The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray Review
That was no lady, that was his wife.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 1, 2014
Orson Welles. The name just sits there: immutable, unapproachable, yet also unavoidable. Is there any other name in
cinema which evokes such a mixture of awe and despair? Welles, the
enfant terrible who burst upon the film
scene with
Citizen Kane, which is
still considered by many to be the finest film ever made. Welles, who with that film offended the sensibilities not only of
powerful opinion shapers but also (perhaps even more perilously) those within the film industry. Welles, who then
quickly saw his career hobbled by interlopers who repeatedly wrested control of his projects from him, remaking them in
their own preconceived images of what they deemed to be more "appropriate".
The Lady from Shanghai
represents what is arguably Welles' last attempt to work within (what Welles considered) the confines of the so-called
studio system. Though he was estranged from her at the time, his soon to be ex-wife Rita Hayworth agreed to star in a
hastily put together Welles project, which Welles himself wanted to do only to raise funds to help pay debts associated
with his
stage production, a gargantuan musical version of
Around the World in 80 Days. (The show's
producer, one Mike Todd, would go on to produce an all star, big budget film adaptation a decade or so later,
sans the song score.) Welles, who of course was one of the world's great
raconteurs, insisted
(according to the commentary
by Peter Bogdanovich included on this Blu-ray as a supplement) that he
came up with the idea on the spot, after phoning Harry Cohn (head of Columbia, where Hayworth was under contract) to
raise money, and seeing a nearby paperback book stand in front of the phone booth. Welles, according to this perhaps
fanciful "memory" (especially since it doesn't exactly jibe with other accounts of how this project got underway), simply
chose one of the
books from the display and insisted to Cohn that it was a hot property and
that Welles would do the film for $50,000 (not so coincidentally the exact amount he needed to pay for the stage show's
costumes). Whether or not this is actually how the project was born is at least somewhat debatable, but it set Welles
up to work on a relatively high budget and high visibility project for one of Hollywood's major studios, something he
would never again quite achieve after this film, with the possible exception of
Touch of Evil, which was shot on nothing approaching the
budget Welles enjoyed with
The Lady from Shanghai.
The Lady from Shanghai exploits one of the all time classic
noir tropes by positing an irresistible
femme
fatale who leads a hapless schmuck down the garden path toward what is usually his own destruction. In this
particular case, Welles takes a few detour paths through the weeds—literally, in the film's opening sequence, when
Welles'
character Michael O'Hara rescues lovely blonde Elsa (Rita Hayworth) from some toughs in Central Park. There are
obviously
sparks between the two, even though Elsa is married to crippled attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane). When it
turns
out Michael has a sailing background, both Bannister and Elsa encourage him to tag along on the Bannisters' yacht as a
kind of bosun.
At this point
The Lady from Shanghai begins a rather perilous journey into competing murder plots and various
shifting allegiances. Bannister's sweaty partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders, whom Welles seems to delight in filming in
extreme close-up) ultimately shows up for the ride and he proposes to Michael that Michael should help Grisby fake his
own death,
which will result in a handsome payday for Michael, allowing him to take off with Elsa. What's
really going on is
of
course considerably more complex, and Michael soon finds himself ensnared in an increasingly complex web of deceit.
A lot of analysts through the years have claimed that
The Lady from Shanghai doesn't make any sense, a result
of massive reshoots and ultimate devastating edits ordered by Harry Cohn after Welles had wrapped principal
photography. While the film is incredibly dense and no doubt over convoluted, it
does make sense—maybe not
much, but there is a through line that can be followed with a little effort. The film repeatedly utilizes fish motifs,
referring to sharks in several instances and in one case (courtesy of O'Hara's voiceover narration), mentioning that our
would-be hero has been "hooked" himself, and that can provide a worthwhile key to unlock some of the film's more
recondite plot points. Elsa, Bannister and Grisby are indeed all sharks circling each other, waiting for one of them to
falter for a moment so that a kill can be made. Things are further complicated by a supporting character named Broome
(Ted de Corsia), who initially is identified as an employee of the Bannisters, but who turns out to have a secret agenda
of his own. Broome might be thought of as the chum in the middle of the circling predators, leading to their feeding
frenzy. In this formulation, O'Hara might be thought of as some poor swimmer who is simply swept into the maelstrom
by the resulting whirlpool.
