The Tattooed Stranger (1950)

I am adding a new one to my list of film noir favorites: The Tattooed Stranger. For a film that is just a little bit more than an hour long, The Tattooed Stranger packs in a lot of information and entertainment. And if you like history as much as I do, it is also a visual record of New York City as it was in the middle of the twentieth century. I have seen the film several times and found more to like each time. Everything about it is low budget and minimalist, and it all works in its favor.

The film starts with a man walking his dog through Central Park in New York City. The dog leads him to a parked car, and the man is shocked to find a deceased female in the passenger seat. The man rushes to the driver’s side of the car and honks the car horn, which alerts a police officer on horseback. It isn’t long before other officers arrive and surround the vehicle. They question the witness, and homicide detectives and the medical coroner are called to the scene.

The crime scene has a few clues. The car was stolen in the Bronx and reported by the car’s owner. The detectives take fingerprints, a cast of a footprint, samples of all the materials (dirt, grass, vegetation) that they find in the car. However, the woman is a Jane Doe. There is nothing on her person or in her purse to identify her.

Captain Lundquist assigns the case to Lieutenant Corrigan and pairs him with new homicide detective, Frank Tobin. Lundquist is impressed with Tobin: He has a college education and a good war record; he was a military police officer in the army. Lieutenant Corrigan is still a little worried about working with Tobin; he jokes with the captain that his grammar might be too poor to measure up.

Tobin is transferring from his work in the police crime lab, and he is convinced he will miss the work. His boss, Captain Gavin says that they will still be working together on cases but that Tobin shouldn’t put all his faith in modern (1950) criminal science: “Now, look, Tobin, you hang around this place too long and you begin to think that the answer to everything can be found on a microscope slide and spectrograph reading. Oh, those things help. Science can help a lot. But remember, 90 percent of an investigation is still carried on in the inside of a man’s head and the bottom of his feet.”

The medical examiner had already examined the body of Jane Doe when he leaves the examining room, and his completed examination is a lucky break because a man enters and tries to carve up her body. A foot chase ensues inside police headquarters, and the intruder is eventually shot and killed. Lieutenant Corrigan recognizes him: Billy Alcohol, already known to the police because he is always being picked up for public drunkenness. The detectives learn that Billy Alcohol was hired to attack the dead body, and the medical examiner can figure out why. Jane Doe had a tattoo on her wrist, and it is an important clue in a case that has so few.

(This article about The Tattooed Stranger contains spoilers.)

Another important clue is a plant specimen found at the crime scene that Captain Gavin cannot identify. He and Captain Lundquist send Detective Tobin to the Museum of Natural History for some research about it. Lieutenant Corrigan is off to inquire at different restaurants to see if he can find where Jane Doe worked because the medical examiner guessed that she spent most of her days on her feet.

At the Museum of Natural History, Detective Tobin meets Dr. Mary Mahan. He is surprised to learn that the PhD plant specialist is a woman. (It helps to remember that the film was released in 1950, when women were leaving the workforce and giving up jobs for returning service members.) They identify the plant, but Dr. Mahan remembers that additional research on the plant was done at the Botanical Garden. She and Detective Tobin head there next to learn that the unknown plant sample found at the crime scene was once found in a vacant lot on the south corner of Gun Hill Road and Grand Boulevard (in the Bronx, according to my online search; no one says so specifically in the film). These scenes serve another purpose: Detective Tobin and Dr. Mahan are attracted to one another and thus provide a bit of romantic interest in the film—no femme fatale for this film noir.

Lieutenant Corrigan distracts Detective Tobin from his budding romance because he wants Tobin to join him for a tour of what he calls “art galleries,” that is, tattoo parlors, on the Bowery. They need to show the photo they have of Jane Doe’s tattoo to tattoo artists in the hope of finding the artist and perhaps learning the victim’s identity. They finally find Johnny Marseille, who tells the detectives that he recognizes the tattoo. He also recognizes the woman from the photo they have of her dead body on the examiner’s table. He doesn’t know her name, but he remembers that she came with a man, a regular customer named Al Radditz. They got matching tattoos at the time, which he thought was romantic. She came in maybe a year later to have the tattoo altered, which is the one in their photo. Johnny Marseille and the detectives surmise that she and Al Radditz broke up and she found a new boyfriend.

