'The Lady from Shanghai' is a beautiful mess

The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Starring: Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, and Glenn Anders
Director: Non-Credited [Orson Welles]
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

A chance encounter with Elsa (Hayworth), the younger wife of a famed trail attorney (Sloane), ends up drawing an independent-minded sailor (Welles) into a web of jealousy, hatred, and murder.

"The Lady from Shanghai" is, like every Orson Welles-directed film beautifully shot and visually ahead of its time. It is also features a cast that is perfect for their roles, with Rita Hayworth, as the title character, and Glenn Anders, as a creepy lawyer, being particularly excellent. Unfortunately, the fine performances and brilliant visuals are undermined by a plot-line that's jumbled and haphazard and which leaves the characters underdeveloped and just a little too mysterious. Hayworth's character in particular could have done with a little more background exposition.

Film historians (including Peter Bogdanovich in the documentary included on the version of the DVD I watched) say that Welles cut of the film was almost an hour longer than what was ultimately released by Columbia Pictures. While I think two-and-half hours might have been a big much run-time wise, I also wish the studio hadn't been quite so aggressive with their chopping. I can't help but wonder if some of the character actions would have made more sense if we what we've been with hadn't been a little closer to what Welles' had intended. (He was so unhappy with the final product that he had his director credit left off--even if it was the score and the sound work in general he the most upset about.)

Underrated Orson Welles thriller

The Stranger (1946)
Starring: Edward G. Robinson, Orson Welles, and Loretta Young
Director: Orson Welles
Rating: Eight of Ten Stars

A US government agent, Wilson, (Robinson) is on the trail of Franz Kindler, a psychopathic genius who made the Nazi concentration camps the efficient centers of death they were. No pictures exist of him, but when Wilson traces Kindler to a small Connecticut town, clues start mounting that well-liked newcomer to town college professor Charles Rankin (Welles) who just married the beloved daughter of the town's leading citizen, Mary (Young), is in truth Kindler.


"The Stranger" is a greatly underrated Orson Welles movie. It's a little slow in the wind-up, but once it gets gong, it moves along its suspenseful story-track with great deliberation and all of the elements working together in perfect time, just like the mechanisms of the clocks that Rankin and Kindler both enjoy working with.

Full of great acting, great camera work, and a perfectly paced story that first keeps the audience guessing and then keeps them on the edge of their seats as it builds toward its spectacular finale high atop the town's clock tower. Welles is in top form here, both as an actor and a director, and if you are a fan his work, of "film noir", or if you enjoyed recent films like "A History of Violence", you need to track down a copy of "The Stranger."

(Trivia: This was the only film Orson Welles produced/directed that turned a profit, primarily because he stayed on schedule and under budget for this one and only time.)