The Lady from Shanghai (1947)

The Lady from Shanghai is one of those films that I find a little intimidating. It is directed by Orson Welles, and almost everyone, especially if they are film noir fans, has seen it. It also has a well-deserved reputation for a plot that is hard to follow, and many claim that it doesn’t make sense. It didn’t do well at the box office when it was first released in 1947, but its stature has grown in the years hence. And apparently audiences in France have loved it all along. The film does have a convoluted plot, perhaps more convoluted than other films noir. Today, audiences can rewatch the film several times on DVD or Blu-ray (as I did), and the plot does make more sense with repeat viewings, which is so true of many films noir.

The narrative begins in New York City, where Michael O’Hara (played by Orson Welles) spots Elsa Bannister (played by Rita Hayworth) riding past him in Central Park in a horse-drawn carriage. He is immediately smitten with her, and he tells viewers as much in his voice-over narration using an adopted Irish brogue. In this narration, he admits to not being in his right mind for quite some time after seeing Elsa Bannister and that once he saw her, he wasn’t thinking except to think of her. Elsa Bannister’s carriage is waylaid by three men in Central Park, and Michael O’Hara is there to save her.

Michael soon learns that Elsa is married to Arthur Bannister, who calls himself the greatest criminal lawyer. Now, Michael wants to avoid her, and he refuses her invitation to work on her yacht. He goes to the pier to find work on a boat sailing out of New York City, but Arthur Bannister comes looking for him, determined to hire him as part of his yacht crew. He and his wife are traveling to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal. Michael refuses at first, but Arthur Bannister gets drunk with Michael and two of his sailor friends, and Michael and one of his friends, Chaim (Goldie) Goldfish, are forced to take the too-drunk Arthur Bannister to his yacht.

The trip aboard the Bannisters’ yacht in The Lady in Shanghai ends in San Franciso with many on-location shots. Click here to visit “Reel SF: San Francisco movie locations from classic films” for comparisons (then and now) of various location shots for The Lady from Shanghai. The list is extensive, both for The Lady from Shanghai and for the other movies spotlighted at the website. Click on MOVIE LIST at the top right of the site to see the full list of films.

When they arrive at the yacht, Elsa comes to Michael, claiming to need help and protection. Michael doesn’t know what to make of her, but Goldie is anxious to get work, and he convinces Michael that both of them could probably be hired to work for the Bannisters. Michael reluctantly agrees; he is hired as bosun, and Goldie is also hired as part of the crew.

It doesn’t take long for the tense atmosphere aboard the yacht to be revealed, especially after the arrival of Arthur Bannister’s law partner, George Grisby. Grisby appears to be baiting Michael and also seems smitten with Elsa. Arthur Bannister repeatedly calls his wife Lover, although it is implied that he and she no longer have sex, if they ever did. (Arthur has braces on both legs and walks with two canes.) Elsa tells Michael that Sidney Broome, the yacht’s steward, is not a steward at all but a private detective hired by her husband to spy on her so he can cut her off without any money if they ever get a divorce. When the yacht stops in Acapulco, Mexico, George Grisby offers $5,000 to Michael to kill him, Grisby. And according to Michael, the story just gets crazier and crazier as time goes on.

Michael O’Hara’s voice-over narration continues at times throughout the narrative, and Michael tells his story in hindsight. The entire film could be called a flashback, and flashbacks are one of the many features of film noir. The story is told by Michael from his perspective, and he relies on his own memory to tell it. He starts by telling viewers that he wasn’t in his right mind once he met Elsa Bannister, and this theme of insanity is repeated throughout the film.

The Blu-ray that I watched came with three audio commentaries, one of them by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, who mentions that Orson Welles showed the expressionistic film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to the cast. He wanted something off-kilter and fantastic, which is definitely true of this expressionistic German film. Welles wanted insanity, characters acting like somnambulists, and a break with reality. Smith also mentions that the interior amusement park scenes at the end of the film were created by Orson Welles himself, and he was inspired by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari once again and by modern art. So the next time that I watched The Lady from Shanghai, I decided to focus on the theme of insanity, which I think is one of the reasons the plot seems so convoluted.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another great film that explores the theme of insanity. It utilizes expressionistic techniques to tell its story, and German expressionism is a large influence on film noir in general. Click here to learn some basics about German expressionism, and click here to see my blog article about the film.

