![]() ![]() The following sequence of stills should help you to make sense of the plot. So perhaps it was always Welles’ intention to take his audience for a ride. But even before that happened… after the preview showing, Harry Cohn, Columbia’s president, offered to pay anyone in the room US$1,000 if they could explain the storyline. Perhaps things would have been spelled out more clearly had the film not been cut by an hour and subjected to numerous retakes and edits. But as the film moves towards its shattering (literally!) climax, the intrigue careers out of control, piling plot-twist on plot-twist. The Lady from Shanghai has a tortuous, labyrinthine storyline. This marked Ted de Corsia’s screen debut and he went on to play a number of villains in movies including Jules Dassin’s terrific The Naked City (1948). Sidney Broome, a private detective hired by Arthur Bannister to spy on Elsa.Glenn Anders’ performance in the role all but steals the show. George Grisby, Arthur Bannister’s sweaty, bulging-eyed, leering legal partner, obsessed with the atom bomb and the end of the world. He has a habit of calling people “fella,” presumably a reference to Nelson Rockefeller, who had recruited Welles to create It’s All True (a film comprising three stories about Latin America), only to terminate the project before it came to fruition.And indeed Arthur Bannister, like Charles Foster Kane, is full of despair despite his success. He’s played with “hawk-like malevolence” by Mercury Player Everett Sloane, who made his screen debut in Citizen Kane. Arthur Bannister, Elsa’s husband whose brilliant legal mind is in stark contrast with his pitiful, crippled body.This role marked a radical departure from those previously played by Rita Hayworth. Elsa Bannister, the drop-dead gorgeous lady from Shanghai with a murky past and a great deal on her mind.For all that, his wistful voice-over imbues the film with a sense of overwhelming sadness, world-weariness and resignation. Orson Welles cast himself in the role, assuming a less-than-convincing Irish accent. Michael O’Hara, an unemployed freelance sailor who acts as the film’s narrator.There are five main protagonists in The Lady from Shanghai: Rita Hayworth as Elsa Bannister in The Lady from Shanghai. The Lady from Shanghai – characters, plot and things to look out forġ947. So, stop reading now if you’ve never seen The Lady from Shanghai and want to watch it without knowing the plot in advance. Spoiler Alert!!! Let’s begin with the main characters and the plot of the film itself. ![]() If you have a blu-ray player, try to get hold of the Mill Creek Entertainment transfer. If you’ve never seen the movie, now’s the time to find out what you’ve been missing. And the story behind it has enough twists and turns to form the basis of a movie in its own right. But the film we see today is very different from the one that Orson Welles, its writer, director, producer and co-star, envisioned. It’s full of originality, strangeness and atmosphere. The Lady from Shanghai has become something of a cult for movie buffs, particularly for connoisseurs of film noir. Or, in the words of Dave Kehr, the weirdest great movie ever made. All of those adjectives apply to this flawed masterpiece by one of cinema’s great magicians. The Lady from Shanghai – hallucinatory, baffling, sinister, brilliant, twisted.
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