The Lady from Shanghai (Dual Format Limited Edition) Blu Ray – Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth

Film noir crime drama directed by and starring Orson Welles. When unemployed Irishman Michael O’Hara (Welles) saves Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) from a group of thugs, she repays him by getting him a position on her husband Arthur (Everett Sloane)’s yacht as a deckhand. It soon becomes clear that Elsa has eyes for O’Hara and wants her husband out of the way. O’Hara, although resisting Elsa’s advances, finds himself becoming embroiled in a web of intrigue and murder.

Legend has it that Orson Welles more or less conned studio boss Harry Cohn over the phone into making The Lady from Shanghai by grabbing the title from a nearby paperback. In any case, this is one of Welles’s most fascinating works, a bizarre tale of an Irish sailor (Welles) who accompanies a beautiful woman (Rita Hayworth) and her handicapped husband (Everett Sloane) on a cruise and becomes involved in a murder plot. But never mind all that (the aforementioned legend also claims that Cohn offered a reward to anyone who could explain the plot to him). The film is really a dream of Welles’s driving preoccupations both on and off-screen at the time: the elusiveness of identity, the mystique of things lost, and most of all the director’s faltering marriage to Hayworth. In the tradition of male filmmakers who indirectly tell the story of their love affairs with leading ladies, Welles tells his own, photographing Hayworth as a deconstructed star, an obvious cinematic creation, thus reflecting, perhaps, a never-satisfied yearning that leads us back to the mystery of Citizen Kane. –Tom Keogh