The post-mortem on Orson Welles' oeuvre has taken us down many a subterranean alley, but one of his most recent films to be canonized upon rediscovery was a big studio thing made in good commercial faith. As Peter Bogdanovich tells us--more than once--on the DVD release of 1948's The Lady From Shanghai, Welles promised a picture to Columbia head Harry Cohn in exchange for completion financing on a Broadway adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, and their Faustian bargain briefly lifted a (sometimes self-imposed) Hollywood blacklist on Welles that seemed to reinstate itself every time he directed a movie.

Cohn later remarked that The Lady From Shanghai was the last time he'd bankroll a project whose lead was also the co-writer, producer, and director--he couldn't fire anybody that way. And Welles offered plenty of justification for Cohn's negativity: he didn't, after all, stop bombshell Rita Hayworth, star of the box office smash Gilda, from cutting her hair to bits and dying it Hitchcock platinum, rendering her virtually unrecognizable to fans. (Bogdanovich adds that nor was it Welles' suggestion to ruin her locks in the first place, but Hayworth's.) As well, The Lady From Shanghai initially clocked in at over two hours, a decidedly gratuitous length for a noir thriller. More scissors took care of that, which was unfortunately nothing new for Welles. (Let's not even start hearts breaking again by recounting the Magnificent Ambersons debacle here.)

Fifty-two years after the fact, The Lady From Shanghai is receiving better notices than it did upon its theatrical release, when it failed to ignite the public's imagination. But if we can remove those rose-tinted, 20/20 hindsight glasses for a moment, it must be writ that the film's editing scars have not entirely healed over. The stylistic moxie that Welles brings to the table ends up seeming compensatory--which was not the intention--for a thin screenplay rather than all of a piece. Watching The Lady From Shanghai is tantamount to a pan-and-scan video presentation: we're often left contemplating what we just missed as opposed to what we just saw. Surely no story flips from courtroom hysterics to funhouse hysterics on a dime by design.

Welles stars as Michael O'Hara, a thuggish Irish seaman who rescues Elsa Bannister (Welles' then-estranged wife, Hayworth), an enigmatic blonde, from an attempted rape and accepts a grateful invite to work on her crippled husband's yacht. Mr. Bannister (Everett Sloane) also welcomes unstable law partner Grisby (a wily Glenn Anders) aboard, and in private, Grisby offers hard-luck (and in love, with the woman he saved) O'Hara $5000 to be the scapegoat in Grisby's plan to fake his own death. Thereafter, the plot thickens to a pea-soup fog, and character motivations--beyond genre norms (jealousy! betrayal!)--become increasingly inscrutable. Yet I can't deny the impact of the film's visuals, especially in its Hall of Mirrors climax, without which there would surely be no similar set-piece in either Enter the Dragon or Woody Allen's underrated Manhattan Murder Mystery.

Welles is that rare breed of theatre vet who transcends any medium, be it the movies or radio drama, instead of transposing stage techniques to the various forms. Hayworth, too, is a sight to behold in The Lady From Shanghai, just teeming with a sensual melancholy--especially in a lone song number called "Please Don't Kiss Me." (She performs it almost as a lullaby to herself.) Bogdanovich is right to worship Welles; it's only too bad that Welles' lifelong artistic persecution has left so many asterisks in his filmography.

The Lady From Shanghai has been preserved on DVD relatively unpolished. All kinds of print damage mars the black-and-white, full-frame image (its overscan-unfriendly compositions hugging the sides of the frame during a bar scene in chapter four), and choppy splices abound. However, the contrast is rich, often brilliant, and an overall clarity excites our eyes. The Dolby 2.0 mono sound exhibits acceptable fidelity. (Note that a quick perusal of the closed captions revealed multiple drop-outs in the text on my preview copy.) In addition to vintage advertising, trailers (for The Lady From Shanghai, A Man For All Seasons, The Last Hurrah, and The Loves of Carmen), and Welles/Hayworth bios, the disc features a Laurent Bouzereau-produced, twenty-minute chat with Bogdanovich, who wrote the book on Welles (literally: This Is Orson Welles), and a commentary by same in which he reads from said tome. While Bogdanovich's lack of humility shines through (the first gossip he spills amid the commentary is that a monograph he penned on Welles was hailed by Orson himself as "the truest words ever written about me in the English language"), the anecdotes and historical information he provides are frequently priceless.-Bill Chambers

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
87 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
Aspect Ratio(s)
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English Mono,
French Mono,
Spanish Mono,
Portuguese Mono
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, French
DVD-9
Region One
Columbia Tri-Star

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Published: October, 2000