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The Lady From Shanghai

1947

Orson Welles

Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders ...

7.7

12,857

Film noir. Mystery A seaman, Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles), is hired as a crew member on the yacht of the wealthy Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane). His beautiful but mysterious wife Elsa (Rita Hayworth) has met O'Hara earlier, when he saved her from a mugging. What ensues is a complicated and bizarre pattern of deception, fraud and murder, with O'Hara finding himself implicated in a murder, despite his innocence.

	Media	Author	Review
		William Brogdon Variety	"Script is wordy and full of holes which need the plug of taut story telling and more forthright action."
		Tom Huddleston Time Out	"The plot is a magnificent mess of switchbacks and revelations, climaxing with one of cinema’s most outrageously inventive sequences"
		Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"The weirdest great movie ever made."
		Bosley Crowther The New York Times	"For a fellow who has as much talent with a camera as Orson Welles and whose powers of pictorial invention are as fluid and as forcible as his, this gentleman certainly has a strange way of marring his films with sloppiness."
		Joshua Rothkopf Time Out	"The plot (...) isn’t especially brilliant, but Welles did notice something special about the deceptive nature of shiny surfaces (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"Welles's brilliant, brash noir moves from city to sea, courtroom to hall of mirrors, crackling with chemistry between him and Hayworth (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		J. Hoberman The New York Times	"'The Lady From Shanghai' is fueled by two powerfully grotesque characterizations (...) At once fluid and discordant, 'The Lady From Shanghai' is filled with virtuoso set pieces."
		Geoffrey Macnab The Independent	"[Welles] brings a mix of charm, naiveté and fatalism to the role (...) The film is as tangled and ingenious as any of Welles's conjuring tricks"
		Chuck Bowen Slant	"What an overstuffed, wondrously weird movie it is (...) It’s affirming in its assertion that Welles could make art out of anything (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"
		David Parkinson Empire	"The set-pieces are the work of a genius (...) The final scene remains a classic outro (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Tony Sloman Radio Times	"[A] marvellously murky film noir (...) A movie with brilliant visual flourishes (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"

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