“MAYBE I’ll live so long I’ll forget her; maybe I’ll die trying.” Thus, the forlorn hope of Michael ‘Black Irish’ O’Hara in Orson Welles’ exotic classic The Lady from Shanghai (1948), the tortuous tale of a man who takes the wrong job and falls for the wrong woman.
An essential entry in the film-noir canon, The Lady from Shanghai is re-released in selected cinemas this week. For this rare treasure we must thank the Park Circus film organisation, whose estimable quest is to “put great pictures back on the big screen”.
Now in their 12th year, Park Circus organises screenings of films from across the spectrum of cinema history — from mainstream to margins — and in this DVD age Welles’ movie is fully deserving of a proper projected showing.
Placing The Lady from Shanghai in any one category is tricky. As an example of the film-noir style it pointedly reflects upon America’s post-war pessimism about its decaying ideals. Simultaneously, the picture recalls the earlier style and symbolism of German Expressionism, which Welles had masterfully exhibited in Citizen Kane (1940) — acute camera angles, exaggerated close-ups, sharp-edged light and shade.
The combined effect implies that as society’s morality becomes undermined, its mentality gets unhinged. And while Welles displays the quirky qualities he admired in European cinema — overlapping dialogue, improvised action — he also sticks to the solid plot structure of classical Hollywood.
Indeed the plot of The Lady from Shanghai is almost text-book noir — some dumb schmuck who reckons he’s known every peril is smitten by a woman who gives him more peril than he knows.
When seasoned seaman Michael O’Hara (Welles himself) rescues the mysterious and luminous Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth, aka Mrs Welles) from a mugging in New York’s Central Park, he doesn’t foresee the spider’s web that’s about to entangle him.
Noir enthusiasts will recognise this narrative set-up from, among others, Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941) and Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). As that mordant but oft-quoted synopsis of film noir has it: “A girl with a past meets a guy with no future.”
But if the plot of the movie stays close to the shore of noir style, Welles’ staging of the story sails far from the usual course. The Lady from Shanghai was adapted from a dime novel titled If I Die Before I Wake, penned by Sherwood King.
The O’Hara character was originally named Laurence Planter, who gets in over his head in elevated New York society. Welles changed the character’s name and his back story, making him a picaresque hero with an enigmatic past, a wandering adventurer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War who’s killed a Franco spy. It’s this last episode in O’Hara’s background that earns him the nickname Black Irish and leaves him with a troubled conscience.
A major turning point comes when O’Hara is offered a job by the definitely lame, defiantly nasty but distinctly wealthy Arthur Bannister, played by Welles disciple Everett Sloane, who makes limping around on two walking-sticks seem somehow threatening.
Mr Bannister is well aware that Mrs Bannister holds a torch for O’Hara but nevertheless hires him to pilot their yacht (Welles borrowed one from Errol Flynn) from New York to San Francisco. By altering the narrative setting to a sea journey, Welles turned the story into a mini Odyssey, with O’Hara as a kind of Ulysses who finds he’s swimming with sharks.
The movie even includes a siren’s song, as Elsa purrs her way through a soft, sultry rendition of Please Don’t Kiss Me. “Some people can smell danger — not me,” O’Hara mourns. He slowly realises that more than his job depends on him resisting the temptations of his employer’s spurious spouse, as the plot turns to murder and to bluff and double bluff.
The cynicism of the Bannister couple was reflective of the Welles/Hayworth marriage, then disintegrating, and the tension crossed over to the screen. “You know, I’m pretty tired of both of us,” Bannister tells his wife. Welles wrote this line for the character, but he might have said the same thing himself.
Welles considered ‘Black Irish’ as the movie’s original title, a nod to his time spent in Ireland as a teenager. He once called Ireland “a land haunted with the raw materials of tall tales”. In 2011 a TG4 documentary on Welles said he became “an adventurer embarking on great journeys” while sojourning in Galway. It’s likely that Ireland’s traditional myth of the intrepid nomad inspired Welles to reimagine the story through Michael O’Hara.
What’s certain is that he learned valuable lessons from Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoir at the Gate Theatre, where he was introduced to acting in 1931. This is particularly so of Edwards, who taught Welles the power of combining visual and verbal expression.
No doubt Welles’ cinematic tour de force in the fairground hall of mirrors at the climax of The Lady From Shanghai owes a little something to Edwards’ influence.
A flawed masterpiece, to be sure, The Lady from Shanghai is still a rich, intoxicating brew.
The Lady from Shanghai opens at the BFI Southbank on Friday, (July 25) and thereafter has several showings across Britain
