Search - The Lady from Shanghai on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Mild Violence, Adult Situations, Questionable for Children Movie Release: 1948 DVD Release: 10/03/2000 Format: DVD - Black and White Audio Tracks: English, French, Spanish Subtitles: English, French, Korean, Spanish, Thai SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 27 mins Studio: Columbia TriStar Members Wishing: 11 Genres: Thriller, Film Noir, Romantic Mystery

The Lady From Shanghai, a complex, involving puzzle-within-a-puzzle mystery story, is a showcase for Orson Welles, showing his singular talents and sensibilities as few other films have. The story is superficially simple: a seaman Michael O'Hara (Welles) is hired as a crew member on the yacht of the wealthy Banister (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. The film is best remembered for its final sequence when the plot comes to a literally smashing climax in the famous "hall of mirrors" sequence, with Elsa and Banister shooting it out amidst shards of shattering glass. Orson Welles, who produced, directed, wrote and starred in the film, is sometimes self-indulgent in his use of visual tricks and techniques, which at times sacrifice plot for visual brilliance, but he pulls it together in the end to produce a stunning, difficult film. Rita Hayworth gives one of her best performances as the deceptive, seductive temptress, hard-edged and cynical. The film confounds, unsettles and disorients the viewer, very much as Welles intended to do. While not an easy film, it is well worth the attention required to follow it, and Welles offers no easy solutions or any false happy endings to his tour-de-force mystery. ~ Linda Rasmussen, All Movie Guide

Rita Hayworth - Elsa "Rosalie" Bannister
Orson Welles - Michael O'Hara
Everett Sloane - Arthur Bannister
Ted de Corsia - Sidney Broome
Glenn Anders - George Grisby
Gus Schilling - Goldie

Another first-rate effort by Orson Welles, the artfully baroque noir The Lady from Shanghai has only gotten better with age. Not only does this Columbia DVD showcase the movie in a pristine full-screen transfer (which matches the theatrical release), it also comes with an excellent commentary from director/historian Peter Bogdanovich. Thankfully free of any cheap sociological insight, Bogdanovich reads liberally from interviews that he held with his mentor Welles. Instead of being an "artiste," Welles' insights into his own work are superb and surprisingly unclouded by the fact that this was yet another picture that the studio ultimately took out of his hands and buried on the "B" side of a double bill. Even though Columbia re-edited the movie and threw out a substantial portion of the still stunning "hall of mirrors" gun battle, Welles indicates that he was most unhappy with the traditional score the studio superimposed onto the movie. There are many "expert" commentaries on DVD but few match Peter Bogdanovich for insight that is delivered in a consistently entertaining fashion. ~ Nick Dedina, All Movie Guide