The Lady from Shanghai could be set in that very same digitless town. There ain't no heroes, only fools pretending to be heroes in a world of such corruption that to merely not act on your bad instincts makes you a knight-in-shining-armor, like Michael O'Hara in this film. Michael makes a living, but it's a rootless, unstable one, so when he comes across the damsel-in-distress, Elsa Bannister, he comes to her rescue and finds himself in a trap not that much different in tone than the that of the ruffians who tried to rob her. He's floundering...in a sea of sharks.
The movie itself is something of a hot mess, with whiffs of desperation and exploitation. From its fabled origins—Welles needed money to get costumes for a stage production out of storage and so he called Columbia head-boss Harry Cohn to get the cash with the offer to direct a story he'd found (actually owned and suggested by William Castle...yes, that William Castle) for free, starring Columbia's big bankable star (and, at the time, Welles' wife) Rita Hayworth—to the head-office controversies over Hayworth's change of hair-style for it, to the studio's and Cohn's insistence on extensive, expensive re-shoots, it's a wonder the film doesn't look like it was put through a grinder. The re-shoots, mostly glossy glamor shots of Hayworth and a lot of studio-based things in front of process screens, clash with the dark, moody lighting that Welles was intending. Then, there was the insertion of a rather needless song with its constant presence in the film's score, and the erratic editing—Welles was trying to do it in long takes, evidently, but you'd never know it now—all of it makes it something of a frenetic, feverish watch.
Welles' original rough cut was 155 minutes. The film—after the demanded re-shoots and extensive editing—now comes in at 87 minutes. You can see some of the dialog cuts in this scene (this is another taken from those "Classic Scene" articles culled from Premiere Magazine) struck out from a Welles draft ("For Estimating Purposes"), dated August 17, 1946 under the title "Take This Woman" with the sub-title being the original book's title "If I Die Before I Wake." There is a lot on the cutting room floor, including sequences from the final memorable "Hall of Mirrors" finale, which was supposed to be three times as long... resulting in little continuity hiccups like, in this sequence, where Welles' O'Hara disappears from a shot before he actually leaves the scene. And one gets the sense that a same shot is just chunked in over and over at times to cover dialog edits or rough transitions.
This extensive studio re-tinkering results in a strange dynamic between Welles' out-there staging and a more traditional-looking "studio look", where one is amazed by some of what one is seeing and then let down by something that looks a little more perfunctory, like switching channels within the same movie, as if studio hesitancy threw in cold water within a hot bath. It's an odd push-pull of a filmmaker pushing the envelope and the powers-that-be insisting on a more traditional approach.
And yet. And yet.
It's still memorable, still sticks in the mind, still does things that you'd never see in movies for their weirdness, their disorienting effects, and that goes out of its way to challenge the safe way of telling stories and rebel against the factory-like conveyor-belt way of making studio movies. The Lady from Shanghai is like a feature-length "spanner in the works" of the old Hollywood system and showed what could be.
And, for validation, in 2018, The Lady from Shanghai was voted into the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
I'll say.
The Set-up: Michael O' Hara (Orson Welles) is a sailor, a man of his own principles that, in a film-noir world (which this is), would qualify him to be called a patsy, a "useful idiot." He rescues a woman (Rita Hayworth) in a park robbery, and her interest in him (and he in her), gets him in the employ of the yacht of her husband, criminal attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), while they complete their journey from Shanghai via New York to San Francisco. But, he doesn't know the trip would be getting him into hot water—hotter than what the tropics offer— and his "cushy" job turns into one with rough seas, given his attraction to the boss' wife and the unscrupulousness of Bannister and his greasy law-partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders). The job could be murder.
Action.
O'Hara: That's right, sir.
GRISBY: Here's your drink, fella.
O'HARA: Thank you, Mr. Grisby.
BANNISTER: You can call him George.
O'HARA: I'd rather not.
BANNISTER: Call him what you like. He won't do anything about it. George used to be some sort of athlete...you know, polo or rhumba...But George is too fat nowadays to object to anything. At the Stork Club I hear even the busboys insult him.
BANNISTER: Oh, but,
O'HARA: It isn't fair? -- And why not?
BANNISTER: You're bound to lose the contest.
O'HARA: I know enough.
BANNISTER: (with demoniac smugness) Please, love, I have my pride.
The Lady from Shanghai is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Columbia Home Entertainment.
90 minutes of stock footage that was shot on location, and which was subsequently used in the re-shoots
...and for other Columbia pictures.
The boat, by the way, is Errol Flynn's, who insisted on being on-board whenever it was filmed.
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