Lady from Shanghai, The (1947)
The Lady from Shanghai (1947), written, produced and directed by Orson Welles.
quote
My shark had torn himself from the hook, and the scent, or maybe the stain it was, and him bleeding his life away drove the rest of them mad. Then the beasts began to eat each other. In their frenzy, they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes, and you could smell the death, reeking up out of the sea. I never saw anything worse...
Until this little picnic tonight.
A quirky thriller. We get fragments and glimpses of a story -- does the plot actually make sense in the end? -- but are mostly off-balance and as confused as our main character. He's intrigued by a beautiful woman and wants to protect her, but she's married and he doesn't want to get mixed up in that. He's crewing a yacht for people he finds contemptible -- he tells them so -- but he's also afraid of them.
As always, when someone asks you to "pretend" to murder them: run! Otherwise you'll find yourself enduring a bizarrely farcical courtroom drama and a graphically wondrous shootout among the funhouse mirrors at the amusement park.
Misc notes:
A box-office disaster.
Glenn Anders did not have a large filmography, but his intense, unblinking"George Grisby", simultaneously scary and slappable, is a vivid character.
Rita Hayworth does not perspire.
Welles thought the opening carriage-in-the-park segment was terrible and would have cut it. He hated the studio's score for the whole film. He had no control over the final cut: about an hour was removed and the footage has been lost.
Welles and Hayworth were married but separated at this time. Doing a film together was her attempt at a reconciliation. It didn't work and they divorced shortly after.
His approximate Irish accent is hard to take.
That's Errol Flynn's yacht.
The Blu-ray is from the TCM Vault Collection. I'm seeing only intermittent hidef detail; the video itself is only 13GB. No subtitles.
The commentary track by Peter Bogdanovich is not really attached to the film as it plays, and he often inserts himself: "I said this, and then Orson said that, and then I said something else..." Still: he gives a lot of production details and inside stories. Welles called himself a "congenital amateur" in movie-making. And: "I never understood women."
