The Lady from Shanghai

1947

Years ago, my first exposure to Rita Hayworth was in the cynical, greasy elegance of The Lady from Shanghai. Hayworth was married to Orson Welles at the time, and this was their inevitable picture together. By all accounts, Welles was a tyrant, but he was also indubitably a cinematic visionary. Characteristically hogging all the credit for writing and directing the piece, Orson also played the audience’s viewpoint character—the man who overestimates his worldliness only to tell us the story of his encounter with evil in voiceover. (That’s a great definition of film noir right there.)

Basically, the film concerns four characters (and enough minor ones to give the sense of always being surrounded by half-familiar faces). Welles plays Mike O’Hara (his uneven embrace of an Irish accent actually made his signature vocal affectation easier to take, in my mind…but that is not the consensus opinion), a sailor who’s “been around the world so many times he doesn’t know anything about it.” Hayworth is the mysterious woman he meets (by chance, by design, by manipulation?) in Central Park. I suspect it was Welles’s idea to cut off her famous red locks and make her a peroxide blonde. The effect works, as one of the most famous faces in the world is suddenly strange and exotic to us once more. The other two men are her husband, Bannister, an aging but brilliant and unscrupulous lawyer who suffers from an unidentified affliction, and his law partner, the queer-coded and highly discomfiting Grimsby.

We find out very little about anyone’s past—except that Hayworth used to work in several big, corrupt Chinese gambling centers (such as Shanghai). The other bit of info we’re given is that O’Hara has killed a man in the past, under undisclosed circumstances. And yet, though this marks him as the Most Likely to Be Dangerous, he is an honest man whose work ethic has made him tune out the rich and truly dangerous people of the world.

Each of the three other characters is made profoundly grotesque by the inventive set-ups of Welles’s camera. Bannister is shot from angles that emphasize his age, his skeletal form, his slightly bulging eyes, and the unnerving gate he acquires from walking with two canes. Grimsby is shot in unsettling close-up, always dripping with sweat, with a sparkle in his eyes and an unnervingly childish smile.

But, as it should be, the most compelling and uncomfortable character is our titular lady from Shanghai. One reviewer noted that Hayworth is so beautiful it is actually distracting. That’s Welles at work. Clearly “owned” by her husband due to some alluded-to blackmail from back in China, the woman (who is alternately called Elsa and Rosalie) embraces her plight by reveling in her object-ness. She is always dressed for—and posing for—a pin-up that is not being shot. In a world that has taken her agency, she makes a game of relinquishing it. And this makes her the most grotesque of them all.

But, of course, all three of our rich characters are employing their true agency—an agency that works below the surface. They may masquerade as a sickly old man, his trophy wife, and his ineffectual fop of a partner…but their reasons for enmeshing their lives with O’Hara’s only partially have to do with a twisty murder plot. They are playing multiple games with him simultaneously, never sure of their objectives. They simply need a game.

The Lady from Shanghai takes the cynicism of film noir and tips it into nihilism. In this world (the Bannisters’ world), the only response to living through the first half of the twentieth century is nihilism. “Everything’s bad,” Elsa tells Mike, while Grimsby regales him with his plan to be far from any cities when they drop the bomb. Bannister has a great line in, “Killing you is killing me. It’s the same thing. But to tell you the truth, I’m pretty sick of both of us.” O’Hara, for his part, has a lovely monologue about once being in a boat in the middle of a feeding frenzy that found sharks so inflamed by the blood in the water that they began to eat each other…and themselves. We don’t need help making the connection.

I have said that critics complain about the convoluted murder plot at the center of the film’s second half, but these characters are not committing logical crimes—they are improvising a deadly game. Even O’Hara is guilty of this, admitting that he killed a man in the past for no reason. It becomes painfully clear that we are not meant to ‘follow the plot’ or ‘untangle the murder’ when we end up in a Peking Opera House (perhaps the most disorienting artform for Western audiences) and finally a funhouse hall of mirrors. None of these characters can understand the world around them, twisted, foreign, and misleading as it is. The famous final scene—a shootout in the hall of mirrors—paints another picture of society that we do not need explained: frightened, confused, distorted, and disoriented, these characters lash out at the people and world around them.

One thing that interests me is the Chinese element that weaves through the film but never takes on a clear meaning. Welles has gone so far as to title his adaptation of the story “If I Die Before I Wake”, The Lady from Shanghai. Why is this the central image? Throughout, Chinese signs and characters pass, keeping the theme in our minds. Is it that Elsa’s time in Shanghai (left a mystery) symbolizes the way these characters find themselves in a world they cannot understand? Was Shanghai chosen due to its overtones of corruption and kidnapping? (Remember, it was a different time.) Or is the whole point of identifying the lady as being from anywhere a sly joke about the choices, situations, and events that shape who we are, even as we lose specificity in the melting pot of human degradation?

Perhaps, after all, the foreignness of the Chinese elements is meant to represent another way of life, alternative to the self-loathing of Bannister and company? Perhaps, when we see Peking Opera performers gaping at the Westerners in their midst, we are meant to recognize our shock and confusion looking in on this dour view of humanity? Is this view mirrored in the aquarium scene, where identities are revealed and obscured under the constant memory of those frenzied sharks? I don’t know. But how nice to be left with something to think on!