Critics have never known what to do with LADY FROM SHANGHAI. It's clearly some kind of masterpiece but how far do you want to go praising a movie that won't even itself seriously? And what can anyone say about a movie with the message that everything anyone says is nonsense?

So everyone weasels out; it's a flawed masterpiece, it shows sparks of brilliance.

Screw that. This is a great film; every bit as rich as CITIZEN KANE or TOUCH OF EVIL. It's a post-modern comic masterpiece, an intellectually wicked dissection of human communication and a despairing, lacerating self-appraisal of a broken marriage and of a potentially great man who found himself a failure in every area. It's also more defiant of the powers that be than CITIZEN KANE... the bad guy is the producer of the film!

A demented radio play

Welles’ ticket to Hollywood was his notoriety as the 22 year old boy-genius of radio responsible for the (overly?) realistic 1937 WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast that sparked panic up and down the East Coast. The problem, which would arise throughout Welles' career, was that his understanding of his medium was a few decades ahead of his audience. 1937 listeners had no concept of “fake news designed only to entertain.” (Today we have cable news networks devoted to nothing else.)

Welles jumped into a film medium that had only had sound for ten years. Most people working in Hollywood had learned their craft during the silent era and still thought of the soundtrack as complementary to a visual art form. Welles came at it from the other direction. His soundtracks for CITIZEN KANE, LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL were giant steps in sound sophistication. (That sophistication survives despite the fact that the musical scores to both TOUCH OF EVIL and LADY FROM SHANGHAI were added over Welles' objections.)

One way to think of LADY FROM SHANGHAI (LFS henceforth) is as someone’s vivid imagination at work while listening to a corny radio drama. The soundtrack functions as a radio show with redundant voice-over narration, exaggerated sound effects and breathlessly paced dialogue. Having the movie on in the background is very much like listening to a Firesign Theatre album. Meanwhile, the visuals, freed of much of the narrative workload, are free to indulge in an orgy of unconventional lighting, angles, close-ups, trick perspectives, and unsettling process-shots.

Personal Lives

Welles and Rita Hayworth were separated pending divorce when they made LFS.

Six years earlier, after CITIZEN KANE and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS,  Orson Welles was flying high. Artistically he could do no wrong. He was even thinking about politics, hoping to be President someday. While in Brazil working on IT'S ALL TRUE, Life Magazine came out with the famous Rita Hayworth negligee picture on the cover. When Welles saw the magazine photo he was smitten. He told everyone who would listen that he intended to go back to Hollywood and marry this Rita Hayworth girl.

Rita in 1941

The king had chosen his queen in the same way Charles Foster Kane picked his newspaper staff. Long story short, she eventually said yes... just like Kane's newspaper staff. The boy-genius had succeeded once again, but for about the last time.

Welles' conquest turned out to be the love of his life, and he the love of hers. So, of course, their marriage lasted only a few years.

Welles lost his confidence. He made bad movies. He began cheating on his bride publicly and habitually, and she eventually filed for divorce.

Here's what Welles learned about his wife's sad life after they were wed... She was a knock-out by thirteen and became her father's partner in a vaudeville-style dance act. Unfortunately her father was also her lover, and jealously so. Spoken for within the family, she was never allowed to date boys. She broke away from her father by marrying a much older Hollywood hustler named Judson who had always lived off of women. He saw in her something he could manage up to real money and worked feverishly promoting her career, including pimping her out to anyone in Hollywood he thought it was important to please. (In fairness, he did make her a star. A lot of would-be starlets in Hollywood got pimped to talent agents and studio execs but few ended up on the cover of Life Magazine.)

Her marriage to Judson came apart amid threats from her husband that he would mutilate her face and publish the names of every man he had pimped her to. She ended up giving him everything she had in the world plus a bunch of future payments.

The most important man to her career was producer Harry Cohn who had an intense and possessive long-standing sexual desire for her. He was pathetic in a way, putting her in movies just to try to shame her into putting out for him. But she never would. Every man in Hollywood had been with her, so why not Harry Cohn, dammit! It was a two-sided neurotic relationship. Hayworth was was mesmerized by Cohn and obsessed about what he would think about her every decision... he was a father figure. Perhaps she refused sex with Cohn hoping to have a more wholesome relationship with him than with her real father.

