The Lady from Shanghai

Starring:Glenn Anders, Steve Benton, Vernon Cansino, Al Eben, Edythe Elliott, Evelyn Ellis, Carl Frank, Joseph Granby, Rita Hayworth, Charles Meakin, Louis Merrill, Mary Newton, Erskine Sanford, Gus Schilling, Harry Shannon, Everett Sloane, Philip Van Zandt, Richard Wilson, Ted de Corsia
Studio: Sony Pictures
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com essential video

Legend has it that Orson Welles more or less conned studio boss Harry Cohn over the phone into making this movie by grabbing the title from a nearby paperback. In any case, The Lady from Shanghai is one of Welles's most fascinating works, a bizarre tale of an Irish sailor (Welles) who accompanies a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth) and her handicapped husband (Everett Sloane) on a cruise and becomes involved in a murder plot. But never mind all that (the aforementioned legend also claims that Cohn offered a reward to anyone who could explain the plot to him). The film is really a dream of Welles's driving preoccupations on- and offscreen at the time: the elusiveness of identity, the mystique of things lost, and most of all the director's faltering marriage to Hayworth. In the tradition of male filmmakers who indirectly tell the story of their love affairs with leading ladies, Welles tells his own, photographing Hayworth as a deconstructed star, an obvious cinematic creation, thus reflecting, perhaps, a never-satisfied yearning that leads us back to the mystery of Citizen Kane. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews:

Welles' camera seemed almost to caress Rita Hayworth..........2007-01-04

After all, you do not go to an Orson Welles movie to see a nice simple little plot and a burnishing of the image of a happy-ever-after star...

You go to see theatrically heightened characters locked in conflict against colorful and unusual settings, lighted and scored imaginatively, photographed bravely, and the whole thing peppered with unexpected details of surprise that a wiser and duller director would either avoid or not think of in the first place...

As usual, as well as directing, Welles wrote the script and he also played the hero - a young Irish seaman who had knocked about the world and seen its evil, but still retained his clear-eyed trust in the goodness of others... Unfortunately for him, he reposed this trust in Rita Hayworth, whose cool good looks concealed a gloomy past and murderous inclinations for the future... She was married without love, to an impotent, crippled advocate, acted like a malevolent lizard by the brilliant Everett Sloane...

There is a youthful romanticism underlying it all, and this quality came into exuberant play in "The Lady from Shanghai." Before the inevitable happened, Welles escaped - to a final triangular showdown in a hall of mirrors, which has become one of the classic scenes of the post-war cinema ...

Welles did not miss a chance throughout the whole film to counterpoint the words and actions with visual detail which enriched the texture and heightened the atmosphere... His camera seemed almost to caress Rita Hayworth as the sun played with her hair and her long limbs while she playfully teased the young seaman into her web...

Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth Drama.......2006-12-29

In London, Michael O'Hara meets Elsa 'Rosalie' Bannister and decides to introduce himself by offering her a cigerette. Elsa tells him that she doesn't smoke but takes the cigerette and wraps it in a napkin and insert into her purse. Michael hears a scream and sees three men pulling on both of Elsa's arms; Elsa is helpless against her attackers; Michael sees Elsa's purse and the cigerette and grabs it; the attackers are defeated soundly by Michael, who is an efficient fighter; Michaels learns from Elsa that she dropped the purse hoping Michael would see it and rescue her; this is the first clue that Elsa has a grand plot for Michael; Michael tells Elsa that he killed a man in Spain during the war; Michael guides Elsa's horse carriage to her car, a real stylish car; Elsa ask Michael work for her on her husband's boat; Michael tells Elsa that he won't work for a married woman.

Arthur Bannister asks Michael to be the Captain of ship which he plans to sail to San Francisco. Michael and his friends join Arthur in a drinking binge and then Michael decides to join the voyage because of his attraction of Elsa. George, Arthur's gay law partner joins the voyage. George sees Michael kisses Elsa and tells Arthur. Arthur is cruel to Elsa calling her, "lover"; Arthur suggests to Elsa that she would like Michael, a strong and bigger male; Arthur acquired the ship when one of his opponents perjuryed and used money to pay for a maid, who had worked for another law firm; Arthur knows that Elsa wants to murder him and take his money. Arthur is murdered by gun; a gun that Michael has seen Elsa use.

Elsa plot fails when her hired killer, kills George instead of Arthur. Michael forces Elsa to reveal the gun that killed George. At the Chinese fun house, Arthur and Elsa kill each other and Michael says, "sharks feeding on each other" suggesting his repulsion of the super rich and the conceit of the super rich with their feed frenzy arrogance.

