The Lady from Shanghai

Orson Welles was acquisitive.  One of his acquisitions was Rita Hayworth, renowned as one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, the pin-up girl whose face and figure adorned a thousand tanks and fighter planes (and was painted on hundreds of bombs) during World War II, and the much-beloved contract player of Harry Cohn, an equally acquisitive tycoon at Columbia Studios.  Welles married his prize but tired of her quickly enough and, after a couple years, the relationship was defunct.  In 1946, Welles finagled her appearance in his idiosyncratic film noir, The Lady from Shanghai -- this was after their marriage had collapsed.  He vandalized Hayworth's carefully cultivated image, forcing her to cut her red hair for the picture and presenting her as a gaudy platinum blonde.  Hayworth responded by delivering an indifferent, even somnambulist performance in Welles' film.  The movie made no sense and Cohn, outraged at the negligence with which his property had been treated, suppressed the film, not releasing it until 1948 and, then, dumping the picture at the bottom of double bills.  Welles didn't care -- he had lost interest in the project well before it was edited and, by the time of picture's release, was unemployable in Hollywood.  His cut was 155 minutes long.  The picture now exists only in an 88 minute version that makes almost no sense.  Cohn reportedly offered $10,000 to anyone who could explain the movie's plot to him.  I think it reasonable to say that The Lady from Shanghai is the most elaborate and baroque revenge ever exacted upon a discarded object of desire. Welles' portrays Hayworth's character as a scarcely sentient schemer, the engineer of an elaborate misshapen murder plot that goes awry because the heroine (if that's what she can be called) is too stupid to understand her own conniving.  Despite all of its flaws and the film's vexed production history, it is one of Welles' most audacious productions and, certainly, fantastically entertaining in spite of itself.  

Welles stars as Mike O'Hara, an Irish sailor with a rich and sweet brogue (although only some of the time -- the accent is sometimes deployed on-cue and other times absent).  At loose ends in Manhattan, O'Hara, a veteran of the war against Franco in Spain, encounters a silky smooth seductress, Elsa Banister.  While she is taxied by horse carriage through Central Park, a band of ruffians attacks the coach, knocks out the coachman, and is assaulting the woman when Welles intervenes and beats up the three bad guys.  (The fight scenes are so poorly staged as to be risible and one suspects that Welles is implying that the whole "meet" has been designed by the femme fatale or her wicked husband to ensnare the poor Irishman in a murder scheme so elaborate that it can't be exactly described, let alone, understood during the movie's relatively short running time.)  O'Hara ends up as the skipper of Arthur Banister's yacht as it sails around the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and, then, up the beautiful west coast of Mexico toward San Francisco where the last half of the movie takes place.  Banister is a sleazy shyster, an unbeatable trial lawyer and he's played by Everett Sloane in a  plummy, over-ripe performance as cuckold and schemer.  I think Sloane's Arthur Banister is supposed to be homosexual because he's equipped a law partner named Grisby who seems both gay and completely demented.  Grisby's face is a blur of greasy sweat and he has little piggy eyes and an insinuating, simpering manner -- he speaks in a kind of affected whine, taunts everyone near him, and, obviously, despises Banister's wife who seems have displaced him, at least temporarily, in the affections of his boss, the crooked shyster.  (In a couple scenes, Grisby seems poised to actually lick Sloane's face but mercifully Welles cuts away).  On the coast near Acapulco, Banister stages a big picnic -- it's like one of Kane's  parties on the seaside in Citizen Kane.)Banister ignores his beautiful wife and encourages her to seduce O'Hara; Elsa pours verbal vitriol on her husband and his boyfriend, Grisby; Grisby says that the world is going to end in a hail of nuclear bombs and tries to hire O' Hara (who has killed a man in Spain) to actually help him commit suicide -- the scene in which Grisby tries to get O'Hara to accept $5000 to kill him is shot on a cliff with the two men almost embracing next to a horrifying-looking precipice.  The yacht docks in Sausalito, a nightmare location of decaying wharves and brothels, and there's more scheming in which Grisby ends up murdered along with another of Banister's flunkies.  O'Hara is framed for the crime, jailed, and, then, tried in the most utterly bizarre courtroom scene in film history.  Welles has no interest in the jury trial and, so, he stages the proceeding as a grotesque carnival of horrors and idiocy.  The case is a circus with the attorney's showboating in egregious ways, a grimacing judge who seems to have no control over the trial, jurors who spend the whole case apparently giggling or sneezing explosively, the whole thing highlighted by a scene in which O'Hara escapes after an operatically destructive fist fight in the Judge's chambers.  O'Hara has taken some kind of medication, apparently as a suicide attempt -- this makes no sense -- and he's in a delirium.  This authorizes Welles to stage the last fifteen minutes in his most flamboyant, surrealist style -- O'Hara hides in a Chinese opera house in Chinatown (so that Welles can show us an exotic song-and-dance number complete with dueling warriors and a display of martial arts.)  Everyone knows the ending but, in context, it remains astonishing -- O'Hara hides in a amusement park fun-house, careens down a hundred and fifty foot serpentine slide, wanders among uncanny exhibits and, then, runs into Elsa in the hall of mirrors.  Arthur Banister, a sinister cripple ("not even a man" someone sneers) appears on his crutches.  Everyone shoots at everyone else -- except for O'Hara who isn't armed other with engaging, if intermittent, accent..  Someone or, as they say in the law, "some several" get killed and that's the end of the picture.  (No explanation, as far as I can see, as to how Arthur Banister, as crippled as FDR with metal braces on his legs, managed to figure out that his wife and O'Hara were going to meet at the Fun House for the final shootout and, then, manages to get himself there as quickly as he does.)  The fireworks in the grotesque trial scene are, almost as wild and showy as the gunfight among the mirrors (a shoot-em-up that Welles cut to 10 minutes in his version and that, now, appears as an entrancing and shapely four minute tour de force).  Banister, in violation of all known legal ethics, defends O'Hara, who, of course, he hates (but also sort of admires) for cuckolding him.  The DA, knocked into a corner, by the legal shenanigans of the shyster, has to demand the right to call Banister (his adversary) as a hostile witness.  After examining Banister to no real import, Banister, then, demands to cross-examine himself, blithely putting argumentative questions to himself  to which he then proceeds to give equally argumentative answers.  It's utterly ridiculous but lots of fun.