From this point on, the two detectives, Tobin and Corrigan, follow the clues and put in the footwork to solve the case. The work is painstaking, and they follow one detail after another, which means the plot goes from one point to another. Once again, I have to point out that The Tattooed Stranger, like so many films noir, needs careful attention to detail. And it’s easy to miss something. It also helps to do a little bit of research because the film includes many cultural references that film viewers in 1950 would have known and taken for granted. Here are just a few examples of what I mean:

◊ Lieutenant Corrigan gives Detective Frank Tobin the nickname “Luther Burbank” after Captain Gavin sends Tobin to the Museum of Natural History to investigate the plant specimen that cannot be identified. I had no idea who Luther Burbank was and had to look up his name to learn something about him. Luther Burbank (1849–1926) was a U.S. botanist, horticulturist, and agricultural scientist—and he had his own active website! Click here if you want to learn more about him at his own webpage at that site.

◊ Detective Tobin tells Dr. Mahan that his homicide case is in the news, but he is joking. When she asks for proof, he directs her to a comic strip in the newspaper. Dr. Mahan tells Tobin that she will feel like Tess Trueheart if he stands her up for their dinner date. Tess Trueheart was a name I thought was associated with the comic strip Dick Tracy, but it was still a name I had to look up, just to be sure. Tess Trueheart was indeed the girlfriend of Dick Tracy, famous cartoon detective of the Dick Tracy comic strip created by Chester Gould in 1931. Click here for more information at Wikipedia about the list of characters, including Tess Trueheart, in the Dick Tracy universe.

◊ Tobin starts a running gag with Lieutenant Corrigan at the beginning of their murder investigation with the following crack: “I knew a tattooed WAC once.” WAC stands for Women’s Army Corps, created during World War II. The Tattooed Stranger was released in 1950, only five years after the end of the war, and it’s a good bet that U.S. film viewers were intimately familiar with all the nation’s defense forces. Click here to learn more about the WAC at the National WWII Museum.

The running gag about the tattooed WAC is one example of the humor in the film. There is a lot of good-natured fun and comradery among all the police officers and detectives. The humor keeps the homicide investigation from getting too burdensome, for the characters and the viewers!

The on-location shooting in New York City is spectacular. The investigation takes the detectives to Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx; they certainly cover a lot of territory. The film has inadvertently become a great historical film record of New York City in 1950, now seventy-five years ago. (One thing that surprised me a bit was the amount of litter in the streets. The city was not especially clean seventy-five years ago.)

One of the pleasures of seeing the film several times was my increasing appreciation for Walter Kinsella’s portrayal of Lieutenant Corrigan and his relationship with Detective Tobin. Because of these two detectives, The Tattooed Stranger was a buddy cop film before the term was invented. The two share most of the jokes, and they trade mock insults and one-liners with each other. It is obvious that the two characters, the two actors (Walter Kinsella and John Miles), enjoyed working together on this film. They managed to trek all over Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx on a short production schedule and on a tight budget. They even tour tattoo parlors on the Bowery back when it was a neighborhood populated by people who had problems with alcohol and public drunkenness.

And they have fun doing it, which means fun for viewers, too.

February 9, 1950 (premiere in New York City), March 11, 1950, release dates  •  Directed by Edward Montagne  •  Screenplay by Philip H. Reisman Jr.  •  Music by Alan Shulman  •  Edited by David Cooper  •  Cinematography by William O. Steiner

John Miles as Detective Frank Tobin  •  Patricia Barry as Dr. Mary Mahan  •  Walter Kinsella as Lieutenant Corrigan  •  Frank Tweddell as Captain Lundquist (aka Lundy)  •  Rod McLennan as Captain Gavin  •  Henry Lasko as Joe Canko  •  Arhtur L. Jarrett as Johnny Marseille  •  Jim Boles as Fisher  •  William Gibberson as Aberfoyle  •  Jack Lord as Detective Deke Del Vecchio

Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures Inc.  •  Produced by RKO Pathé Inc.