(This article about The Lady from Shanghai contains spoilers.)

The theme of insanity and not being in one’s right mind is mentioned directly several times in The Lady from Shanghai. Michael O’Hara saying at the start of the film that he is not in his right mind after seeing Elsa Bannister is just the beginning, and this particular example is easy to dismiss because many people would use Michael’s words to describe the feeling of infatuation and even love. In this example, not being in one’s right mind could be taken as a euphemism. After he and Goldie set sail on board the Bannisters’ yacht, however, things start to change. Michael says to Bessie, another member of the crew who is also the Bannister’s domestic servant on land, “Talk of money and murder. I must be insane. Or else all these people [the Bannisters, George Grisby] are lunatics.” Michael is a little unnerved at this point, but more insanity is ahead.

When the yacht makes a stop in Acapulco, Michael tells a story to Elsa, Arthur, and George Grisby about fishing “off the hump of Brazil.” He caught a shark in a sea that was already dark with blood. The shark got loose and bled into the sea, and the blood drove the rest of the sharks mad. They started attacking and killing each other, which, he tells the Bannisters and Grisby, reminds him of them.

Michael at least is aware that things aren’t right and that the Bannisters and Grisby aren’t telling him everything they know. He tells Elsa about Grisby’s offer to pay him if Michael will kill him (Grisby), and he also tells her, “I’m sure he’s out of his mind.” After Grisby and Broome are murdered, Michael begins to have some doubts about almost everything: “I began to ask myself if I wasn’t out of my head entirely. The wrong man was arrested. The wrong man was shot. Grisby was dead and so was Broome. And what about [Arthur] Bannister? He was going to defend me in a trial for my life. And me, charged with a couple of murders I did not commit. Either me or the rest of the whole world is absolutely insane.”

Michael escapes from the courthouse where his murder trial takes place by pretending to take some of Arthur Bannister’s painkillers. He takes more than he intended to and passes out in a theater in Chinatown. Li Gong, another of the Bannisters’ servants, and his Chinatown gang take him to the Crazy House at the amusement park, which is closed for the season and thus a perfect place to hide him. When Michael comes to, he is disoriented at first, but he is able to regain his senses: “Well, I came to . . . in the Crazy House! And for a while there, I thought it was me that was crazy. After what I’d been through, anything crazy at all seemed natural. But now, I was sane on one subject: her [Elsa Bannister] . . . I knew about her.”

Out of all the main characters—Elsa and Arthur Bannister, George Grisby, and Michael O’Hara—Michael is the only one alive at the end of the film. His story, his metaphor, about the sharks and their feeding frenzy was more accurate than he could have predicted earlier in the story. The insanity is finally over, but at great cost. Perhaps the cost was inevitable. The Bannisters’ and Grisby’s murderous insanity would have continued forever, it seems, if they hadn’t been stopped. Elsa Bannister admits this to Michael as she lays dying in the Crazy House. Michael, on the other hand, tells her that he refuses to play a part in any more insanity.

As I noted, the Blu-ray version of The Lady from Shanghai, published by Kino Lorber in 2023, comes with three audio commentaries: one each by film historian Imogen Sara Smith, novelist and critic Tim Lucas, and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. I have to be honest: I have never been a big fan of Bogdanovich or his films, and I found his commentary to be the least interesting of the three. He literally reads from his notes and recorded conversations that he used for a book about Orson Welles, which was published after Welles’s death. And he also reads from a long letter from Welles to Harry Cohn at Columbia, the studio responsible for distributing The Lady from Shanghai. He did make some interesting points, such as Welles liked on-location shooting because he liked surprises and dealing with challenges. (In contrast, the director Alfred Hitchcock preferred studio shooting because he could control everything.) But Bogdanovich glosses over Rita Hayworth’s childhood abuse and its effect on her marriage to Welles, and he tries to make the case that Welles did his best to deal with it, but Welles and Hayworth were married for only four years. It’s probably best to remember that Bogdanovich thought of Welles as a personal friend.

But the other two commentaries by Smith and Lucas provide lots more information and details. Imogen Sara Smith’s commentary focuses mostly on the film’s production, background, and shooting. Tim Lucas’s focuses quite a bit on the novel, If I Die Before I Wake by Raymond Sherwood King, which is the basis of the film. Both commentaries are well worth a listen because of all the detail they provide. Here are some highlights from each.

