This bizarro film noire, with its unforgettable climax, still casts an hypnotic spell after all these years
Beauty and the Brain
The press called them "Beauty and the Brain." Ordinary moviegoers knew them as Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles, the husband and wife team featured in Welles' dark, angular masterwork, The Lady From Shanghai. This year, that bizarro classic is celebrating its 60th anniversary (for the record, that's 55 years longer than their marriage lasted.)
A Prize Fathead
Welles plays Michael O'Hara, another in the long line of "prize fatheads" he brought to the screen. Like Charles Foster Kane, Othello, and Hank Quinlan, O'Hara is man convinced he is on top of the world, when in fact he is its private plaything. O'Hara is a victim of the nouveau riche, namely the shapely Elsa Bannister and her husband, criminal prosecutor Arthur Bannister. Together, they convert poor, stupid O'Hara from infatuated bon vivant to murder-minded patsy.
It's a piranha infested world O'Hara is brought into, a larval lair of petty dramatics, subversive desires, and well-aimed verbal volleys. The characters crisscross the globe - a lot of the film was shot in Mexico, aboard Errol Flynn's yacht - yet never enlarge the circle in which they run; Welles takes them on the road only to squeeze them within grandiose sleaze. As in all of his films, his characters can only operate in the foreboding and dysfunctional center of a seemingly successful exterior.
Elsa/Rita
The light in this cavernous tunnel is the spark of goodness - ingenuine as it may be - that is Elsa/Rita. While Shanghai is an obtuse, almost experimental film noir, it is also an unabashed valentine to Mrs. Welles. This is Rita as objet d'art. Her iconic red hair is dyed a luminescent platinum, and she is displayed in as many pin-up modes as possible: on a boat in cap, jacket and tight, white shorts, atop a set of jagged rocks in a figure-flattering swimsuit, under a virginal veil in the big courtroom scene.
She is called upon to expand her acting range as well, and distinguishes herself with honors in the film's famed final sequence: the shoot-out in the hall of mirrors, an hallucinogenic triumph of duplicated images, half-dissolves, and offbeat edits.
We don't think of Welles as a master of film noir but that, at its root, is what his films are. Even, it can be argued, his Shakespearean adaptations. Shanghai, along with Touch of Evil, are the purest proofs of it.
The Lady at 60
At 60, the Lady, that dazzling and dangerous creature so much a part of the genre, has not lost her ability to draw us in.
