Orson Welles Week Might Have Been Better Off Abandoning Ship

Odd thing about The Lady from Shanghai: Internet Movie Database says Welles was the director, but that he was uncredited. And no one else was credited as director. Not sure what to make of that.

I wouldn't call it one of Welles' stronger efforts, ranking well behind the other films of his I've watched in the last week. It has the bog-standard plot about a poor gullible guy (Welles), who falls in love with a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth), married to an old, physically infirm, cruel man. Michael O'Hara ends up serving on Mr. Bannister's boat for a cruise down the Pacific coast, which doesn't help to diminish the attraction between himself and Elsa Bannister. An attraction which is plain to everyone around them, including Mr. Bannister and his legal partner, George Grisby. O'Hara would love to take Elsa away from all this, but he's a poor man, traveling the world in hopes of learning something he can turn into a novel. Then Grisby asks O'Hara to kill him, sort of, in exchange for 5 grand. O'Hara, like a dope, agrees, and things spiral down for him shortly thereafter.

I think I might care more for Michael if he were more obviously a fool, but he isn't. He has a long speech, to the Bannisters and Grisby, about how he once saw sharks go into such a frenzy they not only ate each other, they started tearing at themselves. it was the ugliest thing he'd ever seen, before these three people he stood before. He's under no illusions of what these people are, yet he throws himself in among them. For all his desire to "save" Elsa, she understands more than he does, and sees how blind he's being. Given the story, I guess we have to consider everything she says to him as really designed to spur him on, rather than to save him. The beautiful princess, willing to suffer herself, but not willing to see him suffer. Again though, he'd seen this, and understood it, and went ahead anyway.

Well, he did say that when starts out to make a fool of himself, nothing can stop him until it's done.

This film didn't seem to have Welles' usual play with light and shadow, which is why I thought he didn't direct it. It does have some interesting shots. We observe Grisby watching Elsa swimming through a looking glass, and we know what he's looking at because she's reflected in the lens at the end. The other one came as Grisby tells O'Hara he wants him to kill him. The camera's been maintaining a distance during their conversation, as they wind their way through Acapulco. Now, it moves in, sitting a foot or so above them and off to the side, like we're peering over a ledge to eavesdrop. The two are standing very close together, a few inches between them at most, squeezed into the shot together. They'd walked to the end of a overlook, and all we see behind them is the surf crashing against the cliffsides. The whole thing is very furtive, covert, but also dangerous. Michael's on the edge of the precipice, right next to the guy that seems so eager to go over himself.

The Lady from Shanghai has its moments, but on the whole, I'd advise watching any of the other films I've reviewed this week if you're in need of an Orson Welles fix.