Such was the baggage Welles took on board when he snagged the woman of his dreams. (God knows what dreadful Welles baggage poor Rita Hayworth took on.) Welles said that Hayworth told him years later that despite his periodic abandonment and public extramarital affairs their years together were the happiest of her life. Welles added, "Can you imagine what the rest of her life must have been?"

The ugliest smack-down in movie history

Rita with Cohn

Bannister with Elsa

Making LADY FROM SHANGHAI was a suicidal defiance of authority that makes tackling the Hearst empire in CITIZEN KANE look safe and polite. But for some reason this isn't widely talked about. (?)

In LADY FROM SHANGHAI Hayworth's husband is criminal lawyer Arthur Bannister (Mercury Theatre great Everett Sloane.) He is a rich and brilliant, yet whiny, weak, manipulative and impotent. Badly crippled, we walks with two canes, looking like a spider or a broken machine. In public he always calls his wife "lover" out of bitter self-pitying irony. He freely acknowledges that he essentially purchased her. He pimps her to Welles' character simply for the pleasure of controlling people like marionettes. He is partners with an overt fascist sympathizer and presumably a fascist sympathizer himself. He brags about owning people. As Bannister, Sloane sports an absurd rubber nose that makes Alec Guinness’ notorious Fagin look goyish.

Bannister has some traits of Haywoth's father and her first husband, but he is primarily a vicious textural caricature of her sometime-Svengali Columbia executive Harry Cohn.

Welles clearly didn't have much use for Cohn, a man who made a life-long hobby of trying to get Welles' wife in bed and was actively sabotaging Welles' marriage. (Welles wasn't alone in his feelings. When Cohn died a huge crowd turned out for his funeral. Either Billy Wilder or Red Skelton observed, "Give the people what they want and they'll turn out.")

And the producer of LADY FROM SHANGHAI was.... Harry Cohn!

As a 'favor' to Hayworth Cohn bought a piece of financially troubled Welles in 1946, fronting him money against an agreement that Welles had to make LFS for Columbia with Rita as the star. Cohn figured a movie starring the famous divorcing couple would be big box-office and felt confident that Welles and Hayworth were through and forcing them together would exacerbate their enmity. He didn't realize to what extent he was throwing Hayworth back into Welles' bed. He certainly didn't realize he was financing the world's cruelest caricature of himself.

It's as if William Randolph Hearst had arranged the financing for CITIZEN KANE. Was Harry Cohn so self-satisfied that he couldn't even see that he was Bannister? Perhaps... Bannister is more expressionistic portrait than literal  imitation.

But still... when I first glanced at this photo of Cohn and Hayworth I assumed it was an on-set candid shot of Rita Hayworth with Everett Sloane in his Bannister make-up. Cohn's expression in this photo is aped by Sloane throughout LFS. Looking at it I expect to hear Bannister's bird-like cawing of "oh, lover!"

Bannister hiring O'Hara in order to throw Elsa at him as part of a malignant larger plot is like Cohn hiring Welles to make this movie. Every emotion O'Hara feels in LFS is derived from Welles' recent experiences.

We can feel Welles post-separation paranoia... knowing that his wife is talking about their life with Harry Cohn. Knowing that because of Rita he has entrusted his artistic fate to a rival, just as Mike O'Hara trusts Bannister with his life in the trial while knowing on some level that it's all a set-up to bring him down.

One can do worse than reading LFS as an expressionist history of LFS itself executed as surrealist parable with an existentialist punch-line. Whew... that's really post-modern!

Grisby & Rockie

Speaking of outlandish caricatures... Glenn Anders steals the show as George Grisby, among the weirdest characters in any Hollywood movie. He makes Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET look like Aticus Finch. Anders was a name Broadway star in the 1920s and his performance in LFS is essentially an over-the-top stage performance filmed in close-up. It’s a beautiful effect! Exaggerated doesn’t begin to describe it.

Anders was known for his wickedly cruel imitation of Nelson Rockefeller and that's just what he was hired to do as Grisby. Welles felt he had a score to settle with Rockefeller, the man who sent him to South America... a relocation that spelled the beginning of the end for Welles. (Yes, the same Nelson Rockefeller who chiseled the Rivera mural out of Rockefeller Center, served briefly as US Vice President, flipped off protesters on camera and died during intercourse with his mistress.)

