Now it was the very last thing that Columbia Picture's reigning chief Harry Cohn wanted and he indeed shuddered to think that The Love Goddess herself, Rita Hayworth would have little choice but to shorn those luminous and luxurious locks of hers to accommodate the image of an upcoming role, and Cohn couldn't exactly put the blame on Mame, as it were. (Even though Mame could have put the blame on Cohn, who harangued the starlet for years to get her in the sack, oh and on his couch too). And yet with much fanfare, her soon to be ex-husband,(at the time they had recently publicly announced their plans to divorce) Orson Welles the one-man band of the impending production, oversaw the remodeling of her tresses into a cropped peroxide curl for the role of archetypal femme fatale Elsa Bannister in 1948's The Lady From Shanghai.
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| Orson Welles' protagonist confronts the split personalities of Elsa (Rita Hayworth) |
As waterfront agitator Michael 'Black Irish' O'Hara (Welles) ransoms the elusive Elsa from a hold-up by a trio of thugs and foils their attempt at snatching her purse in New York's Central Park, his blarney voice-over intones via flashback mode:
"Once I had seen her I was not in my right mind" - a condition worth aspiring to when privy to to this most languorous and dreamy of all noirs.
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| The Ship of Fools. |
Beguiled by the charms of this deceptively vulnerable woman and persuaded by her disabled husband Arthur (Everett Sloane), "the world's greatest criminal lawyer," Michael agrees to pilot their East-West cruise via Panama. Completely adrift, Michael falls helplessly prey to the machinations of his duplicitous, shark-like hosts as they holiday restively on the Mexican coastline, and is forced to endure a couple of noir's veritable grotesques - Arthur's unctuous, double-dealing law partner Grisby (Glenn Anders) and his snarling P.I. Broome (Ted De Corsia), who travels it incognito as the yacht's steward.
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| The divided selves - in all their superimposed glory - (Everett Sloane, and lovely Rita) |
Docking in the waters of the San Francisco Bay, they are now in dire need of monies to fund his planned elopement with the bewitching Elsa, Michael is then bamboozled into accepting Grisby's offer of $5000 in return for signing a spurious murder confession. The ruse is that the victim will be, naturally Grisby, whose paranoia switches into overdrive - and wants to disappear as soon as possible. Michael's confession will be null and void. Before their disappearing act via the South Seas, Grisby (with Elsa) intends to exploit what he believed to be a cast-iron alibi, but a blackmailing Broome and a fatal rendezvous with the panic-riddled Elsa puts paid to his scheme. When Michael inevitably ends up in the dock on a murder rap for Grisby, with a bloodthirsty Arthur as his defense attorney, his Brechtian nightmare has only just now commenced.
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| Hey Arthur, where you goin' with that gun in your hand? |
Even in its bastardized form - with a noticeably incongruous score, a score however that was initially rejected by Welles; contributions from three separate cinematographers, and jarring studio inserts - The Lady From Shanghai which was originally titled Take this Woman, and Black Irish as its second choice of title - still rates as one of the greatest films noir. Stand-out moments include Michael's vertiginous cliff-top conversation with the leering Grisby, rife with low-angled shots, sweaty choker close-ups and suffused with a free-wheeling flavor that will have you thoroughly convinced its the late 1960's and not the latter 1940's, and Michael's meeting with Elsa at the San Francisco aquarium as their breathless and erotic exchange is subsumed by the foreboding backdrop images of octopus, conger eels and sharks.
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| Orson Welles, Orson Welles, Orson Welles and Orson Welles. |
The film's surreal coda closes with Michael's de-realized state of mind literally working its way back to consciousness as he wakes up in the Crazy House (based on the Bay Area's Play Land amusement park Fun House), having escaped the confines of the courtroom only to be catapulted into the clutches of Elsa and her menacing Chinese gangster accomplices. The sequence is now a mere, pale shadow of what Orson originally had intended, as Michael aimlessly roams, a seeming somnambulist through labyrinthine chambers before somersaulting down an 100 foot elevated chute for his final confrontation with Elsa and Arthur.
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| A Chuting Star. |
And irrespective of the loss of its original cut - Welles' abridged version of the film certainly feels like pure, unadulterated noir, with its themes of overt eroticism and avarice, its flashback structure, inconclusive voice-over narration, camera angles, and last but not least - its femme fatale. However a rare-form Welles, whose understated acting, replete with an unbelievable brogue in this film perpetually undermines the narrator's character and pushes performances to extremes, whilst simultaneously projecting a multiplicity of strategic camera angles and extended tracking shots that often border on the farcical. The Lady From Shanghai, which marked the first and last collaboration of Welles and his second wife Rita Hayworth has managed to achieve a cult following at best, there are even some theories that this film is cinema's first and only noir-comedy and yes while it does contain some moments shambolic, it all the while hosts its own certain gravitas that should have truly sufficed and kept any chances of Mr. Cohn losing the plot at bay, but inevitably it would sail above his head and hey, where's my one thousand smackers then (dirty) Harry?