Ten Years of Film Noir at Make Mine Film Noir, and It All Started in The Dark Corner (1946)

Make Mine Film Noir celebrates its tenth anniversary!

Ten years ago today, I launched Make Mine Film Noir with an article about The Dark Corner (1946). The film is one of my all-time favorites, and to celebrate, I saw it again. (Okay. I admit it: I have seen the film several times in-between.)

I am happy to report that Brad Galt and Kathleen Stuart, the two main characters, are just as entertaining and engaging as ever. In spite of reports that Lucille Ball hated the film and hated working on it, the chemistry between her character and Stevens’s is still there on-screen. Their repartee certainly helps: It looks like both actors are having fun delivering their lines. And they aren’t the only ones. Almost all the characters have a chance to shine with puns and comedic lines, especially Hardy Cathcart, played by Clifton Webb.

The snappy dialogue isn’t the only clever use of language. I think other writers would also appreciate Brad Galt’s line to Lieutenant Frank Reeves when the latter comes calling to check on Galt at his new office: “I’m playing this [his private investigation firm] by the book, and I won’ even trip over a comma.”

And then there is the running baseball metaphor that Kathleen Stuart uses at the start of her courtship with Brad, something she brings up more than once. And because the on-screen chemistry is working, it’s not long before Brad is embellishing the metaphor. How can Kathleen—and viewers, too—not be charmed by this handsome private investigator? And all because her father was a major league umpire!

The film also uses slang terms that are unusual even for film noir. Film noir uses a lot of slang from the 1940s and 1950s, and I almost always use captioning to figure out what the characters are saying. I often have to consult online dictionaries to learn the meanings of words that are unfamiliar to me, to probably all film viewers today. Here are just two examples from The Dark Corner:

◊ pepper pot = handgun

◊ shagging = following someone, tailing a suspect (not the meaning of the term in British English)

Both are obvious from the context in the film, which is a lucky break because I tried to find them online and couldn’t.

This description might make people think that The Dark Corner is not a film noir at all, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Be warned: There is plenty of violence and betrayal to go around.

I have written about The Dark Corner twice before on this blog. Click on each list item below to read more about the film:

◊ The Dark Corner (1946)

◊ Four Favorite Noirs: Born to Kill (1947), The Dark Corner (1946), Marlowe (1969), and Too Late for Tears (1949)

Next year, on April 9, 2026, The Dark Corner celebrates its eightieth anniversary. I’ll be seeing it again, I’m sure.

What amazes me after ten years is that I have just scratched the surface, that I have more noir to see, enjoy, and write about. I hope to keep writing for another ten years.

April 9, 1946, release date  •  Directed by Henry Hathaway  •  Screenplay by Bernard C. Schoenfeld and Jay Dratler •  Based on a story by Leo Rosten  •  Music by Cyril J. Mockridge  •  Edited by J. Watson Webb, Jr.  •  Cinematography by Joseph MacDonald

Lucile Ball as Kathleen Stuart  •  Mark Stevens as Bradford Galt  •  Clifton Webb as Hardy Cathcart  •  William Bendix as Stauffer, alias Fred Foss, White Suit  •  Kurt Kreuger as Anthony Jardine  •  Cathy Downs as Mari Cathcart  •  Reed Hadley as Lieutenant Frank Reeves  •  Constance Collier as Mrs. Kingsley  •  Eddie Heywood as himself, playing with his orchestra  •  Molly Lamont as Lucy Wilding  •  Ellen Corby as the maid

Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox  •  Produced by Twentieth Century Fox

Dangerous Crossing (1953): An Ocean Cruise with a Noir Twist

Ruth Stanton Bowman is on a honeymoon cruise with her new husband John Bowman in Dangerous Crossing. The last thing she expects is to lose him on the ship. They met four weeks and two days earlier, so they really don’t know each other very well. That’s the first clue that something may not be quite right. After they board, John leads Ruth to their cabin, Cabin B-16, where she admits that she was a mess when he first met her—the second clue that trouble might be looming. John leaves Ruth in their cabin to stash some money with the purser’s office—and then disappears. Ruth spends the remainder of the film looking for her missing husband and trying to solve the mystery about how he—how anyone—could disappear on a ship at sea.

