Surprisingly incoherent and boring

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

A poetic drifter saves a beautiful woman from a random mugging, then accepts her husband's offer of work on a yachting holiday, only to find himself ensnared in a murder plot ...Highly contrived story that never gets into a groove, although it does develop a chaotic energy. Right from the start you sense the writer/director struggled to get things rolling, with hopelessly implausible plot points and lots of dead-end dialogue. But just as I was losing the will to continue, a courtroom scene pulled me back in with some truly engaging charm and idiosyncrasy, followed by an interesting hall-of-mirrors climax.So lots of weaknesses, but ... there is one outstanding element that makes this movie great: Rita Hayworth's close-ups. The most beautiful, fascinating face ever seen on a movie screen. Ever.The music is fine, not overly dramatic. The photography has some brilliant touches, with good use of angles and lighting.Overall: an oddly laboured effort, elevated by a unique actress.

This classic film opens with sailor Michael O'Hara rescuing beautiful blonde Elsa 'Rosalie' Bannister from a group of muggers in Central Park. Afterwards as he takes her home he tells her that he is a sailor and she offers him a job crewing her husband's yacht which the couple plan to sail from New York to San Francisco by way of the Caribbean and the Panama Canal. Initially he isn't keen to take the job but eventually he takes in and joins the Bannisters and their friend George Grisby on their voyage. As time passes it is clear that Michael is developing feelings for Elsa; something George has clearly noticed. Then George approaches him with a very strange proposition; he wants to pay Michael $5,000 to murder him! Actually he wants Michael to tell the police that he killed him so he can start a new life on the insurance money, he assures Michael that without a body he can't be prosecuted. Of course it doesn't go as Michael hoped and he finds himself on trial for his life with Rosalie's husband, a renowned defence attorney, representing him.Fans of film noir are sure to like this as is has all the hallmarks of the genre; murder, a twisting plot and most importantly a beautiful femme fatale. Orson Welles does a solid job as Michael, the ordinary man caught up in a deadly scheme, even if his Irish accent seems a bit off. Rita Hayworth is impressive as Rosalie, a woman more dangerous than she appears, Everett Sloane is good as her husband Arthur as is Glenn Anders as George. The story starts relatively slowly, giving us time to get to know the characters then quickly picks up the pace as the plot emerges and the danger becomes apparent. This all leads up to an inventive finale in the hall of mirrors in an out of season funfair. There are moments of comedy; most notably the court room scene where Arthur is called as a witness and ends up cross examining himself! Overall I'd say that this is an impressive film that fans of the genre should watch.

"The Lady from Shanghai" is a 1947 film noir by director Orson Welles. The film was famously "butchered" by Colombia Pictures president Harry Cohn, who removed about half of Welles' footage and replaced it with extensive and expensive re-shoots."Shanghai" is narrated by Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles), an Irish sailor who gets swept up in a plot involving crooked lawyers, rich businessmen and sultry femme-fatales (Rita Hayworth). Like most of Welles' film, its aesthetic is busy and bombastic to a fault. Welles assaults us with all manners of trickery, including off-beat camera angles, strange accents, unusual compositions, copious long shots, extreme close ups, grandiose location photography, audacious crane shots, leering shots of Hayworth's bikini-clad body and manic fun house sequences which include a visit to a Hall of Mirrors. Welles so commits to his "throw everything including the kitchen sink" approach, that he even hits us with giant fish, giant octopuses and a courtroom filled with shenanigans too bizarre to describe. There's even an apocalyptic subplot in which characters pontificate the End of the World! As "The Lady from Shanghai" doesn't represent Welles final vision, Welles intentions for the film remain unknown. Some view it as a film about the dissolution of Welles' marriage to Rita Hayworth, whilst others see it as a tale unreliably narrated by a madman. Others view it through a political lens, O'Hara a disillusioned dissident (he fought against General Franco in the Spanish Civil War, whilst the film's chief villain admits to being pro-Franco) and leftist trapped in a landscape of visual distortions and so forever unable to "fit" into the world. This world, he explains, is one of conniving sharks, humans destined to "eat themselves up" via deranged blood-frenzies. However one reads "Shanghai", it offers one of the most baroque and bizarre handlings of familiar noir tropes.7.9/10 – See "Out of the Past" (1947) and "Double Indemnity".

Dave Kehr calls this film a true 'film noir comedy'. It seems to me that this perspective manifests in the way that the universe of The Lady from Shanghai continually and incessantly laughs at Michael O'Hara's misfortune and helplessness. Certainly Welles has obliged stylistically - his strange, morphed compositions increasingly begin to collapse around O'Hara as he is drawn slowly into the mystery of the murder conspiracy. The blocked paths of the actors criss-crossed and circle each other venomously as the aquarium creatures loom large in the background. The narrator seemingly jumps readily inside his own story as the voice-over switches seamlessly into dialogue. And then there is that famous climax in the house of mirrors where all sense of direction and orientation is abandoned for our characters - each shot and each shattering of glass further distorts the space (although the lost footage is apparently much longer and grander). In some instances the cosmic farce is literal in its humour - as the hobbling Bannister ends up on the stand interrogating himself in the trial that is little more than a slapstick affair. But for all the effort in maintaining this pervasive aura of paranoia and disorientation by ramping up the convention stylistic tones of noir the film falls a little flat. The murder plot itself, which is meant to be increasing hard to follow until that final reveal, is secondary to Welles' atmosphere, so what we have is a distancing effect due to his own plodding, almost bored narration guiding us along. What is supposed to be irregular and affecting merely highlights its own flaws - the clumsy ADR dubbing which does the dialogue no favours, the oddly stilted romance that doesn't quite lure us into a false sense of security (perhaps a casualty of the director and starlet's impending divorce), awkward little zooms and smash cuts that merely draw attention to themselves rather than establish a tone. I would so very much like to see this lost artefact.