Blu-ray audio commentary by film historian Imogen Sara Smith

◊ Orson Welles always intended the film to be offbeat, but Columbia wanted a vehicle for Rita Hayworth, their biggest star.

◊ Rita Hayworth wanted to work with Orson Welles, even though they were no longer living together. They were still married but living separately.

◊ Suicide is another recurring theme in the film.

◊ The court scenes in which Michael O’Hara is tried for the murders of George Grisby and Sidney Broome are staged as a circus. The audience is raucous, and its members are looking to be entertained.

◊ The Lady from Shanghai is told mostly from Michael O’Hara’s point of view, and viewers are just as confused as he is. Disorientation is a feature of film noir.

◊ George Grisby ogles Elsa Bannister. Smith wonders if this is perhaps a comment on studio executives. The scene with him watching her through a telescope while she sunbathes and dives is funny, but it is pushed to the extreme. Hayworth was abused by her father, and her first husband tried to bolster his career by sending her to studio executives.

◊ George Grisby mentions the end of the world and nihilism, which is a reference to the atomic bomb. Welles is one of the first filmmakers to mention the atomic bomb and nuclear destruction in a film. Grisby wants to escape nuclear destruction by moving to a South Sea Island, but the United States tested the bomb on a South Sea Island: Bikini Atoll.

Blu-ray audio commentary by novelist and critic Tim Lucas

◊ Tim Lucas gives a lot of background information about Raymond Sherwood King and the publication of his novel If I Die Before I Wake. He talks about its long path to publication and to its adaptation first as a radio play before it was put on film by Orson Welles. The novel was originally published in May 1938.

◊ The film’s release date in the United States was April 14, 1948. Its release was delayed by one year after production.

◊ Orson Welles refused to take credit or responsibility for the film. There is no credit for the director.

◊ There is no mention in the film’s credits of which novel by Sherwood King is the basis of the film.

◊ The novel takes place only in New York and on Long Island. The film goes from New York to Acapulco, to San Francisco.

◊ The characters in the film are more sinister than they are in the novel. In the novel, Elsa Bannister is portrayed like a lost child. In the film, she is more cunning and conniving. She is really the femme fatale of the film.

◊ Lucas erroneously states that the group of well-dressed Asians listening to the biased radio broadcast about Michael O’Hara and his murder trial seemingly have no link to the courtroom drama, but they do foreshadow the subsequent scenes in Chinatown and at an amusement park, where one of them works. But Tim Lucas is wrong about one thing: one of the Asian men, Li Gong, works for the Bannisters, and he and his gang take Michael O’Hara to the amusement park at the request of Elsa Bannister.

◊ Elsa Bannister’s last scene, her death scene, shows that Rita Hayworth was a good actress.

The Lady from Shanghai is not the only film noir to have a convoluted plot. It’s true that its plot seems more opaque than those of other films, but I have written many times before about other films noir needing repeat viewings to catch all the details and make sense of the plot. And the same can be said for The Lady from Shanghai. It’s well worth the effort. It is a remarkable story and an amazing example of Orson Welles’s particular style of filmmaking. And it is a great chance to see Rita Hayworth meet the challenge of a difficult role. So many films noir have complicated plots that reward repeat viewings, and The Lady from Shanghai is no exception. I have seen the film several times now, and I enjoy it more and more each time.

December 24, 1947 (France), April 14, 1948 (United States), release dates  •  Directed by Orson Welles  •  Screenplay by Orson Welles, William Castle, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle  •  Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Raymond Sherwood King  •  Music by Heinz Roemheld  •  Edited by Viola Lawrence  •  Cinematography by Charles Lawton Jr, Rudolph Maté, Joseph Walker

Rita Hayworth as Elsa (aka Rosalie) Bannister  •  Orson Welles as Michael O’Hara  •  Everett Sloane as Arthur Bannister  •  Glenn Anders as George Grisby  •  Ted de Corsia as Sidney Broome  •  Evelyn Ellis as Bessie  •  Gus Schilling as Chaim (aka “Goldie”) Goldfish  •  Erskine Sanford as the judge  •  Carl Frank as District Attorney Galloway  •  Louis Merrill as Jake  •  Harry Shannon as the cab driver  •  Wong Chung as Li Gong  •  Philip Morris as port steward Officer Peters  •  Anita Kert Ellis as the singer dubbed for Rita Hayworth

