Amazon.com Essentials:
Legend has it that Orson Welles more or
less conned studio boss Harry Cohn over the phone into making this
movie by grabbing the title from a nearby paperback. In any case,
The Lady from Shanghai 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 on- and offscreen 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