Ruth looks for John when he first disappears but doesn’t see him anywhere. When she returns to Cabin B-16, their cabin, the door is locked. She asks the steward to unlock it, but the cabin is now empty, and he tells her that the cabin has not been booked for this crossing. She doesn’t have the key; she doesn’t have the tickets. The steward gets the purser, and while Ruth is alone in the empty cabin, she thinks to herself: “I knew it couldn’t last. . . John, what have they done? Why did I let you get mixed up in all my troubles?”

(This blog post about Dangerous Crossing contains spoilers.)

Ruth faces another problem: Is she a flighty, hysterical woman, as everyone is beginning to suspect? When the steward and the purser return to Ruth in Cabin B-16, the purser finds that Ruth is checked into Cabin B-18 under her maiden name. When they arrive in the new cabin, she finds her own luggage, but not her husband’s. The purser plans to call the ship’s doctor, but Ruth protests. When she leaves Cabin B-18 to look for John again, she is frightened inexplicably by a man walking with a cane and collapses. When Ruth comes to, the purser; the ship’s nurse, Nurse Bridges; and the ship’s doctor, Dr. Paul Manning, are in her cabin.

All the people that she can remember seeing before her husband disappeared claim never to have seen him. Second Officer Jim Logan saw her at the gangplank, but he doesn’t remember seeing Ruth with anyone else. Anna Quinn, the stewardess, did see both Ruth and John in Cabin B-16 when they first arrived, but she claims that she was never in Cabin B-16. Ruth now wants to see the ship’s captain, and the ship’s doctor accompanies her.

Captain Peters orders a search of the ship. He discovers that Ruth has no passport and no tickets, and she is not wearing a wedding ring. The doubts about her sanity begin in earnest. Captain Peters offers to let Ruth leave the ship on a pilot boat and return to New York City. She refuses to leave the ship until she finds her husband. After she leaves the captain’s quarters, Dr. Manning tells Captain Peters that he wants to check her story and verify what she says. Captain Peters wants the doctor to keep an eye on Ruth because he can’t have her running around the ship and disturbing the other passengers.

In the meantime, John calls Ruth in her new cabin, Cabin B-18. (How does he know the cabin number?) He tells her, “We’re in terrible danger, Ruth. I’ll tell you more when I can. All I can say now is, don’t trust anyone. Not anyone.” He promises to call the next night, at 10 p.m. When he doesn’t, Ruth fears for his safety.

Dr. Manning tells her that the search of the ship ordered by Captain Peters is complete. John Bowman is not onboard the ship. But Ruth doesn’t believe this and wants to continue searching for her husband.

Ruth trusts her husband John completely. The number of people that she doesn’t trust is long. It includes crew members and other passengers: Anna Quinn, the stewardess; Key Prentiss, a fellow passenger who introduced herself to Ruth before the ship even set sail; Captain Peters; Dr. Manning; Second Officer Jim Logan, who saw her but not her husband board the ship; the male passenger with a cane; and Nurse Bridges. Dangerous Crossing does a good job of building the suspense. When the film reveals the true villain, I was surprised because, unlike Ruth, I didn’t trust anyone at all and suspected everyone, including her husband.

The film also highlights the predicament of women in the 1950s. In addition to Ruth’s inability to keep her emotions in check when she is most in need of keeping her wits about her, others are quick to judge her negatively. Except for Dr. Manning, no one is willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she just lost her newlywed husband. Captain Peters is especially guilty of this, and Dr. Paul Manning is a bit doubtful, too, although he professes to be well-meaning. Ruth does not have the cruise tickets or her passport because she left them with her husband John. She is penalized for leaving her important documents with her husband during a period like the 1950s when that kind of submissive behavior was expected of women. In other words, she is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t.