Distributed by Columbia Pictures  •  Produced by Mercury Productions

Affair in Trinidad (1952): Some World War II History Can Help

I wrote about Affair in Trinidad about three and a half years ago, and more recently someone left a comment, really a couple of questions, about a plot detail: “But why did Fabian want [Neal] Emery dead? Or have him killed?” I hadn’t seen the film in years, and I decided I was ready for another viewing because I was pretty sure that these questions had been answered in the film. Didn’t Neal Emery find out that Max Fabian was involved in international smuggling of state secrets and that’s what got him killed? Didn’t Fabian want Neal’s brother Steve Emery killed because he was digging into the circumstances of his brother’s death? And wasn’t Steve quickly becoming Fabian’s romantic rival for Chris Emery’s (Neal’s widow’s) affections? I decided to see the film again, just to be sure.

Click here for my first blog post about Affair in Trinidad.

It seems that I had made some assumptions about Neal Emery’s death based on a bit of knowledge about U.S. history—World War II history in particular. After seeing numerous films noir and other classic films from the war era, my curiosity about certain historical topics and issues led me to do some research. And after seeing Affair in Trinidad again, I found out I needed just a little more background information. Viewers in 1952 would not have needed to do the kind of research that I needed to do. The writers of the film’s screenplay could assume that viewers knew a lot of background information because, for them, many of the film’s details would have been current events, maybe even very similar to their own experiences, not a lesson in history.

(This blog post about Affair in Trinidad contains spoilers.)

Neal Emery, Chris’s husband, is already dead, murdered, at the start of Affair in Trinidad. His death is first thought to be a suicide, but the coroner discovers that he died of blunt force trauma to the skull. Mr. Anderson, from the U.S. consulate, is summoned to Inspector Smythe’s office because Neal Emery is a U.S. citizen living in Trinidad. Inspector Smythe, who works for the British government because Trinidad is under British rule, suspects Max Fabian, or someone close to him, in Neal’s death. Neal Emery and Max Fabian were friends, and Fabian is attracted to Neal’s wife Chris.

The film explains that Trinidad and Tobago are owned by Great Britain. Because he is already under suspicion, Max Fabian is known to the British authorities in Trinidad. Viewers in 1952 would have known that Great Britain and the United States were on friendly terms and would not have been surprised that the U.S. consulate would have become involved in the investigation surrounding Neal Emery’s death. Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union were World War II allies. The Soviet Union was breaking away from its wartime alliance after the war, but the remaining three allies were still working together on the international stage to keep the peace and root out Nazism. Many Nazis had escaped from Germany after the war and were hiding in South America and the Caribbean.

Steve Emery, Neal’s brother, flies down to Trinidad because Neal wrote a letter inviting him and because Neal has found a job for Steve. Steve Emery’s first appearance in the film is on the plane traveling to Trinidad. He is sitting next to Peter Bronec, although Bronec doesn’t identify himself at this time, and Steve and viewers don’t know who he is. Steve talks about his younger brother Neal, and the passenger says that he doesn’t know Neal, but he acts suspiciously after his conversation with Steve. Even the flight attendant notices Bronec’s behavior and inquires about him.

After Neal’s death, Fabian feels free to pursue the widow Chris, so he is not too happy to hear that Neal’s brother has arrived on the island asking questions. But he invites both Steve and Chris to dinner at his home. Additional houseguests arrive while Fabian is entertaining Chris and Steve for dinner, and Fabian introduces all his guests in one scene:

◊ Peter Bronec is an electronics and radar specialist. (Steve Emery recognizes Bronec as the passenger sitting next to him on the plane.)

◊ Dr. Franz Huebling has written articles about V-2 rockets just after World War II. (Steve Emery recognizes Huebling’s name and knows that Huebling has written these articles. Steve Emery mentioned on the plane trip to Trinidad that he is a pilot and flew a B-29, so he knows something about the subject of Huebling’s articles.)

◊ Veronica Huebling is Franz’s wife.

◊ Walters is working for an unnamed government that has paid huge sums of money to Max Fabian for industrial and technological information and secrets. (Viewers learn later in the film that this unnamed government is hostile to the United States.)

