A famous-enough B-level Welles
work that means you could stretch your Welles-viewing bucket list to about five
titles to include it
[For my “director’s dossier” of
Welles’ films, see here.]
Subsections below:
Caveats
The overall story is a bit routine; and reading it in line with its
genre
Biographical backstory gives some spice for embracing this film
Welles’ career helps us with bearings; the impetus for Lady
A droll/grotesque element involving a law firm
The thickening plot, and the colorful denouement
A mixed-feelings conclusion
[Edits 8/21/15. Edit 8/28/15.]
Caveats
This film poses an unusual problem for my reviewing, but
this sort of thing has happened before. I only had about three days to review
it as much as I could, because of the limits placed on my borrowing the DVD
from a New York State library system (four days is the shorter limit, imposed
by some libraries in the overall network, and in effect here). What I did was
watch, on the 2000 DVD of the film, the extra of scholar and one-time Orson Welles
confidant Peter Bogdanovich talking about the film—I saw this extra three
times; the film itself I saw once all the way through (in two separated bouts),
and a second time only partway through. This means I have more of a
scholarly/abstracted familiarity with the film (as aided by Bogdanovich) than
that of watching it several times through. But somehow this isn’t so bad, and
I’ll explain why.
When Welles films get talked
about in a sort of career-ranging way, The
Lady from Shanghai gets mentioned as if it’s both “one of Welles’s films”
and pretty well known, but it’s never mentioned as one of his best. I myself
found that it was interesting to look at as a Welles scholar—and Welles, of
course, is interesting today from a sort of analytical, scholarly look, as well
as for typical-film enjoyment (including appreciating his unusual esthetics);
and with Welles, often the “about-the-film” DVD extras can be at least as
interesting as the films themselves.
There is a lot of visually
interesting stuff in Lady that
typifies Welles (the shots from near the end with the two-mirror
repeating-image motif is one of the most famous images from all of Welles’
work): he goes beyond what we might expect from this kind of story in terms of
style, and usually this doesn’t detract from it as if it were merely empty
style, but reflects an intelligent man seeing how film can marshal its resources
to go a step further in doing what the medium does best to tell a story.
On the other hand, what makes this film worth reviewing today is as a noir, but not a first-rate example; as
a Welles work, but not first-rate
in that regard either; but also as an example of 1940s films, going beyond the
usual fare visually in a way that can still intrigue and satisfy us today.
The overall story is a bit routine; and reading it in line with its
genre
I thought the film slid along at
a fairly decent pace, but it seemed synthetic a lot of the time—until you got
to the famous “shootout in the hall of mirrors” sequence, which in the film’s
own terms seems the most well-planned and well-executed sequence in it. But for
much of the film—which Bogdanovich describes as one of the notable members of
the class of film noir (from its period of first flowering), and which he says
was made before some of the others—if you compare to it one that may be one of
the very best examples of the genre, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), which came out before it, Lady falls short.
On the 2008 DVD of Touch of Evil that contains all three
versions of that film—and I think Touch
of Evil as a sort of noir is quite superior to Lady—the “preview” version has probably the best set of during-the-film
commentary you can opt to play, by both of Welles scholars Jonathan Rosenbaum
and James Naremore, and in this commentary, Rosenbaum remarks that Touch of Evil didn’t impress him so much
(contrary to the case with Naremore) when he first saw it in the theater, which
he says is probably because he was reading it so much in line with the genre it
was supposed to be in.
I think that, though I wouldn’t make
that sort of assessment about Touch of
Evil myself, I would use that way of criticizing Lady. If you compare Lady with
Double Indemnity, Lady seems flaccid indeed. As with so
many noirs, in Lady there is the
lynchpin of the femme fatale, Elsa (I only got this name from reading the
Wikipedia article on the film after the weekend in later July I saw it and bit
of the immediately following Monday morning) in this case played by Rita Hayworth. There is the man she is already,
socially-acceptably linked with, her husband Arthur Bannister, a
criminal-defense lawyer, played by Everett Sloane.
Then there is the poor sap (Michael O’Hara, played by Welles, rather casting
himself against type here) who is roped into her machinations-of-sorts, an
innocent whom “one is put over on,” and becomes victimized almost like a
Kafkaesque hero, usually involving some murder or other. If you consider these
plot staples, you can follow Lady and
find that it traces the path fairly recognizably.