Still, it IS Welles. . ........2006-11-10

I must confess at the outset that I am an Orson Welles fan. This is not to say that I am unaware of or wish to minimize his faults. What I mean is that, for me, his work possesses a set of characteristics, not all of them completely definable even yet, which are nonetheless rich and compelling. Furthermore, I maintain that enough (all?) of this "Welles aesthetic fingerprint survives the tribulation, sometimes extreme, to which his work was all too often subjected at the hands of others, to render even his lesser efforts very worthy of serious attention rewarded by enjoyment.

"The Lady from Shanghai" illustrates the above very clearly. Welles made the film at a very serious juncture in her career. His "boy wonder" reputation was fading rapidly. His political views were becomming less popular as the country began to move toward the right. His radio work had begun to dry up. His finances were a shambles. In desperation, he turned to Harry Cohn, a man he had contemptuously attacked, to support his latest project. He meant "The Lady from Shanghai" to restore his reputation as a viable filmmaker, proof that he could make a film that would be "aminstream" enough to pay off at the box office, and yet not represent artistic capitulation to commercial Hollywood. It was also to be a both a starring vehicle and a "stretch" performance for his then-wife, Rita Hayworth.

Unfortunately, the film proved typical of most of Welles work in one significant way: it was taken out of his hands in post-production, and as a result, was, when released, by no means the film Welles had in mind.

I inssist, however, that it does manage to succeed to a great extent as an intelligent, originally handled thriller. Welles's genius for visual elements -- location, lighting, camera angles, etc, retain their fascination and beauty. A certain viewpoint still pervades the handling of plot and character -- satiric, bitter, increasingly surreal. And, I maintain, Rita Hayworth does "stretch" as an actress, creating, with, admittedly, a lot of help from her husband and his camera, a memorable femme fatale. The high quality of her performance is uniform with the rest of the cast, such as the very fine Everett Sloane.

The is a film not only for fans of Welles, such as myself, but for anyone who enjoys an intelligent film noir,

enticing sexy dip into film noir waters.......2006-09-27

The Lady from Shanghi's reputation is secure as a classic of film noir but then this genre is notoriously disrespected probably because many film noirs are based on dime novels and sound like it; in order to appreciate a film noir, therefore, you have to be able to enjoy the kitschy quality of snappy dime-novel dialogue. But kitsch alone is not what makes (some) film noirs great. What really sets film noir apart from other genres is its striking, even elegant, visual style which often contrasts sharply with its stark subject matter. Film noir has a way of glamourzing corruption, and giving corruption a unique aesthetic allure all its own. Film noir probably owes something to the German Expressionist film masters (Murnau, Lang, Von Stroheim) and the Hollywood grotesques of the 20's and 30's but it absorbs and evolves these influences into a highly refined style of its own. Orson Welles is the undisputed master of the high noir style. All of his films after Magnificent Ambersons mobilize film noir methods and techniques and so Welles' reputation rises and falls with that genre that he did not create but that he perfected.

Film noir came of age during WWII and like many film noirs Lady from Shanghai is about anxieties over race, class, sexuality, and identity and, in this particular noir film, negotiating racial, social, cultural and sexual difference in an increasingly globalized world. The film takes place in several international (Acapulco) and exotic (Chinatown) settings and these strange locales allow Welles to examine how his characters respond to a diverse array of atmospheres and social/cultural settings. Welles himself plays the central character in the film, Michael O'Hara, and to do so he affects an Irish accent (another international touch) that, some critics argue, is supposed to sound false/inauthentic. O'Hara has a way of talking that sounds a bit too self-consciously literary; and though he affects a working class worldliness his yarns sound like they come straight out of Conrad (O'Hara echoes many of Conrad's colonial concerns) and Hemingway (O'Hara echoes Hemingway's anti-Franco sentiments) and so we suspect that this character has spent more time reading and writing stories than in actually working. Whether we believe Michael's Irish brogue is authentic or not we know that he is fond of creating fictions and this casts suspicions on his identity as well as on his version of events that we hear on the voiceover. Furthermore, we can see that his obsession with literature has given him a taste for the romantic and the typically masculine posturing of his favorite literary heroes and instead of making him worldly wise this just makes him all the more gullible when a pretty lady and the promise of a new adventure come along.

