The Girl From Shanghai

[Elenio Guardado]

TheLady from Shanghai is a 1947 American film noir produced and directed by Orson Welles that stars Rita Hayworth, Welles and Everett Sloane.[2] Welles's screenplay is based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King.[3]

Although the Columbia Pictures film initially received mixed reviews, it has grown in stature over the years. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[4][5]

Irish sailor Michael O'Hara meets a woman named Elsa as she rides a horse-drawn coach in Central Park. Three hooligans waylay the coach. Michael rescues Elsa and escorts her home. Michael reveals he is a seaman and learns Elsa and her husband, disabled criminal defense attorney Arthur Bannister, are newly arrived in New York City from Shanghai. They are on their way to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. Michael, attracted to Elsa despite misgivings, agrees to sign on as an able seaman aboard Bannister's yacht.

They are joined on the boat by Bannister's partner, George Grisby, who proposes that Michael "murder" him in a plot to fake his own death. He promises Michael $5,000 and explains that since he would not really be dead and since there would be no corpse, Michael could not be convicted of murder (reflecting corpus delicti laws at the time). Michael agrees, intending to use the money to run away with Elsa. Grisby has Michael sign a confession.

On the night of the crime, Sydney Broome, a private investigator who has been following Elsa on her husband's orders, confronts Grisby. Broome has learned of Grisby's plan to murder Bannister, frame Michael, and escape 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 ground to draw attention to himself. Meanwhile, Broome, mortally wounded but still alive, asks Elsa for help. He warns her that Grisby intends to kill her husband.

Michael makes a phone call to Elsa, but finds Broome on the other end of the line. Broome warns Michael that Grisby was setting him up. Michael rushes to Bannister's office in time to see Bannister is alive, but that the police are removing Grisby's body from the premises. The police find evidence implicating Michael, including his confession, and take him away.

At trial, Bannister acts as Michael's attorney. He feels he can win the case if Michael pleads justifiable homicide. During the trial, the incompetent judge quickly loses control of the proceedings. Bannister learns of his wife's relationship with Michael. He ultimately takes pleasure in his suspicion that they will lose the case. Bannister also indicates that he knows the real killer's identity. Before the verdict, Michael escapes by feigning a suicide attempt (swallowing pain relief pills Bannister takes for his disability), causing a commotion in which he slips out of the building with the jury for another case. Elsa follows and she and Michael hide in a Chinatown theater. Elsa calls some Chinese friends to meet her. As Michael and Elsa wait and pretend to watch the show, Michael realizes that she killed Grisby. Michael passes out from the pills he took just as Elsa's Chinese friends arrive; they carry the unconscious Michael to an empty 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 that Elsa had to kill Grisby for her own protection.

During a shootout in a hall of mirrors ("the Magic Mirror Maze"), Elsa is mortally wounded and Bannister is killed. Heartbroken, and ignoring Elsa's pleas to save her life, Michael leaves presuming that the events which have unfolded since the trial will clear him of any crimes. He contemplates, "Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget her. Maybe I'll die trying."

In the summer of 1946, Welles was directing Around the World, a musical stage adaptation of the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, with a comedic and ironic book 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 financed it. When he ran out of money and urgently needed $55,000 to release costumes that 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, and direct a film for Cohn for no further fee.

As Welles told it, on the spur of the moment, he suggested the film be based on a book that he happened to see in front of him during his call with Cohn, one a girl in the theatre box office was reading at the time. Welles had never read it.[6] However, according to the daughter of William Castle, it was her father who had purchased the film adaptation rights for the novel and who then asked Welles to pitch it to Cohn, with Castle hoping to receive the directoral assignment himself. She described her father as greatly respecting Welles's talents, but feeling nonetheless disappointed at being relegated to serve merely as Welles's assistant director on the film.[7]

Welles was appalled at the musical score, and he was particularly aggrieved by the cuts in the climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse at the end of the film. Intended as a climactic tour-de-force of editing and production design, the scene was cut to less than three minutes out of an intended running time of twenty minutes. As with many of the films over which Welles did not have control over the final cut, the missing footage has not been found and is presumed to have been destroyed. Surviving production stills show elaborate and expensive sets that were built for the sequence and which were entirely cut from the film.[10]

The film was considered a disaster in the U.S. at the time of its release, although the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors has since become one of the touchstones of film noir. Not long after the film's release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce. A remake of the film came close to production at the turn of the century from a screenplay written by Jeff Vintar, based both on Welles's script and the original pulp novel, produced by John Woo and Terence Chang, and starring Brendan Fraser, who wanted Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones to co-star. Although the screenplay was considered highly successful, and Fraser was coming off the highly praised Gods and Monsters, the project was abandoned when the head of Sony Pictures, Amy Pascal, decided to concentrate on teen films.[citation needed]

In addition to the Columbia Pictures studios, the film was partly shot on location in San Francisco. It features the Sausalito waterfront and Lee Kahn's Valhalla waterfront bar and cafe,[12] 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-at-the-Beach amusement park at Ocean Beach for the hall of mirrors scene, for which interiors were shot on a soundstage.

Other scenes were filmed in Acapulco. The yacht Zaca, on which 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 at a cantina in Acapulco.[13]

Among retrospective reviews, Time Out Film Guide 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."[18] One recent book on film noir praises the film for its pervasive atmosphere of malaise and its impressive, extraordinary technical mastery.[19] David Kehr has subsequently declared the film as a masterpiece, with him calling it "the weirdest great movie ever made."[20]

In the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound poll, six critics each ranked it one of the 10 greatest films of all time.[21] Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports the film has an 85% approval rating based on 52 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Energetic and inventive, The Lady from Shanghai overcomes its script deficiencies with some of Orson Welles's brilliantly conceived set pieces."[22]

Despite these logistical challenges, Welles brought the production in early and under budget. But Columbia demanded major reshoots and edits, resulting in overruns and a picture very different from the one he intended. Reportedly the iconic funhouse sequence that ends the film was cut down from 20 minutes to three.

The final funhouse sequence is indeed quite memorable. The house of mirrors, besides being visually stunning, is an apt metaphor for the many different ways we perceive others and are perceived. Bannister and Elsa shoot each other fatally and Michael, the only one who has never pretended to be other than that which he is, escapes unharmed.

\u201CThe Lady from Shanghai\u201D is one of those movies that has been studied and written about almost continually since the day it came out (and was a critical and commercial flop). I\u2019m surprised no one\u2019s produced a documentary about its making, which encompasses some of Golden Age Hollywood\u2019s greatest creative legends and autocratic missteps.

Let\u2019s start with: Orson Welles didn\u2019t even want to make it. He needed some money to continue a major stage musical he was producing and convinced Columbia Pictures to finance it in exchange for directing and starring in a movie. Despite his travails with the studios, including the virtual dismemberment of \u201CThe Magnificent Ambersons,\u201D he was still a hot commodity, including the financial success of 1946\u2019s \u201CThe Strangers.\u201D

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