As with virtually every post-
Kane Welles film, there is the film Welles wanted to make and the one that ended up
on the screen. Welles was such a forceful visionary that even Cohn's ordered revisions can't completely stamp out the
primal genius that was behind the film.
The Lady from Shanghai is rife with odd framings, Welles' almost
patented use of deep focus and some of the most interesting editing of any late forties
noir. Perhaps the most
piquant example of Welles' anachronistic approach is in the film's least
noir-ish scene, an extended trial
sequence toward the end of the film which seems to have been ported in from one of Luis Buñuel's surreal comedies.
That's followed by what
could have been one of Welles' most distinctive extended segments, a hallucinatory trip
through a carnival funhouse in what might rightly be seen as echoing the Salvador Dali designed dream sequences from
Alfred Hitchcock's
Spellbound (it's
interesting to note that the podcast included on this Blu-ray as a supplement mentions
The Lady from Shanghai
as having influenced much of Hitch's output in the fifties). This particular sequence was hacked to smithereens by Cohn,
but the few minutes that are left are still among the most striking moments in the annals of film, let alone
noir.
The film is a bit more problematic from a performance standpoint, at least by Welles himself, whose overly broad Irish
brogue becomes more and more of a distraction as the film goes on. Hayworth is actually quite good in a fairly
understated yet entirely seductive characterization. The film's true acting honors probably belong squarely to bug eyed
Everett Sloane, who makes Bannister both a buffoon and a mesmerizing villain, and Anders, who fairly oozes
smarminess throughout the film's extended central section.
The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray, Video Quality
The Lady From Shanghai is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of The TCM Vault Collection (though this is a Sony-
Columbia property) with a VC-1 encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. You all might want to just get out the torches and
pitchforks right now, for I have a feeling my assessment of this transfer may generate its fair share of naysayers. I am, in
a
word, a bit underwhelmed. Why, you may well ask? Well, first of all, this was evidently (or at least
reportedly)
sourced
off the original camera negative and given a 4K scan. Second of all, this is, as mentioned above, a Sony-Columbia title, a
studio which under the inspired mentorship of Grover Crisp has proven itself a remarkable (maybe
the most
remarkable) curator of its assets catalog, especially with regard to their matriculation into high definition. And so let me
state up front part of my disappointment here is no doubt due to
expectations. Is there anything downright
horrible about this transfer? No, and in fact parts of it look great—it
actually is at least marginally
cleaner
than the old DVD release, and it features well modulated gray scale and some impressively deep blacks, as a glance
at
the screenshots accompanying this review will prove. But this simply does not have
quite the luster, the sheen,
and especially
the sharpness and clarity that we've come to expect from 4K scans of primary elements held by Columbia. It also has
occasionally problematic
contrast and image depth issues, as well as a slightly variable grain field (beyond understandable issues with opticals).
The fact that this title was "passed off" (for
want of a better term) to The TCM Vault Collection may indicate some inherent issues with the elements, but I'm more
prone
to point to
a
single layer disc and some fairly anemic bitrates (only occasionally ever rising much above 20 Mbps, with only a handful of
moments above 30 Mbps) that may (emphasis
may)
account for at least some of the issues here. (Some have pointed to the ostensibly less effective VC-1 codec, but I'm not
an
AVC elitist; I've seen many great looking transfers encoded via VC-1.) There is absolutely no doubt that some of the
softness and roughness on display is due to the film's reliance on multi-pass opticals; huge swaths of this film feature
literally
minutes
of dissolves and segues, something that will inherently add some problems. But the overall look here, while certainly
generally pleasing and just as certainly a step up from the DVD (especially in terms of damage), is something of a
letdown, at least to me. This is a
matter of degrees, however, and should be tempered by the realization that, yes, I was expecting a knock your socks off
transfer on this title (and unfortunately my socks are still on). There may be many of you who will be perfectly fine, maybe
even excited, by the video quality of this
release. I was just
expecting more. I'll be in the
Frankenstein
Castle awaiting your arrival.
Update: TCM has announced a reissue of this title, with an AVC codec and higher bitrates.
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