Product Details

• Actors: Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders, Ted de Corsia
• Directors: Orson Welles
• Writers: Orson Welles, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle, Sherwood King, William Castle
• Producers: Orson Welles, Harry Cohn
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• VHS Release Date: June 24, 1994
• Run Time: 87 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302281849
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #244,161 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Legend has it that Orson Welles more or less conned studio boss Harry Cohn over the phone into making this movie by grabbing the title from a nearby paperback. In any case, The Lady from Shanghai is one of Welles's most fascinating works, a bizarre tale of an Irish sailor (Welles) who accompanies a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth) and her handicapped husband (Everett Sloane) on a cruise and becomes involved in a murder plot. But never mind all that (the aforementioned legend also claims that Cohn offered a reward to anyone who could explain the plot to him). The film is really a dream of Welles's driving preoccupations on- and offscreen at the time: the elusiveness of identity, the mystique of things lost, and most of all the director's faltering marriage to Hayworth. In the tradition of male filmmakers who indirectly tell the story of their love affairs with leading ladies, Welles tells his own, photographing Hayworth as a deconstructed star, an obvious cinematic creation, thus reflecting, perhaps, a never-satisfied yearning that leads us back to the mystery of Citizen Kane. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Misunderstood Masterpiece, February 4, 2002

By 

"juleswelles" (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lady from Shanghai (DVD)

The most tragic aspect of Orson Welles' career is the accepted wisdom that he only made three good films. In fact he made 13 films in a 40 year career (a tragically small number in itself) and ten of them were arguably masterpieces. That's a track record that bears comparison with anyone.

The Lady from Shanghai is a classic example of a misunderstood Welles masterpiece. The studio didn't understand the plot and the film got buried; in addition it was put forward that Welles intended revenge on his ex-wife Rita Hayworth by casting her as the bad girl (in fact Welles only interest was in making a great film and Hayworth's astonishing performance merely consecrates his success).

Welles fully understood the attractions, both of film noir themes (jealousy, greed, paranoia) and the mandatory visuals that go with the genre. The great cinematographer Stanley Cortez once said of Welles that he understood lighting better than anyone in the Cinema. Many scenes stand out as examples of Welles' brilliant visual invention - the lovers meeting at the aquarium and the final "hall of mirrors" shootout are just two outstanding set pieces amongst a miasma of unsettling camera angles, close-ups and deep, overbearing shadows. Welles' unique talent was in reinventing himself with every film, so whilst there are familiar Wellesian hallmarks in Shanghai (overlapping dialogue, deep focus etc) it is still a work of stunning visual originality, albeit shot in 16mm.

What the french call "mise en scene" (literally "composition") was everything to Welles, so the plot (an innocent man is drawn into a web of intrigue by a woman) was less important, save to the extent that it enabled Welles to delve into the emotional dynamics of the characters. For example, the fracturing relationship between Welles' (the actor) and Hayworth's characters is dealt with in an uncommonly sophisticated manner for what is essentially a femme-fatale/innocent-chump storyline.

So buy this and marvel at the work of Cinema's only natural (and greatest ever) inventor. And while you're at it, see The Trial, Othello, Chimes at Midnight, F for Fake, Macbeth and The Stranger as well.

48 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Innocent is a big word--Stupid is more like it", November 9, 2003

By 

Coram - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Lady from Shanghai (DVD)

Stupidity--not innocence, not heroism, not any virtue at all--is the major theme of *The Lady from Shanghai*. Therefore, to some viewers this film will appear to be a stupid movie. That's unfortunate, but that's Orson Welles.

Everybody--EVERYBODY--is stupid in *Lady*! The Welles character, Michael O'Hara, admits he is stupid right off the bat. Elsa, played by Rita Hayworth, seems to be the cleverest of them all until the end...when she and her husband Arthur Bannister die together in the Crazy House, her husband gasping at her, "For a clever girl you make a lot of mistakes." Arthur, "the world's greatest lawyer", obviously has brains and knows what's going on through the whole story, but he's so grotesque (practically crawling through his scenes like a daddy longlegs spider) that his intellect is self-defeating: he's just one of the sharks that Welles describes in the beach scene, ravenously devouring himself. And the Grisby character...take one look at this guy and it's hard to believe *Lady* was made in 1946. Grisby's right out of David Lynch, or more like it, David Cronenberg! The judge, the folks in the courtroom...all STUPID and distorted, just like the images in the funhouse mirrors!

