Review of The Lady from Shanghai (1947) by Kenneth L — 19 Jun 2014

This isn't quite the perfect movie that Citizen Kane is, but then not every movie can be. It's still a dazzling, fascinating, and completely unpredictable movie evidently made by a true genius.

It's a film noir, sorta, but not like any other noir I've ever seen. The story follows a young sailor (Orson Welles himself, doing a funny stage Irish accent) who is hired to work on the yacht of a very weird married couple: the seductive and mysterious Elsa (Rita Hayworth) and her husband (Everett Sloane), a wealthy, crippled lawyer.

I don't want to give away any more than that, but suffice to say the movie took a bunch of twists and turns I didn't anticipate. The performances are excellent, and there's a bizarre romantic sequence in an aquarium.

The house-of-mirrors sequence at the end is amazing. Welles's direction is often expressionistic, finding ways to render familiar things bizarre and uncanny. There was no one quite like Orson Welles, and it's a shame he had such a consistently difficult career.

At least we can appreciate him now.