Dr. Manning and Ruth slowly become attracted to one another: They start to spend a lot of time together while Ruth looks for John and the doctor investigates Ruth. Ruth becomes hysterical when Dr. Manning shows her a radiogram stating that people she knows at home in Philadelphia don’t know of any John Bowman and don’t believe that Ruth is married. Ruth gets so hysterical that Dr. Manning slaps her across the face. He may have come across as well-meaning in 1953, but I thought he was a little bit creepy and a little bit sexist by 2025 standards. And slapping Ruth across the face isn’t the only example.

Dr. Manning helps Ruth search for her husband John in places where admittance to passengers is prohibited. Ruth decides that she wants to know more about Dr. Manning while he takes her on this tour of the ship. She learns that he has never been married and that he enjoys his job as a medical doctor aboard a cruise ship: “I’ve saved the lives of people I’ve never seen before and will never see again. I don’t know which it is I like more, the feeling of responsibility or the feeling of power. I don’t know many men who could play God so many times in the course of a year.” Dr. Manning professes to Ruth and to Captain Peters that he wants to help Ruth, but this conversation didn’t strike him from the suspect list for me.

Dr. Manning is tending to Ruth in her cabin when Captain Peters arrives to tell them that the stewardess, Anna Quinn, gave a full confession: She and John Bowman, who married Ruth using an alias, were working together to get rid of Ruth and steal her inheritance. The captain tells Ruth: “After we talked to her [Quinn], we found these . . . . Your passport and your marriage certificate.” Dr. Manning is quick to intercede: “I’ll take those, Captain, until she needs them.”

After Captain Peters leaves, Dr. Manning continues his position of authority over Ruth, and Ruth says nothing to Dr. Manning about him taking her documents, and she even lets him leave her cabin with them. Ruth Bowman doesn’t learn her lesson, which makes Dangerous Crossing even more noir than, I believe, the original filmmakers intended. When Captain Peters hands her passport and marriage license to her, she should never have let Dr. Manning grab them. Leaving them in the possession of her husband John Bowman is what got her into trouble in the first place. She sure as heck shouldn’t have allowed Dr. Manning to leave her cabin with those documents. But this is the world of film noir. And few questioned women’s place in the world in 1953.

Dangerous Crossing may seem a bit dated today, but the film is still fun to watch, especially if you like a puzzle with a lot of pieces. I rooted for Ruth all the way, and I think viewers are meant to. The story is told from her point of view, so viewers believe her perceptions and what she is going through. Jeanne Crain gives a wonderful performance as the put-upon Ruth Bowman, who doesn’t have enough opportunities to enjoy her honeymoon cruise.

And if you are a fan of Carl Betz, Dangerous Crossing is worth a look because of his performance. He’s not on-screen much after his character disappears mysteriously, but I thought he made the most of his screen time. I am used to seeing Betz in The Donna Reed Show reruns, and it was a real treat to see him in Dangerous Crossing. And not just for his acting abilities, by the way. In one scene, he is shirtless; in another, he is dressed in a uniform. He carries off both scenes—and all his others—quite nicely!

This article about Dangerous Crossing (1953) is my entry for the Hit the Road Blogathon hosted by Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In. Click here for the complete list of blogathon participants and links to their blogs. The list is updated each day of the blogathon, from August 29 to September 1, 2025.

August 1953 release date  •  Directed by Joseph M. Newman  •  Screenplay by Leo Townsend  •  Based on the radio play Cabin B-13 by John Dickson Carr  •  Music by Lionel Newman  •  Edited by William H. Reynolds  •  Cinematography by Joseph LaShelle

Jeanne Crain as Ruth Stanton Bowman  •  Michael Rennie as Dr. Paul Manning  •  Carl Betz as John Bowman  •  Mary Anderson as Anna Quinn  •  Marjorie Hoshelle as Kay Prentiss  •  Willis Bouchey as Captain Peters  •  Yvonne Peattie as Nurse Bridges  •  Max Showalter (aka Casey Adams) as Second Officer Jim Logan

Distributed by Twentieth Century Fox  •  Produced by Twentieth Century Fox

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