Steve Emery mentions that he flew a B-29, and Huebling says that he wrote articles about V-2 rockets. Viewers in 1952 wouldn’t have needed more information to know that Emery is a World War II veteran and that Huebling is a German scientist who had worked for the Nazi government. A modern-day viewer like me, however, had to do a little bit of research to find out more about these plot details. An online search led me to britannica.com (click on each list item for more information):

◊ V-2 rocket:

“In German, Vergeltungswaffen-2 (“Vengeance Weapon 2”), also called V-2 rocket or A-4, German ballistic missile of World War II, the forerunner of modern space rockets and long-range missiles.”

◊ B-29 plane:

“Also called the Superfortress, a U.S. heavy bomber used in World War II. Its missions included firebombing Tokyo and other Japanese cities and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively.”

Inspector Smythe is already investigating Max Fabian. He tells Chris Emery what he knows about Fabian’s activities and his involvement in the trade of international government secrets. Inspector Smythe also knows about Steve Emery’s arrival in Trinidad because he is keeping an eye on all arrival lists from the customs office. He needs to do a thorough background search on Steve Emery before Emery can be a trusted participant in his investigation. Inspector Smythe is more than willing to use Chris Emery as a spy because it is common knowledge that Fabian is attracted to her.

The reason(s) why Max Fabian had Neal Emery killed are not stated directly in the film. But I think the plot details give vital clues—details that would have been obvious to contemporary filmgoers but not to modern viewers. Neal Emery had found out that Max Fabian was involved in smuggling of some sort. He knew that Fabian had at least one private plane and that is why he had asked Fabian to hire his brother Steve, who is an experienced pilot. Whether Neal knew about the smuggling of state secrets isn’t important: He was asking questions and that was dangerous enough. Fabian wants Neal’s brother Steve Emery killed because Steve is digging into the circumstances of his brother’s death—and he becomes Fabian’s romantic rival for Chris Emery’s affections. Although the specific details are a bit different, Fabian wanted both brothers killed for the same general reasons.

It's also common knowledge that Fabian has resorted to violence and will do so again to get what he wants:

◊ Neal Emery is murdered, most likely by someone working for Max Fabian.

◊ Peter Bronec is killed, run over by a car at the airport. Bronec had finished his work for Fabian and was no longer useful to him. The fact that Wittol’s car (Wittol is the owner of Club Caribe in Trinidad) was used in the murder is probably a way to frame Wittol instead of anyone connected to Max Fabian.

◊ By the end of the film, Fabian has plans to kill both Steve and Chris Emery. Once he discovers that Chris has been using his affection for her to spy on him, she becomes expendable, too. Steve has been expendable all along because he has been asking too many questions.

One tiny detail that I couldn’t find any information about occurred during Steve Emery’s plane conversation with Peter Bronec. Steve is excited about visiting his brother in Trinidad:

• Steve Emery: “They tell me Trinidad makes the rest of the tropics look like Callahan’s backyard.”

• Peter Bronec: “Yes, it’s very beautiful.”

It’s clear that “Callahan’s backyard” is something everyone in 1952 knew something about, but I couldn’t find anything at all about it. If anyone wants to solve this last piece of the film’s puzzle by leaving a comment, I would be grateful.

Thank goodness for the ability to search online because I was able to find out a lot of information very quickly. A little bit of knowledge about World War II history helps a lot when it comes to understanding the plot of Affair in Trinidad.

July 29, 1952, release date  •  Directed by Vincent Sherman  •  Screenplay by Berne Giler, James Gunn  •  Based on a story by Virginia Van Upp, Berne Giler  •  Music by George Duning  •  Edited by Viola Lawrence  •  Cinematography by Joseph Walker

Rita Hayworth as Chris Emery  •  Glenn Ford as Steve Emery  •  Alexander Scourby as Max Fabian  •  Valerie Bettis as Veronica Huebling  •  Torin Thatcher as Inspector Smythe  •  Howard Wendell as Anderson  •  Karel Stepanek as Walters  •  George Voskovec as Doctor Franz Huebling  •  Steven Geray as Wittol  •  Walter Kohler as Peter Bronec  •  Juanita Moore as Dominique  •  Mort Mills as Martin, Wittol’s henchman  •  Ralph Moody as the coroner

Produced by The Beckworth Corporation  •  Distributed by Columbia Pictures