Portraying American people in that unflattering light was just not "on" in the early postwar period. No wonder Orson Welles was being watched by the FBI during those years. Even today, many filmgoers expect movies to give them at least one or two heroic characters that they can identify with. Sorry, friends, *Lady* jumps right into your face and right into your space (like the scene with O'Hara and Grisby overlooking the ocean) and blurts drunkenly, "Yer STOO-pid too, FELLAH!"

But why on earth is Orson Welles telling us we're all stupid? That's made very clear. We are blissfully living out our grubby little lives on the brink of self-destruction. "Do you believe the world is gonna end?" asks Grisby of O'Hara in that ocean overlook scene. That's the question Welles tells us we should be asking ourselves. But just as O'Hara was too stupid to ask himself a few simple questions, like "how can Grisby collect the insurance money if he's declared legally dead?", we don't ask ourselves the important questions that overshadow our silly little existences.

A lot of people won't like it. They sure didn't when *Lady* was released in '48.

But I love it! *Lady* was "postmodern" before postmodern was cool (before anybody knew what postmodern was)! It is deliciously self-referential: the scene in the Shanghai Low Chinese theater, with the strange Oriental play being performed onstage, instantly reminds one of all the strange characters and goings-on in the "real" story, the movie itself. But the movie itself is not real either, of course--it too is a play that reflects the bizarre world of human events, OUR world, the world of the moviegoer who seeks meaning in film and theater. House of mirrors! Movies of the '40's were just NOT self-referential, they really tried to create an alternative world that the audience could escape from its troubles into. Almost all movies then, and still most today, do not hold up a mirror to the audience. But *Lady* does. And still today many people aren't going to like what they see. "It's a bright guilty world," sayeth Welles/O'Hara.

The close-ups of Rita Hayworth singing "Please Don't Kiss Me" establish her as THE most beautiful woman to have ever graced the silver screen. Sorry Marilyn, Lana, Bette, and you too Nicole. "Rita Hayworth gave good face" indeed. I'd have paid the price of the whole DVD just to have those few seconds of film. But there's so much more in *Lady* that's worth watching than the lady.

Peter Bogdanovich's interview and commentary is pretty good, though as a Welles/Hayworth fan there was a good deal of stuff I already knew. But some stuff I didn't know, so I appreciated Peter's contribution.

*The Lady From Shanghai* and *Gilda*...movies just don't get any better!

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Black Irish and a Blonde Bombshell", March 15, 2006

By 

Byron Kolln (the corner where Broadway meets Hollywood) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Lady from Shanghai (DVD)

What was once considered Orson Welles' most notorious failure is now regarded as a classic by movie buffs. THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, the story of a man driven to obsession and murder by a beautiful blonde temptress, is filled with striking imagery and amazing performances. Based on a novel by Sherwood King, the story focuses on world-weary crewman Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) who literally stumbles across the path of beautiful Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), and almost on the spot he's invited to join the crew of her yacht, about to set sail on an international cruise, that soon dissolves into murder and mayhem. The plot plays like classic film noir, with many twists and turns. The film is highlighted by the famous `Hall of Mirrors' finale where Welles demonstrates the whole idea of the unknown enemy.

Rita Hayworth is sensational in one of her best roles. It is a very famous story that she was personally recommended for the picture by her then-husband Orson Welles, but studio heads regarded the project as a B-picture and thus not worthy of one of their biggest box office stars. Welles hacked off Hayworth's trademark red tresses and bleached it platinum blonde, in an effort to emphasize the fact that this was indeed a different movie, but it was also a different Hayworth, one the audience had never seen before. THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI was a bitter disappointment for writer/director/star Orson Welles, who felt he was sabotaged by a studio who did not trust his vision. The film was significantly edited by Columbia shortly after it's completion but was kept on the shelf for several months before it was finally released, to mostly scathing reviews.

The DVD contains audio commentary from well-known Welles fan and director Peter Bogdanovich, a featurette with Bogdanovich, the original trailer and vintage advertising gallery.