The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

In the summer of 1946 needing a last minute cash influx to pay for costumes in his stage production of Around the World in Eighty Days, Orson Wells arranged with Columbia studio head Harry Cohn to direct a film adaptation of a book he hadn't even read (If I Die Before I Wake by Sherman King) in exchange for a $50,000 advance. The film that resulted from that deal, while less ambitious then Citizen Kane, would be saturated with the Wellsion style, almost too the point of self parody. The visuals, the casting (with the notable exception of Rita Hayworth), the melancholy mood, weird characters, and winking sense of humor would all combine with an almost indecipherably complex plot and result in a film that left Cohn flummoxed and more then a little bit irritated.

Into this idiocentric project would come, by her own insistence, Rita Hayworth, Columbia's biggest star at the time. Hayworth was then in a failing marriage with Wells and insisted she be included in the film hopping that their working together would help the marriage; it didn't they were divorced the next year. Hayworth made some sacrifices for her role, she was not playing her usual care-free flirty type, but instead a sort of low key fem-fatal; and to Cohn's frustration cut her signature long red main and appeared instead as a short haired blond.

The plot of the film has Wells playing a Irish seaman (complete with accent) who saves a rich young trophy wife from a possibly staged mugging in Central Park. He takes the woman (Hayworth of course) back home where she informs him that she is about to leave with her wealthy husband on a long Yacht trip through the Panama Canal to California, and would like to offer him a job there on. Wells senses that it wouldn't be a wise idea to go and turns the offer down; the next day Hayworth's husband, a prominent lawyer (Everett Sloane) who looks like Marty Feldman and for some reason sports crutches, tracks Wells down and essentially forces him into taking the job on the condition that he will hire two of his friends as well.

The Yacht trip is awkward, Wells, Hayworth, Sloane and his smiley end-of-the-world obsessed law partner Glenn Anders, as well as a mysterious crewman who turns out to be a PI hired by Sloane (Ted de Corisa). There's tension, somethings off, they all seem to recognize it, and even though they don't address it openly, recognize that everyone else recognizes it. The plot is not clear, we know a somethings afoot, but it comes down to a question of whose plotting with who to kill whom? It is Big Sleep complicated.

Eventually they get to San Fransisco, Wells against his better judgment has fallen for Hayworth and somebodies murdered. Wells of course is the prime suspect but with a little police work I think it would be easy to see that it wasn't him, but the plot demands he stand trial so he is; to be defended of course by Sloane, who may or may not want him to go free. Orson Wells reportedly hated lawyers and he has fun poking holes in the legal balloon throughout that court sequences. Senseless squabbles between the lawyers, plainly gimmicky arguments, a largely impotent judge, and a juror who keeps sneezing. When the verdict is set to be read Wells mounts a sudden escape, scenes in a Chinese opera, and (iconicly) a house of mirrors follow, and in narration Wells admits hes acted pretty dumb.

Its a strange trip, noirish in many ways but also rather Camus. I recommend.

Great