Make-up

Anders and Sloane are filmed almost without make-up (except Sloane’s nose) and are constantly bathed in sweat. Hayworth and Welles are covered in heavy make-up with nary a reflection in sight. In the many scenes of interaction between them all the effect is disconcerting, like a mix of humans and Gods.

Speaking of make-up and Gods… the studio wanted lots of close-ups of glamorous Rita. Since Welles' wanted LFS to be as alarming and oblique as possible he complied by inserting discordant glamorous soft-focus extreme close-ups of her disembodied face that shatter the continuity of conversations… at times she’s more like a vision than a character. Perhaps she really is a demigod, since her husband named their yacht “The Circe” after the Greek temptress witch who seduced Odysseus and turned his men into swine. (When Hayworth later springs a trap of seduction and deception on O’Hara she first leads him down back alleys until they reach a spot where a large pig is wallowing in the street.)

An ironic aside: Trying to think what LFS's dream-world Hayworth close-ups remind me of all I come up with is the surreal tacked on Joseph Cotton Anne Baxter promenade from MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS that Robert Wise shot at the studios insistence while Welles was in South America–the sequence that ruined the movie.

Out-of-control Symbolism

LFS features a particularly unsubtle symbolic scheme involving Rita Hayworth and cigarettes. In the opening scene Welles offers her a cigarette as a pick-up line. She announces that she doesn't smoke, but she takes the cigarette, enfolds in in her handkerchief, puts it in her purse and snaps the purse clasp shut. From that point forward Welles is all hers, since she literally has his masculinity in her pocket. (Check out Hitchcock's MARNIE for some really out-of-control purse symbolism)

Initially Welles is Hayworth's pawn but it's hard to say for sure whether Hayworth actually falls for him later on. The best evidence that she has developed real feelings for him is when she starts smoking. During the trial there's a lulu of a shot of Rita sitting on a bench smoking right under a big "No Smoking" sign.

Post-Modernism

LFS is a highly original parody of itself. After devouring each convention and cliché it mints new cliches to devour. (It’s like Harpo Marx gassing everyone at the end of ANIMAL CRACKERS then, realizing he’s the last one standing, gassing himself.) To my eyes LFS was a break-through work; the Demoiselles d'Avignon of post-modern film. It functions simultaneously as outlandish satire and confusing but sort of exciting film noir. The “and” is central to  my conception of post-modernism. Everyone is entitled to their own conception since it’s not like post-modernism has ever been satisfactorily defined, so here’s mine:

Were people a hundred years ago wrong to over-look Van Gogh? We can't really say. Maybe Van Gogh paintings looked terrible a century ago. To say otherwise is to say that if someone 100 years from now will disagree with something you think today then you are wrong. In science that’s probably true. In art it’s just weird.

The grandeur and folly of modernism was thinking that art was tied to science and technology; progressive and perfectible. Modernism demonstrated that if art is progressive then all art forms are reducible to philosophical nothingness. Raphael, BIRTH OF A NATION and Mozart were distilled to Jackson Pollack, Andy Warhol’s EMPIRE (One unmoving 485 min shot of the Empire State Building), and John Cage’s composition 4'33" consisting only of silence and ambient sound.

So every artist today starts out knowing her chosen form is reducible to nonsense. To paraphrase from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, the post-modern trick is not minding that it is reducible to nonsense. That knowledge only makes art meaningless in the surmountable way that knowing we are made of atoms makes life meaningless. At first it’s disappointing to learn that culture itself is the only true canvas, but it’s not such a bad canvas…

Today’s artist is less likely to strive for the Platonic ideal of an artwork because she knows that pure art can never exist because there are no pure audiences and art cannot have meaning without an audience. Saying otherwise suggests that art in a time capsule would retain some intrinsic virtue or meaning after the human race became extinct. Optimistic 1940s science fiction stories aside, I have no reason to think a sentient slime mold from the Andromeda galaxy would recognize CITIZEN KANE as a better work that ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY.

The post-modern recognizes that the audience is aware they are seeing a constructed thing and that they have seen many similar constructed things. The audience is hip to the process and aware of the cultural environment. That awareness is part of how we see now. Our cultural self-awareness creates artistic opportunities.