Elsa (played by Welles' then-wife Rita Hayworth)identifies Michael as an easy mark the first time they meet. Unlike Michael Elsa actually is worldly and we can tell she's seen and experienced a lot and that she knows a lot about the world (not just read a lot about it) and she sees through Michael's pseudo-brogue and bravura right away and knows exactly how to exploit his romantic tendencies. She sums him up and plays him from the first moment they exchange knowing glances (hers much more knowing than his). Michael prides himself on his independence and his integrity but he just can't help falling for Elsa's pretend innocence and helplessness--its just too good to resist-- and he can't help wanting to come charging to her rescue even though there are signs everywhere that indicate that Elsa is in no need of rescuing. At first Michael resists her job offer but she is a woman who always gets her way and soon Michael is one of her employee/servants just like all of the other men in the film. Michael just can't tear himself away from Elsa's dangerously seductive & corruptive charms that he willingly and perhaps willfully misinterprets as innocence and helplessness only because that version of her makes him feel better about his own true motives. Michael has been hired on as an extra hand on Elsa's husband's yacht and as soon as he steps foot on deck everyone else aboard sizes him up and begins figuring how they can use him to further their own plots. Elsa's husband Bannister is a famous lawyer and both he and his partner Grisby are, like Michael, under Elsa's spell and trying to plot their way out of captivity. As the yacht pulls out of harbor we see the word "Circe" written in bold letters on the yacht's hull.

Elsa's past is a secret only hinted at (all we know is that she was born on an island somewhere in the east & spent some time in Shanghai). She looks like the penultimate American blonde but she is not from America and her cultural reference points are decidely eastern in contrast to Michael's western points of reference; to Michael she represents the unknown and perhaps the unkowable, and this is part of her allure and also what makes her so dangerous. "Elsa" is the prototypical femme fatale and the conventions of the film noir genre tell us that things will not end well for anyone that gets too close but she's just too enticing. The most famous scene of the film has Elsa in a sleek black bathing suit diving off some perilous rocks as if she were accustomed to such danger and as if danger was her natural element. But then she lays down to sunbathe on the rocks and from the relative safety of the boat Michael looking on, anxiously aware of how dangerous she is, can allow himself the comforting illusion that she is vulnerable and that she needs saving and that only he can save her not only from all the other male predators on board, but save her from her own eastern imbued fatalistism.

Elsa is so beautiful that she has all of the men in the film believing exactly what she wants them to believe and all of them believing that they've actually got a chance with her. And the men all slowly lose their head around her. Some of the men talk down to her but still they do what she says and she has all of them plotting against each other while lighting her cigarettes. The film has been criticized for having an impossibly tangled plot but I think the point of the film is that you are never supposed to be certain or not whether Elsa is merely defending herself against the men who want to control her or if Elsa has been in control of all of them (just like she has been in control of Michael) from the start. Even at the end we still want to believe that Elsa is a victim of something, perhaps something from her past that she just can't escape, but since we don't know what her past was we have no ultimate insight into what has been driving her all along nor for that matter do we have any insight into what originary crime or sin has been driving the men all along; all we know is that the sexes and the races and the classes are at odds. Elsa remains an unknown all the way through and Michael once ensnared must realize that he too is an unknown because under her influence he has been forced to act against what he perceived to be his own true nature.

The Lady from Shanghai offers some of the most stunning visuals of any film noir I know of. The Acapulco scenes are especially exciting as the danger and unpredictability of a foreign woman is made especially inviting and exciting in a foreign land. In this film Welles offers the ultimate noir vision of anxiously uncertain men and women attracted to each other but also repelled by what they find themselves attracted to and what they find themselves doing in the name of desire. Its a film noir and that means that the film follows certain recognizable conventions but it does more than simply follow those conventions, it pushes those conventions as far as they have been pushed and explores the nature of those conventions in a more thorough way than any noir before or, arguably, since. By the end of the film the characters have become lost in their own plots and no longer know who they are and this is conveyed brilliantly with Welles use of masks & mirrors in the celebrated and luridly twisted funhouse scene which feels a bit like the famous Dali sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound but is even more disorienting & disconcerting (Spellbound was released in 1945 so it is possible, even likely, that Welles had seen it and that it influenced his own film that was made in 1946 and released in 1948). [In the extra featurette that follows the film we learn that Welles himself painted much of the funhouse props and set.]

There are a lot of bad noirs out there and these give the genre a bad name but the few good ones are among the best films ever made. Welles' reputation would be greater if film noir were better understood and appreciated not as a genre that is as cheap as the dime novels that inspired it but a genre where cinema explores its own methods and techniques. The great directors from Lang & Von Stroheim to Welles & Hitchcock to Godard & Chabrol and the other new wave auteurs have all been attracted to noir for this reason.

