The Lady from Shanghai

Friday being "family movie night" here, we watched Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai this week, it being the May entry in Charla's 2020 film noir calendar.  I have to place it among the strangest movies I've seen, up there with the entire ouevres of David Lynch or Luis Bunuel or Maya Deren.  I received it as a complete surprise, never having been warned of its strangeness.

Thinking about movies like The Lady from Shanghai made in the period right after the end of World War II, I hypothesize that creative ferment had multiple sources and could yield messy results.  I wanted to be smart here and refer to the specific technological advances that must have happened in movies over the course of the war years, but my googlesearch didn't yield anything specific. 

It seems clear from the variety of locations used over the movie's journey from New York to San Francisco that the freedom to travel (after the restrictions imposed by the war) was liberating for Orson Welles' creative juice-flowings.  The movie includes a whole anthology of mini-movies enclosed in the overarching structure of the story.  The Caribbean picnic, the Acapulco layover, the Chinese theater... each of these sequences is etched in my memory album already.  These sequences and others are masterpieces of cinematography, really, attested to by the fact that the best article I've found on the web about the movie so far focuses on the cinematographer rather than Welles.

What is puzzling about The Lady from Shanghai is that the acting is stylized to the point of being inhuman, the writing laugh-out-loud pretentious, and the story a gobbledygook mishmash of fantasy and plot points that makes no sense except in an assumed dream world within the cranium of Orson Welles.  Puzzling because Columbia must have known they were taking a flyer on a story both unsympathetic and confusing, with only the face and body of Rita Hayworth to pull in the masses.

Hypothesis one: The Lady from Shanghai takes its liberties from the world of "theater" (pronounced in as high-falutin a manner as possible) in which primadonna actors pronounce and enunciate and preen and strut rather than interact or attempt to convince the audience that what they are doing is natural.  This fits an image I still have of the decade prior to my birth as a period, now identified as "middle-brow," in which the number of Americans who hungered for intellectual nourishment and high art was greater than ever before or since, and that ambition was fostered because it fit our Cold War need for exceptionalism so well.

Hypothesis two: Orson Welles made movies as a hybrid of radio and visual scene construction, and wasn't concerned about the seamless integration of the two.  If you were to listen to the dialogue of The Lady from Shanghai on the radio, the anti-naturalistic speaking of the actors would be exactly what was expected and needed for transmission over the era's highly unreliable networks; the lack of visual cues would probably sometimes, but not always, make the story more confusing and wild than it already is.

Hypothesis three: Welles' anti-naturalism is a deliberate attempt to bring the incredible into a contemporary environment, a form of mythologizing or mythic storytelling that can't be judged by any normal criteria of credibility.  The character played by Welles combines superhuman capabilities and charisma with seeming passivity in the face of others' manipulations: he's a mix of Odysseus, Orpheus and Hercules (at a minimum).  And Rita Hayworth plays multiple incarnations of the Goddess over the course of the film and up through its stupefying conclusion.

So good and so bad...  I'm not willing to recommend the movie, but I recommend that you watch it.