The Lady from Shanghai

“There was a start to the world, so I guess there will also be a stop.” Having already proven himself as a cinematic visionary, Orson Welles once again delivers a mesmerizing piece of art in The Lady from Shanghai, starring his wife at the time, Rita Hayworth, in the title role. From the opening sequence that follows a horse-drawn carriage through the park, Welles’ camera floats and flies and bobs and weaves, accompanied by a sound design ambience both intimate and aurally panoramic, clearly the product of Welles’ significant experience in the radio medium. In addition to producing, writing, and directing, Welles stars as sailor Michael O’Hara, aka Black Irish, who’s offered a job on the crew of hotshot attorney Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), who’s sailing to San Francisco by way of Latin America with his gorgeous, young wife Elsa (Hayworth) and his business partner George Grisby (a fantastic Glenn Anders). Michael is soon being manipulated by both Elsa (“From that moment on, I didn’t use my head very much”), who suggests she’s trapped in a marriage to a man she doesn’t love, and Grisby, who asks Michael to murder him as part of an insurance scheme. From here the plot twists and turns through torch-lit Mexican beach parties, a darkened aquarium where the fish appear magnified like kraken, a San Francisco murder trial in which the wrong man is charged with murdering another wrong man, a cacophonous Chinese opera theater, and a spectacular climax in an abandoned fun house, one of the most stunning sequences in Welles’ entire oeuvre. A near perfect blend of artistry and action (look for a fantastically choreographed fistfight in a judge’s chambers), Welles uses every cinematographic color on his palette — deep focus, crane shots, low angles, frames within frames — to paint a work of film art that deserves its spot near the top of the noir canon.