A brilliant film. After this film (which was a commerical flop) Welles didn't work in America for ten years and when he did return to America he made Touch of Evil (another brilliant noir film). Touch of Evil also failed to generate revenue and effectively ended Welles career as a mainstream director even though he continued to make independently financed small pictures like Othello, Macbeth, The Trial & Chimes at Midnight.

"It's a bright, guilty world"..."I told you...you know nothing about wickedness".......2006-09-16

"The Lady from Shanghai" crackles with Welles' energy and intelligence inspite of the tampering done during post-production by Columbia with the film. Welles ended up working his advesary Harry Cohn the head of Columbia on this unusual, imaginatively photographed (by the late great Rudolph Mate)noir thriller. This "Lady" is memorable if for nothing else than the amazing fun house scene at the conclusion of the movie.

Michael O'Hara (Welles)is immediately smitten with Rosalie (Rita Hayworth)the wife of the super wealthy Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane in a terrific performance). He ends up employed by Bannister on his yacht putting him close to his wife and making sparks fly with the amoral Rosalie. Money seduces Michael into participating in a faked murder of Bannister's law firm partner Grisby (a great performance by Glenn Anders)which turns from fantasy to reality and making Michael the primary suspect.

Welles' film is full of brilliant visuals, witty dialogue and lovely location work (particularly the sequences set in 1948 San Francisco). The last sequence in the funhouse full of mirrors is brilliant realized. Like Hitchcock Welles' liked to take genre conventions and turn them on their head with inventive, intelligent plots and visual sequences. Where the film goes wrong is in post-production. With the exception of "Citizen Kane" Welles ended up abandoning his babies or had them taken away from him and messed with by studio heads. "The Lady from Shanghai" is not an exception. Welles uses extremely close ups to make us feel as uncomfortable as Michael does about his employers and the situation he finds himself in when he realizes he's been duped.

From the insistence that Welles go back and shoot glamor shot close ups of his soon to be ex-wife Rita Hayworth to meddling in the editing room and the misbegotten musical score (a pity Welles didn't have Bernard Herrmann working on this film)enforced on the film "The Lady from Shanghai" ended up being compromised. A pity that Columbia hasn't tried to dig up the cut footage (if it exists) along with the temp score (they could recreate that based on Welles' notes)that Welles used to help "guide" Heinz Roemheld (who totally ignored Welles' notes and the temp soundtrack) It still manages to a classic Welles film despite all the interference. Roemheld's forte was scores more like the one he composed for "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and he was totally out of his element here.

Columbia includes a fascinating commentary track by Peter Bogdanovich and vintage advertising to compliment this release. I just wish that Columbia had gone the route of Warner with "Citizen Kane" but the extras are pretty good overall. I'd highly recommend this now if Warner would get around to releasing "The Magnificent Ambersons" on DVD I'd be a happy camper...

Average customer rating:

Welles' camera seemed almost to caress Rita Hayworth...
Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth Drama
Still, it IS Welles. . .
enticing sexy dip into film noir waters
"It's a bright, guilty world"..."I told you...you know nothing about wickedness"

The Lady from Shanghai [Region 2]

ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Film Noir | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

( L ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Gilda
Touch of Evil (Restored to Orson Welles' Vision)
Double Indemnity (Universal Legacy Series)
The Big Heat
Kiss Me Deadly

ASIN: B00009V8XU

Amazon.com essential video

Customer Reviews:

Welles' camera seemed almost to caress Rita Hayworth..........2007-01-04

Orson Wells and Rita Hayworth Drama.......2006-12-29

Still, it IS Welles. . ........2006-11-10

enticing sexy dip into film noir waters.......2006-09-27

"It's a bright, guilty world"..."I told you...you know nothing about wickedness".......2006-09-16

Affair In Trinidad [Multi-Language Subtitles, Non-US Format, PAL, Region2, Import]

Average customer rating:

Affair In Trinidad [Multi-Language Subtitles, Non-US Format, PAL, Region2, Import]
Starring: Rita Hayworth , and Glenn Ford
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Subtitles: Finnish, Romanian, Danish, Greek, Spanish, Hindi, Norweigan, French,
Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, English,
Swedish, Arabic, Turkish.
Dubbed Language(s): French, Spanish, Italian

ASIN: B000NDHSEU

Product Description

In this romantic spy thriller, a nightclub performer plys her trade in her husband's Trinidad bar. He is murdered by a notorious spy. Soon afterward, the police ask the widow to try to get close to the killer and gather information. Her work is nearly thwarted when her bumbling brother-in-law appears, looking to bring the killer to justice himself. This film marked the return of bombshell Rita Hayworth who had retired from movies during her marriage to Prince Aly Khan.

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