Lady from Shanghai (1947)
#46 in my 2007 movie challenge was Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. He co-starred with then-wife Rita Hayworth to raise money for the project he really wanted to be working on, a stage production of Around the World in Eighty Days.
Welles is an Irish bad boy with a shady past who falls literally in the path of Hayworth’s femme fatale, married to a rich, cruel, older, disabled man. With a bleached, short hairstyle that ages and homogenizes her striking looks, Hayworth is appropriately chilly as the removed object of Welle’s unwilling passion and sympathy. Like many noir works, the plot is not the thing, while the atmosphere is, and this film has lots of it. There is a claustrophobic boat cruise followed by twists and turns of loyalties and the truth. The end features a striking scene in a house of mirrors that may have been the first of its kind.
There is a curious lack of chemistry between Welles and Hayworth, which made sense when I learned they were soon to be divorced. Hayworth is not portrayed in a flattering light, either in appearance or character. In the end, Welles’s bitter, young loner finds that beauty and money aren’t meant to be his, and he is lucky to escape with his life and hard-earned experience. I can’t help but suspect that Welles was drawing from his own life in making this movie.
There is a remake in pre-production, slated to be directed by Wong Kar Wai (In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express) and rumored to star Nicole Kidman.