The film is full of rococo images:  there's an aggressive dachshund, a scene in an aquarium in which O'Hara and Elsa embrace in silhouette in front of tanks full of huge sea-turtles and writhing octopuses.  The shoot-out in House of Mirrors has an odd, almost metaphysical aspect -- Elsa Banister's huge image overwhelms Bannister and he appears to be a figment of her own malign imagination.  Everything seems to be taking place inside someone's fever imagination.  O'Hara is just a dupe and exists in order to deliver showy Shakespearian soliloquies about human nature and tells a story from Melville (uncredited) about sharks in a feeding frenzy ultimately devouring themselves.  These speeches are tremendous but don't much fit in with the pulpy atmosphere of the movie.  Mexico is called "a bright guilty world".  O'Hara says that he's "independent" but not "independently wealthy" noting that poverty is "not sanitary."  The bitchy repartee on the yacht in Mexico with Elsa pouting in her white bathing suit, Grisby and Arthur Banister boozing it up while O'Hara looks on longingly are kitsch at a sublime level -- it's like Beat the Devil as written by Edward Albee-- and extremely funny.  Welles wants to do everything.  He wants the film to have a jangly, expressionistic Cabinet of Caligari vibe but with periodic opportunities for the characters to exhale gorgeously written Shakespearian soliloquies.  The different moving parts in the picture don't ever fit together -- Welles vanity and Hayworth's exhausted somnolence, the alarmingly literate arias of quasi-Shakespearean dialogue and the pulp fiction aspects of the plot.  It doesn't make any sense -- indeed, several of the Wellesian aphorisms are gibberish.  But the film is extraordinary on the technical level of spectacle, unlike anything of this kind before the similarly nightmarish, but more coherent Touch of Evil  made about a decade later.  And it's hard to fault the incomprehensible plot -- Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep has an equally incoherent narrative and its not nearly as fun.  Welles lost interest in the project long before it was done, walked off the production, and others had to recut the film into the form in which we now know it.