Saw The Lady From Shanghai and oh boy how I loved it! It was a fairly classy noir film written, acted, and directed by Orson Welles. It follows a Irish sailor who saves a pretty, rich woman from being raped and she, in return, hires him on to the crew of her husband's yacht. From there, they discover that he has a criminal past and he begins to be pulled into their webs of semi-serious games, as they taunt each other and threaten divorce and humiliation and murder.
The film is fairly by-the-numbers with rich old men and beautiful broads, hats and guns. The engine that drives much of the film for me is to see how innocent the pretty wife is. Is she the naive bait being dangled by her sinister husband? Or is she the true Svengali, pulling everyone's strings? But all of this is beside the point for me. I just loved the excesses of the noir genre on display here. At one point the wife mumbles a song to the camera as her face fills the screen. There's hideously ugly old women who scream and point at the gunman, a courthouse scene with a befuddled judge, and there's even a climactic shootout in a fun-house hall of mirrors that has to be seen to be believed!
If the behind-the-scenes trivia is to be believed, the film was fit so firmly into the noir mold by studio execs. Indeed, the film doesn't achieve the levels of restraints and polish of, say, The Magnificent Ambersons (or Citizen Kane of course, for that matter) but I appreciated the simplicity of the results. This film isn't interested in subverting or reinventing anything. It's interested in digging so deeply into the noir groove that it strikes gold.
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