TCM Vault: The Lady From Shanghai

[Drucker]

It's very hard to watch the more-butchered Welles work and not imagine what judge it based on what could have been, especially Ambersons and Lady From Shanghai from me. But I'm with Hare on Shanghai. The ending of the film is perfect, starting in the aquarium. The end of the film is so destructive, and I find it to be Welles' ultimate kiss-off to Hollywood. His ultimate expression of the system that could benefit both parties so much, but continues to chew him up and ruin his work. And of course, it's Welles who survives and walks away with some sort of dignity intact. The studio system, on the other hand...

[FrauBlucher]

Agreed. There should be no pity party for Welles. Early on much of the antagonism he brought on himself. He escalated it through the years. Not to say the studios didn't have their share of the blame, but Welles took misguided delight fighting the fight at the expense of his films.

Lang was another famous Hollywood outsider who was still able to fight his fight and make his films on mostly his terms, and be prolific as well.

What we have from Welles is brilliant and wonderful even though it may not be his entire vision. And his jagged history just adds to the legend.

[Drucker]

Perhaps this belongs in the general Welles thread, but since I'm mostly familiar with accounts based on Welles' words and sympathetic figures like McBride and Bogdanovich, can you illustrate some of this "fight" he put up? Also, I'm sure he did his fair share of partying back then, but there is ample evidence provided by McBride in What Ever Happened to Orson Welles that the idea he was a profligate with studio money in South America is a myth.

I don't know that The Stranger is improved to the level of masterpiece by adding in the cut footage, but I definitely believe the material would be elevated a bit...just giving it an extra touch to make it a little more interesting. The same goes for Shanghai as far as I'm concerned, though what we have is far better than The Stranger.

I will say I just haven't seen the evidence that Welles liked to fight for the sake of fighting. But by the nature of how he got to Hollywood, he was never going to be a Ford, Hawks, or Lang. Lang was an outsider, sure, but he had over a decade of the greatest resume imaginable under his belt. If Welles had "played ball" more and not ruffled so many feathers, there just wouldn't be a Kane. There can't be one aspect of his nature that's good (creativity, vision) without accepting the other stuff (stubbornness).

[Roger Ryan]

There are primarily two reasons people tend to emphasize Welles' troubles with Hollywood: the first is that Welles himself liked to talk about it and made it a part of the presentation of his character arc; the second is that his artistic temperament was never suited to making films in the studio system. I'd say most of the admired directors from the studio era ran into some kind of conflict with studio heads which altered or compromised the films they were making, but they didn't crow about it much, preferring to continue to work within the system. Ford, for example, almost seemed to welcome Zanuck's revisionism to his films for Fox.

Specifically to THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, Welles' pitch to Columbia was filled with his ideas to unsettle the audience with weird, unconventional elements unlike anything they've seen before. In other words, the exact opposite of what Harry Cohn would want from a film starring his prize star Rita Hayworth. In Welles' mind, he was already compromising by taking on his second thriller to achieve some kind of commercial success; to live with his choice, he would bring all kinds of weird to it, not least of which would be some Brechtian ideas he was playing around with that year. In retrospect, this is what Welles is applauded for now, but it always had limited appeal to the mass audience the studios were churning this material out for.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI is a lot more inventive than THE STRANGER and, yes, more fun. But it also suffered a lot more revisions than Welles' previous film did. Welles usually attempted to maintain control of the editing by shooting in long, continuous takes with little coverage. That didn't work well with this film as Columbia insisted Welles himself do significant re-shoots against a process screen to bridge the huge amounts of location footage that was being deleted. This is why a GREED-style reconstruction would be unrealistic; the reworked moments crop up too often and almost in every scene, although the majority of the re-shooting affected the Acapulco sequences.

I think it's safe to say that Welles never would have wanted the film to run two-and-a-half hours (that's only an early rough cut estimate); he was always to determined to keep his films at two hours or less. However, the cutting continuity for that rough cut demonstrates that allowing approximately an additional twenty minutes to stay in the film would have gone a long way to improve its narrative and maintain the subtext Welles was going for (essentially, his emphasis on class distinctions and wealth versus poverty). I still find much to love about THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, but the meddling makes it one of Welles' sloppiest-looking films.

[Drucker]

I love both the theatrical and reconstruction of Touch of Evil. There is certainly a brilliant mania to the theatrical cut. But I will say one of the things that hurts Shanghai most is the aforementioned re-shoots. I think that's why something like ToE still holds up so well even after studio interference. There's a huge difference between just editing Welles' work differently and the rear-projection, studio close-up type shots that are nothing like his style.

[criterion10]

It's been almost a year since I first watched The Lady from Shanghai, so it isn't exactly fresh in my mind, though I do remember it being an initial disappointment. Much of this is obviously a result of the studio's changes, and I certainly agree with much of the recent comments here. Structurally, I think what most through me off was the main plot point

Spoiler

Welles being framed for murder

occurring so late into a rather a short film (nearly an hour in of the film's 87-minute running time). The film finally starts to pick up steam here, but it's over all too soon. It really felt like everything after this event should have been the main focus of the film.

The now famous climactic sequence is arguably my favorite moment in all of Welles' films though.

[Drucker]

The aquarium scene is brilliant, and your points about the CUs there are well-taken. But I find the scene of the song on the boat, which other people have defended very distracting. And I'm under the impression a lot of that was re-shot/studio inserted? I know I've brought this up on the Welles thread recently so apologies if I'm mistaken.