But with this film—though it has
some visual niceties, and also some relatively banal full-face close-ups
especially of Hayworth, as if rather excessively milking her star status of the
time—it doesn’t seem that all the
details and writing really count for a lot and grip you, as can just about
every minute of Touch of Evil,
especially if you watch it several times over a few years (which is worth
doing). Lady seems puzzling at
times—the labyrinthine way in which the poor sap, Michael O’Hara, is willingly-enough
included in a manipulative murder plot was a bit confusing on my first
viewing—and of course this is one of Welles’ films heavy-handedly edited by the
studio after he got done turning in a rough cut. The result? A story that
sometimes seems standard noir, and sometimes seems to pile up details, whether
visual or not, that you don’t always recognize as to whether they’re so
essential to the story, or just decorative. That helps make the film synthetic,
I thought.
(Sloane, who in Welles’s films
usually cuts a distinctive face and lucid manner of speaking [if nothing else],
is in Lady given two canes, one held
by him along each leg oddly, to walk with as if he is oddly crippled.
Bogdanovich says he did this with Sloane because Welles knew the latter was
really a radio actor, not good with his physical composure or distinctiveness
for film, so Welles gave him something to do to make him stand out physically.
I tell you, as Sloane walks along, he just strikes you as weird.)
Biographical backstory gives some spice for embracing this film
Bogdanovich in the interview of
him is interesting—he mumbles a bit at times, so you have to work to listen to
him, but if you play his discussion a second time, every sentence counts—in
telling not simply about the film, including its admittedly odd qualities (he
is among Welles fans who would count Lady
as among the larger film “canon” today, but inevitably he mentions features of Lady that helpfully convey it as rather
unusual, stylized, and Wellesian, but not among his very greats). Bogdanovich
also tells a lot of backstory, including about Welles’ marriage to Hayworth
(which has value here a bit beyond mere gossip) and how the production fared
(including a month-long shutdown due to Hayworth’s being ill). (The
Welles/Hayworth marriage broke down just before the picture opened; but it
seems, from Bogdanovich’s implications, that Welles made a game try to have
things work out, and that a prime source of the personal problems were
Hayworth’s own personal issues, which included the residue of child abuse she’d
been subjected to when young.)
Notably, the final cut was two
and a half hours long, and the studio cut it down by an hour, quite a
significant cutting. The film was made in 1946 [added 8/28/15: according to Barbara Leaming, in Orson Welles: A Biography (Viking, 1985), p. 336, filming ended in March 1947], but released in 1948; the
beginning titles list 1947 as the copyright date, so apparently postproduction
work went well toward the end of the year following that of production (1946).
The fact that Lady is missing more
than a third of what Welles originally envisioned makes us wonder if his
version would have made more sense, or perhaps if it would have been an hour
more of visually intriguing but synthetic stuff (it does turn out that a lot of
the funhouse sequence was lost, that we have only a precis of this).
Generally as with Touch of Evil, Welles wrote a memo after
viewing the studio’s chopped-down cut, requesting changes in line with his
vision. In the case of Touch of Evil,
in late 1957/early 1958, the studio (Universal) originally honored about 20
percent of his famed 58-page memo on that film, and much later, in 1998 (more
than a decade after Welles’ death), a further reedit was done, putting a new
cut fully in line with the memo. However, with Lady, the studio (Columbia )
didn’t honor his memo at all.
Welles’ career helps us with bearings; the impetus for Lady
The history of Welles’ films, as
Bogdanovich gives a thumbnail sketch of, is that with Citizen Kane (1941), which had no studio butchering, the problem
was that its distribution was interfered with by William Randolph Hearst, on
whom the character of Kane was based; with The
Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the studio (RKO) removed some material, and
reshot a happy ending that seems incongruous tone-wise. The next film Welles
directed, The Stranger (1946), which
Bogdanovich relates Welles considered the least of his films but still
considered his because the studio
didn’t recut it, actually made money. It is a minor Welles film, but definitely
worth a look for those interested in Welles.
Welles was, in effect,
blacklisted (Bogdanovich’s term] among one or more Hollywood studios after the
commercial failures of his earliest two films, but apparently this status was
lifting when he had an idea for another film by 1946.
By the 1946 production year,
Welles was already in the phase of his career where he would take on some
projects in order to finance others (which, we find from the 2005 DVD for F for Fake, meant he took a lot of acting
jobs in order to finance films he was making on his own). (All the following
facts except for some details of Castle’s career are related in Bogdanovich’s discussion
or otherwise on the 2000 Lady DVD.) Welles
was mounting on Broadway a version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, which was expensive, and (per
Bogdanovich) he had no money for costumes. So as an assumed potboiler, he
proposed to Hayworth’s boss at her studio, Harry Cohn,
that Welles write and direct what he anticipated being a minor thriller, an
adaptation of a novel titled If I Die
Before I Wake (by Sherwood King).
