The Lady from Shanghai

It might be the most conventional Orson Welles movie I've ever seen, but that doesn't mean this twist on noir doesn't feature his typical (and beloved) flourishes, even if that conventional feeling and the ambitious (some would say convoluted) plot sometimes work against each other. One of the ways this is conventional is the way it's shot. You don't get the inventive camera angles like in Citizen Kane. There's none of the trickery he'd later do in Touch Of Evil, where plot events happen just off-camera but are audible, or the sweeping, epic opening shot. There's a bit of a forbidden love story going on, and some duplicitous rich people possibly exploiting a working-class guy in Michael O'Hara (Welles). Compared to the rich psychological explorations or Shakesperean adaptations he'd do in other movies, Lady feels as close to a mid-tier pot-boiler as Welles could get, the 40's version of a movie like Single White Female -- something meant to be good, but not great, but might end up overachieving anyway. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have Wellesian touches. There isn't a character in this movie -- not even our lead -- for whom the phrase "moral ambiguity" doesn't apply. To paraphrase Carlin, "the blood is already on their hands, we're only talking a matter of degree". For a fair chunk of the movie, it does feel like it's laying breadcrumbs in the most deliberate way possible. It's a calculated risk, and you have to either have confidence that Welles isn't treading water (he never does), or just pull the cord and bail. It does all lead to something, but it also is setting you and O'Hara up. You're sucked in by the beauty of the seas and Acapulco, and by Rita Hayworth being an unusual femme fatale, and by all the characters having all sorts of weird personality quirks and unspecified sliminess. The movie wants you to be drunk on all this, but it also wants to plant subtle red flags in your brain. It wants you to not know which way is up, so when it finally kicks into high gear, you won't be able to see any of the twists coming. And in that regard, for some, it may be too complicated for its own good. The movie has schemes within schemes within schemes. Welles loved to pull the rug out from viewers -- look at the ending of Touch Of Evil, that vindicates the villain, at least in the context of the movie's main mystery -- but this movie has the viewer stand on a tower of rugs and keeps pulling them out, one after another. Some might find it tiring, or irritating, but the movie does set up that the Bannisters and the associated characters all have a very flexible view of morality and where the lines are drawn. Living in that moral ambiguity also gives the movie realism -- nobody is a 100% true north hero -- but it also means it's hard to root for anybody. O'Hara is the least awful person, but he admits to murder at one point, and has little to no reservations about murdering the right person for the right price. It makes the movie basically be "watch awful people do awful things". It's a hell of a way to make the noir genre stand on its head. But then again, that's what makes Welles movies so interesting. He was the original director that lived to challenge convention. Where lazy hacks like Rian Johnson (come at me) try too hard to "disrupt", Welles embraced the tropes and flipped them around and turned them inside out and did so effortlessly. Lady From Shanghai uses the conventions of the noir genre and instead of mocking the tropes, re-purposes them. The square-jawed hero that's a step ahead of everybody is now a sucker and a bit of a scoundrel himself. The femme fatale is no longer a passive damsel waiting for the hero to come in; she's just as complicit as everybody else. The layers are deep, and for some maybe impenetrable, but for those who are willing and patient, there's a damned good riff on noir to be found here.