Parody, camp, absurdity, and irony are no longer just commentary on something else, they are the highest bandwidth genres we've got. Cultural self-reference can be rich suggestive shorthand. What we sacrifice in purity we gain in raw information transfer. It's neither better not worse than the old days, just different.

How good is Lady from Shanghai?

Better than almost anyone has ever said. It's roughly as good as CITIZEN KANE and TOUCH OF EVIL and better than anything else Welles made. And that's despite having a terrible score tacked on and about 20% of the most interesting experimental scenes cut out.

LFS has been routinely damned with faint praise as an artistic misfire with some stunning visuals. The visuals are indeed staggering, but I can't see much wrong with the movie on any level.

The unsettling elements of LFS that have usually been dismissed as errors were calculated. The bizarre acting styles were designed. The senseless plot was intentional. And this movie dismissed as light-weight is definitely about something. It's about a lot of things! There's at least as much serious content about life, people and art here as in other great films. (LFS is certainly richer and/or more meaningful than THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, which used to haunt critic's lists of top ten movies of all time.)

In his first notes about the film Welles said he was striving for the bizarre, the unsettling... he wanted to use the medium against itself to shock and alienate, seeking novel forms of audience response. He designed "shock effects that audiences have never seen before." (They were mostly cut. I assume they included things like the shrieking transparent macaw that punctuates the picnic in CITIZEN KANE... or the rape overheard in the next tent during that same picnic.)

In any event, 20% of the film was too weird for producer Harry Cohn. (How the heck can a man who can't even figure out the movie is about him hope to understand a wildly experimental film?) In fairness, I have no doubt that 20% was too weird for audiences either, so the cuts were probably commercially sound.

So, what does the movie MEAN?!

LFS might be a great film if it meant nothing at all, but there's more at work than Brechtian experimentation and bravura technical filmmaking. This is a personal movie about Welles’ marriage falling apart and, more broadly, about idealism and failure. It is also a cry of despair over our self-destructive impulse to fall repeatedly into the same self-made traps.

And, above all, it's a statement that everything anyone says is junk... just hucksterism, lies, self-delusion and talking for the simple sake of making noise. We cannot believe what others say and we cannot believe what we say. Our own delusions pose an even greater obstacle than other people's lies.

Chinese

In 1947 Chinese was synonymous with “incomprehensible.” Rather than 'women are from Venus' this is lady from Shanghai. You think you know someone, but she might as well be speaking Chinese. In LFS the metaphor becomes real when O'Hara is drugged and struggling for comprehension in a Chinatown theatre full of smoke and noise.

(Roman Polanski's CHINATOWN is heavily influenced by LFS, even obliquely copying the theatre scene. When Jake Gittis' old partner says of Dunaway's freakish death "It's Chinatown..." he is saying, to my ears, that it cannot be understood.)

It’s not just Hayworth that makes no sense, of course… everything is nonsense. To bitterly disillusioned Shakespearean Welles the world WAS a stage. Almost every line spoken in the film is artifice; performance, self-serving nonsense or a flat lie. The courtroom scene is like Abbott and Costello, with a witness answering the current question with the answer to the previous question. Then we go from the courtroom to a Chinese play where the actors bark Chinese and beat a gong seemingly at random. It’s all the same show, all equally bewildering to O’Hara and to us. We are just the audience. (Notice the way the audiences are shown in the court and the Chinese theatre... like children, maniacs or zombies.) It’s no surprise to us when we end up in a fun house for the climax.

Bertolt Brecht and Chinese acting

It's obvious that the Chinese theater scene is central to the meaning of LFS, but less obvious what that meaning might be. I had fixated on that scene before reading any of Barbara Leaming's Welles biography, so I was delighted to find therein a several page discussion of her take (presumably via Welles himself) on the significance of Bertolt Brecht that scene and to LFS in general.

At the time Welles was coming off an involvement with Bertotlt Brecht's Galileo in New York and his exposure to the man and his theories of drama was rocking Welles' world. Of particular interest were the implications for revolutionary dramatic forms in Brecht's essay on the Chinese style of acting and "the alienation effect."