William Castle, the director of
later (1950s-60s) shlock pictures and, contrarily, producer of the great Rosemary’s Baby (1968), owned the film
rights to the Sherwood novel (and did some work on the screenplay for what
became Welles’s film); but Welles managed to get the rights acquired for his film (Castle is noted in credits as
one of the producers). Welles wrote the script, and agreed to act in the film
as well as direct; his wife Hayworth’s involvement meant it was a sort of star
vehicle, which wasn’t his original intention. One might conclude this was an
unexpectedly fancy project for Welles to get involved in, just to get money to
finance part of his stage production.
The film production became
elaborate enough, for whatever reasons, that it had no fewer than three
cinematographers (though only one is credited); and of course it was on
location in multiple sites, including Acapulco and San Francisco, which adds to
the visual and vignette-level variety and exoticism of the film. But one could
just as readily say that there is something rather arbitrary about the plot: a
lot of the story revolves around a cruise (allowing shipboard scenes) that
Michael O’Hara takes in filling the ad hoc role of a sort of spontaneously adopted
ship hand, when Hayworth’s character Elsa goes with her wealthy husband (Bannister)
on a trip on their yacht; the favor to O’Hara is ostensibly as repayment for
O’Hara’s fortuitously helping her when she had been attacked by thugs in a city
park. (If this all sounds rather far-fetched, I tried to describe as elegantly
as possible, in as plausible a set of terms as I could, the plot setup, which
is a good example as any of the story peculiarities of this film.)
A droll/grotesque element involving a law firm
Adding to the oddness of the
film is a character—he’s another attorney (who is a firm partner with Bannister),
but he’s certainly weird—named George Grisby, played by Glenn Anders. As a fairly conspicuous, steady element, this
character is presented as an eccentric of sorts, and of course Grisby becomes
the entry point for O’Hara’s getting roped into murder-centered shenanigans. (As
I’ll focus on more later, the aspect of the film’s looking at the
legal-practice world for satirical and spooky-noir possibilities is, on an
important level, one of the most modern and still-relevant features of this
film.)
Anders, whom Welles had liked
from a 1930 work, is led to play up his surface oddness with various ways of
speaking and leering (such as eyeing Hayworth through binoculars), and it isn’t
enough that he seems rather “too weird” for the smoother intents elsewhere in
the film, but huge close-ups of his somewhat homely face (including a spot on
the white of one eye) happen a few times. The result is Welles’ using his
visual sensationalism at turns—which Welles scholars point to as typical of his
innovative ways—to add a sense of dislocation to this film. Thus it goes beyond
the smooth, level-headed, if moody, styling of Billy Wilder and other ace
practitioners of film noir, and Lady becomes
a sort of “eccentric cousin” among the entries in this genre.
On the Monday morning after the
weekend I squeezed this film in, I watched part of the DVD, most importantly scenes
15 through 18 (as numbered by the DVD), and got more of what the murder-plot
was. As it turns out, this film followed the noir template of having a rather
elaborately planned-out murder scheme, and maybe this film’s murder plot is a
little more convoluted than most. I have to say that gleaning it from a viewing
(almost two) was less fun—or there seemed less tasty substance there—than
pulling out all the machinations, subtleties related to the plot, and so on
that you can do with Touch of Evil.
Grisby first seems to want to
tempt Michael into pulling off a fake killing—that Michael has killed Grisby,
but Grisby would really flee the country or such, pointing out that, as a
function of the law (per the script), Michael could produce a confession of
killing Grisby, which becomes the basis
of a declaration of death made about Grisby (so insurance on him can be
collected—following the Double Indemnity
kind of malfeasance), but without Grisby’s body, Michael couldn’t be charged with murder. (This is how the film lays it out;
whether actual state or federal law would have conditioned this sort of thing,
I don’t know.) Spookily, Bannister, in one throwaway shot, tells Michael that
if ever he needs a lawyer, he is available.
Then, a rapid sequence of events
unfolds that starts with Grisby seeming to trigger Michael into doing his
bidding, with Grisby heading off from a shore-club location in a motorboat,
while Michael fires a few to-nowhere gunshots to attract attention that is
essential to staging the fake killing. Michael flees…and Grisby catches up with
him, including accompanying Michael in a car, where Grisby causes the car to
crash into the back of a truck to condition an alibi with respect to the fake
murder. Grisby also wipes blood on Michael….
The thickening plot, and the colorful denouement
In the midst of this mess,
Grisby encounters a private detective (played by Ted de Corsia, the only “marquis” name on the DVD box beyond
the more recognizable stars noted), who lets Grisby know he is onto what Grisby
and others are plotting (whether he is partly bluffing, I don’t
know; I found this scene confusing when I first saw it, and it was only
explained for me later in the Wikipedia article).
