The Lady from Shanghai

Capsule Film Review #13

This is the thirteenth in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear weekly, in addition to my regular essays.

Readers looking to contribute can now buy me a coffee, if they would like - any and every contribution would be very gratefully received!

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The critic Kenneth Tynan, in his Diaries, quotes a remark by Orson Welles, which Welles (though seldom trustworthy in such matters) attributes to Ferenc Molnár:

Never touch shit, even with gloves on. The gloves get shittier, the shit doesn’t get glovier.

These days, when most of us perpetually feel that we are living under somebody else’s empire of shit, the thought is disconcerting. Shit goes into our brains, it seems, and shit comes out of them.

But perhaps Welles was being (characteristically) romantic. Rather famously, after all, he did touch shit, repeatedly—and not just in his acting roles. One of his bulbous, impossible masterpieces comes from a penny dreadful; another one (sadly unfinished) from unproduced radio schlock.

And then there is The Lady from Shanghai (1947), based on a 1940s potboiler which you’ve never heard of and which Welles never read, with a plot so incomprehensible that he couldn’t explain it even when Harry Cohn offered him $1000 to do so. Its musical melodrama is dreadful—and Welles’s stage-Irish accent is worse. The haircut he gave to Rita Hayworth is so bad that it has gone down in film legend as a jealous husband’s revenge on his soon-to-be-ex-wife.

And yet, does any of this matter? There is still that aquarium, those cliffs, that black-and-white. There is still, unforgettably, that hall of mirrors. And he was still Orson Welles, with gloves on. As Tynan himself suggested, in another context, you might as well critique the Niagara Falls.

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