You can read something found on the internet about that alienation effect right here. Without getting too deep into something I know little about (for once), here are a couple of quotes and paraphrases of Brecht's observations in this essay we know was central to Welles' conception of LADY FROM SHANGHAI:

The actor is aware he is "playing" and being watched; the audience is aware that the performance is a theatrical event produced with a highly refined style. The Chinese artist never acts as if there were a "fourth wall" in front of him delimiting the real space of his world; he is well aware of the existence of his audience out there; he knows himself to be playing a part.

The artist's object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work. As a result everything put forward by him has a touch of the amazing. Everyday things are thereby raised above the level of the obvious and automatic.

Though these observations were written well before LFS you couldn't ask for a better description of the movie's feel.

Welles the Failure

KANE was more a portrait of Welles than of Hearst. For all of LFS's caricatures the sharpest is O'Hara as Welles. And TOUCH OF EVIL is about Welles, too. The man knew his flaws very well. In fact, Orson Welles knew from an early age exactly what mistakes he would make in life and he spent the next fifty years making them.

LFS savages Welles’ self absorbtion, self-destructive stubbornness, pomposity and his youthful idealism about everything; politics, women, art… everything that bitter maturing Welles came to see as fool's gold.

The Welles of LFS knew that Hollywood was running out of use for him. He was embraced that the Army rejected him. (Asthma.) He had failed utterly as a husband and father (for the second time.) He figured out that he wasn't going to be President, particularly with two divorces. And he was flat broke.

The essence of LFS is that hero and narrator Mike O'Hara is Orson Welles and he is a clown. He’s the one everyone is laughing at behind his back. (Bannister may be a cuckold, but it’s by Bannister’s own design.)

The greatest hypocrite in LFS is Welles/O'Hara, the performer who is never himself yet continually shocked by the world’s falsity. O'Hara is a performance masquerading as a man. He's all show, down to his hilariously bad vaudevillian Irish brogue and theatrical sailor get-up. O’Hara conducts himself like he’s on a stage… he acts like every clichéd line he utters is a priceless bon mot and often pauses for laughter or applause that will never come. (Welles loved timing gags and there are so pips here, particularly when O’Hara pauses fruitlessly for laughter after the genuinely funny, for once, line, “Well, he isn’t a very good one.”)

O’Hara interjects unsolicited wisdom on every topic, usually to people who are only pretending to listen to him because they’re running a con on him. He is so stupid that at one point someone offers him money to sign a pre-typed murder confession and he still can’t figure out that he’s being set-up to take the fall for a murder. Seriously. Even as he tells the story in past tense he continues to miss obvious elements; knowing what he knows he still seems to think the opening attack in Central Park happened naturally, though it’s implausible to us seeing it for the first time.

In addition to Welles the lover and Welles the artist, O’Hara is a playful self-critique of Welles the anti-fascist friend of the common man. O’Hara ostensibly hangs out at the seaman’s hiring hall but in the movie it looks more like he’s a propagandist for a radical union. He’s a sort of John Reed figure, banging away on his typewriter under a sign saying something like “You Have Rights.” When he is mentioned on the radio he’s called a waterfront agitator. We know he fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco. The bad guys in the movie are supposed to be fascists. One even says he served on pro-Franco committees. So, what does it all mean? Not much… just another aspect of the movie’s self-critical middle-aged bewilderment. O’Hara is handsome, brave and idealistic. He is also on the right side, insofar as Bannister and Grisby are evil, and Franco too for that matter. But what does that get you?

(Since it seems that LFS was profoundly influenced by Bertolt Brecht it may be worth noting that Brecht was one of the high profile despairing socialists who saw Stalinism as the final proof that socialism cannot work. Welles probably shared some of that disillusionment.)

The common people turn on O'Hara, their self-styled defender, every chance they get. The ignorant mob arrests him for murder. A different ignorant mob tries him for murder. And look at how he makes his most foolish decision, taking the job on the yacht. Even after Elsa's exotic blandishments he is ready to walk away until Bannister's  non-white servant woman pleads with him to stay because "that poor child" Elsa needs his protection. White knight chivalry and being down with the people, all in a tidy package. The servant woman was just doing Bannister's bidding, of course. She needs the money, as Bannister cruelly demonstrates later on.