rushes, Cohn detested the picture; he couldn't figure out what it was about and offered $1000 to anyone who could explain it to him. Even Welles himself could not explain the plot to him.
Reviews of the film were mixed when released in the late 1940s. Variety magazine found the script wordy and noted that the "rambling style used by Orson Welles has occasional flashes of imagination, particularly in the tricky backgrounds he uses to unfold the yarn, but effects, while good on their own, are distracting to the murder plot."[3]
A more recent Time Out Film Guide review states that Welles simply didn't care enough to make the narrative seamless: "the principal pleasure of The Lady from Shanghai is its tongue-in-cheek approach to story-telling."[4]
Notes
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