Long (or twisted) story short, inaugurating
more tumultuous doings, Grisby shoots the detective, seems to try to pin it on
Michael, and it seems to Michael as if Grisby is (in a more clever, overarching
plot) going to kill Bannister (?)…. Michael hastens on the road (amidst all
this, in visual shots we’re given, Elsa is taking in some of the sordid
developments with a face we can’t entirely read, assuming our not already knowing
how much she is supposed to know all of this)….
And when the law finally catches
up with Michael, it turns out that Grisby really seems to be dead, taken away
on a stretcher. Looking like the picture of an unsuspecting bystander to all
this, Bannister comes out of some big building with his weird handicapped walk,
very much alive. Michael is now about to be tried for murder. And Bannister, we
find, will be his attorney.
The rest of the film is (I think) fairly straightforward plot-wise—that
is, it winds through a trial sequence (played by Welles very pointedly [but in
part] for satire of the excesses of the legal system). Here we see a judge
who’s a bit of a buffoon, and a court process that includes some passing rude
behaviors (like a big sneeze in the courtroom from a juror); the whole idea of
a solemn, well-mannered procedure is intermittently mocked here (though it’s not
always clear whether the satire’s focus is the putative pretentiousness of the
legal process itself or the fallibility or boorishness of people in their roles
in this process).
Most pointedly, an attorney
questioning Elsa on the stand is a good case of an abusive litigator. We
appreciate Welles’ focusing on the potential for hypocrisy of the legal system
(and Bogdanovich, I think it is, comments that Welles had an antipathy toward
lawyers). But Welles will do this kind of satire in a much more tooled,
socially pointed way in Touch of Evil
about a decade later.
Sidebar: Welles gets better at
skewering the errors of the legal process years later. As one measure
of how “topically” well-tooled Touch of
Evil is on the issue of lawyers, one set of details is something that the much-later
Coen brothers could equally well have arranged in a story: we find in Touch of Evil, in a relatively closely
associated set of scenes that the same attorney, Howard Franz, in the fictional
U.S./Mexican border town of Los Robles, has served all of Rudy Linnaker [sp?],
a local construction-company owner; Eddie Farnum (played by Gus Schilling, a
Welles acting regular who also appears once or twice in Lady), who has almost gotten prison for involuntary manslaughter
and now works for Linnaker’s company; most comically, Joe Grandi, the temporary
head of the Grandi family, an Italian clan that operates as a sort of clumsy
gangster family on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border (seeming to deal in
drugs as well as operate more legitimate businesses, like a bar and motel); and
most recently Marcia [sp?], the daughter of Rudy Linnaker, who has been
cohabiting with Manola Sanchez, who becomes the prime suspect in the bombing
murder of Rudy Linnaker, and who—as the key plot driver of the film—is set up
by Hank Quinlan (Welles) in performing his duties as the main detective for the
town. Yet Howard Franz, the local attorney, pointedly does not represent
Marcia’s boyfriend Sanchez, who impetuously (and bitterly) reveals, during the
famous long-take scene in which Quinlan plants evidence on him and has him
arrested, that he doesn’t have an attorney. Welles’ point couldn’t be plainer
in showing that nearly every white male (and occasional female) in town, no
matter how sleazy, can have the services of a local attorney (even when there
is a risk of conflict of interest), but the local Hispanic man who becomes a
criminal suspect, and is relatively poor, can’t get one.
There is a situation of
Michael’s fleeing (a set piece in a kind of Chinese theater I felt was
gratuitous aside from just allowing a visually intriguing few shots), and then
there’s the climax of the movie where Michael tumbles down a big slide in an
amusement park funhouse, and eventually ends up in the hall of mirrors where
the final killing takes place (between who and whom, I’ll leave aside as not to
totally spoil it for you).
When O’Shea is walking off (not
quite into the sunset) at film’s end, making a remark about his being “stupid,”
this doesn’t quite rise to the level of other of Welles’ modern-story films
that include a Shakespearean one-liner or two.
A mixed-feelings conclusion
If one were to look (as film
buffs) at this work (as can readily be done with others of his oeuvre) as a
chance for Welles to milk some potential for cinema out of the exotic locations
he was in, then it’s a feast of various tasty possibilities. The story, though,
is confusing (or dense) at times, and lax at other times. The fact that (as
happens, posing less of a problem, in other Welles films, like Touch of Evil) a lot of plot information
gets shoehorned into a visually complex scene (though it’s not that it can’t be
appreciably read on second or third viewing), here the aquarium scene (between
Welles’ O’Shea and Hayworth’s Elsa) helps show that, throughout the film, you
can find yourself feeling a bit bored at times (in slower moments), then (as
here) needing to play closer attention at others. The inconsistency in story
quality is one reason, I suppose, that this film’s rating by Leonard Maltin as
three out of four stars seems about right.
So this is a good film for your short-ish Welles list to see. But if you
had a chance to see only three of
his, leave this one off.