Again, I love the film, love Welles, and also caught the 4k resto in a theater. But some of the brilliant, brilliant moments feel rushed to me in a way that doesn't sit right. The aquarium scene fully plays out, start-to-finish, in a similar mood and builds fantastically. Whereas the climb up the hill feels a bit distracting and hard to follow, until the scene climaxes with the revelation of Grisby's goal.

[kingofthejungle]

But I would contradict some of your points: Welles was very definitely working away from the long take master shot(s) and detailing decoupage/montage he used for Ambersons for instance in Lady. The sequences look to me to very much play for disjunction to the point where characters, once they are shown (like the beach party) are then impossible to physically relate to the previous locations or sets.

Spot-on.

If you really examine the arrhythmic montage in Lady From Shanghai, it's apparent that it's the result of a very deliberate visual design rather than haphazard re-cutting, because the discomfiting frenzy is deeply embedded into the film's mise en scene. These aren't casual cuts, but rather very carefully juxtaposed compositions that highlight oppositional directional movement, keeping the viewer perpetually off-balance by denying them the harmony of spatial clarity and kinetic unity that traditional editing seeks to establish. Simply put, you couldn't arrive at this frenzy by accident. Look at the way Welles uses the long takes that remain in the film (such as the one that begins the aquarium sequence) - his staging is designed to create the same effect that his cutting does. Welles and Hayworth are constantly crossing each other, shifting from the left to right and back again, turning toward and away from the camera, always reorienting themselves and never allowing us a fixed vantage point from which to observe them. Another really great disorienting moment is the extreme high angle of Michael and George Grisby standing on the edge of a cliff after Grisby has asked Michael to kill him. There's a danger in the image because it raises the specter of Grisby being pushed to his death, yet it becomes all the more shocking when Grisby seems to fall out of the other side of the frame.

All of this creates the subtly surreal feeling that the movie is a bad dream, which is clearly what Welles seems to be going after. The process starts from the very beginning of the film when Welles collapses the distinctions between the outside world of narrative action and the interior space of O'Hara's consciousness by shifting us between Michael's interior monologue, Michael interacting with Elsa (which seems to be initiated by the monologue itself), and shots of Michael speaking lines that seem to extend the text of the narrator's monologue. Throughout the scene, all of the dialogue is dubbed in post, so that while the scenes visually read as conversations, the voices remain curiously disembodied, as if emanating from the viewer's own subconscious.

It's really a shame that most discussion of Lady From Shanghai and The Magnificent Ambersons revolves around studio interference and "what might have been". From my perspective, those two films (and the theatrical Touch of Evil) are the greatest testament to Welles' genius, exhibiting a formal mastery that makes Citizen Kane look like the promising beginner's film that it is.

[kingofthejungle]

You've really got to hand it to Welles, Verites et Mensonges, Smoke and Mirrors! We're still talking about it!

Oh, absolutely.

I also want to add something to the conversation about Rita's song sequence.

Rather than being a distraction, I find it an absolutely vital passage in the film. Michael is an Irish sailor given to viewing the world through a sort of lyrically philosophical lens and Elsa becomes a focal point for his poetic projections (a point that Welles bolsters with a visual motif - throughout the film, every encounter between Michael and Elsa - with the important exception of the funhouse sequence - is somehow associated with imagery of the sea. We transition from a shot of the dock to the first meeting in the park, thene the trip on the schooner, the meeting in the aquarium, even in the courtroom, Elsa is framed in front of a window overlooking the bay). The song sequence makes subtext text, and let's the audience experience the seduction, the siren's song magnetism that draws Michael to Elsa, and let's us understand why he might be so blind and act so foolishly on her behalf. Without the quiet passion of the song, and the smoky glamour in her closeups, the film's fatalist poetry would be severely diminished.

[Roger Ryan]

Let me clarify here that I was not arguing that Welles was maintaining his single take approach with SHANGHAI throughout the film (which, as noted, is far more prevalent in KANE and AMBERSONS). However, the most explicit examples of the single take approach occur during the film's opening ride through Central Park and, later, when O'Hara and Grisby climb to the cliff edge in Acapulco. In both of these cases, Welles was forced to rework the material to please the studio. In the Central Park sequence, so much was cut that Welles had to dub in new line readings to make sure certain plot points were still presented. This is why the lip synch is somewhat off. As originally executed, the climb to the cliff edge was done as an elaborate series of long takes shot exclusively on location. Welles wanted to emphasize the various tourists swarming around O'Hara and Grisby and their own fixation on money. In the same way that most of the material featuring the various guests at the last ball in AMBERSONS was deleted, the studio editor wanted these "superfluous" tourists gone as well. To accomplish this, Welles had to do numerous process screen inserts back in Hollywood to cover the missing footage. The result is pretty sloppy-looking and that is what I was complaining about.

There are still plenty of examples of Welles' montage approach left in the film. As mentioned above, the aquarium scene is all Welles and it's a brilliant use of rear-screen projection. Even the less convincing scene at the dockside where O'Hara interacts with a rear projection image of Bannister is a shot devised by Welles. Still, a number of re-shoots were insisted upon and Welles dutifully shot them against his wishes (this film is not a case of another director being brought in to shoot new footage), so the numerous glamor close-ups along with some of those awkward process shots in the Acapulco sequence go against Welles' style and how he would have approached the scenes if he had final cut.

For the record, I think the film has many wonderfully-edited scenes: the fun house scene, of course, even if half of it was cut out (the more surreal, weird half!), but also the scene where O'Hara's car crashes into the truck which has marvelous inter-cutting. I even like the scene featuring Rita singing which fits well into the whole style of the film; I can't recall if Welles re-shot any of this (probably some additional close-ups if anything), but it plays really well.