Word: orson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Lady from Shanghai (Columbia) is a piece of sleight of hand by Orson Welles. The big trick in this picture was to divert a head-on collision of at least six plots, and make of it a smooth-flowing, six-lane whodunit. Orson brings the trick...
...main plot: Orson, a "philosophical" merchant seaman who finds it "very sanitary to be broke," signs for a long yacht cruise because Rita Hayworth, who much prefers to be filthy rich, will be aboard. For love of her, he also signs a phony confession to a supposedly phony murder. When the murder turns out to be real, Orson finds himself caught in a frame and the toils of the law. He escapes, literally, through an optical illusion: the real villains of the piece mow each other down in an amusement park's House of Mirrors...
...magic. Everett Sloane, as Rita's lame and jealous husband, crawls through the picture as horribly as a spider; and Glenn Anders, as a man who madly plots his own murder, has developed a soundless laugh as chilling as a razor's edge scraped across plate glass. Orson has done a capable job with his brogue, a flashy one with the camera. But not all of his magic works. He makes a blonde out of his onetime wife, redhead Rita Hayworth, but not an actress...
...Orson Welles, back in Hollywood last week, called The Lady from Shanghai "an experiment - in what not to do." He figures he was trapped into making it by Columbia's Harry Cohn, who lent him $60,000 to get him out of a hole, made him promise to make a picture to pay it back. "But I'm not bitter," says Welles...
Miss Hayworth, who naturally plays the title role, picks convenient moments to dive off rocks, kiss Orson Welles, and just lie around looking dewy-eyed and shapely, and she still finds time to do a satisfactory job of acting out her part in the story. Welles, as the philosophic Irishman, affects a brogue that is not objectionable, while Everett Sloan and Glen Anders, who play Hayworth's husband and his partner respectively, give excellent performances as two rather evil individuals...