Movie Night With Urbaniak: The Lady From Shanghai

James has a fondness for oddball, standout performances, anything that possesses a twist of surreality but is nonetheless grounded in some kind of emotional reality. Mr. Anders does not disappoint in this regard — he fills his scenes with weird, off-balance, unique intensity and the energy of the movie noticeably deflates when he disappears from the narrative.

When James comes over for movie night, silent contemplation is not the order of the day. The two of us essentially talk through the movie, discussing the various performances — what the actor seems to have been told to do, how he or she deals with challenges of the scene and larger narrative, how his or her makeup works (or does not), what he or she seems to be striving for and how he or she achieves his or her goal or falls short.

Welles movies are great to watch in this regard and The Lady of Shanghai in particular has a peculiar assortment of performances in it. Everett Sloan and Glenn Anders seem to be in one movie, nominal star Rita Hayworth in a second, and Welles in a third. They’re even lit and made up differently, so that when Welles cuts from one to another in the midst of a dialog scene, one’s face will be shiny with sweat while the other’s will be given a matte finish, one will be lit with a distorting, grotesque light and the other will be lit like a movie star. The performances are all good, but sometimes seem to literally be taking place in different movies. How much of this is intentional I have no idea.

Whenever a performance as odd as Anders’s comes along, I, crouching under my screenwriter hat, must stop and wonder what the director was after. In this case, I think Welles directed Anders to be so strange and unsettling in order to distract from the big reveal at the end of the movie, which, if you’ve seen a few noirs in your life, isn’t that big a reveal.

The only really bad performance is Welles’s — he’s miscast in a part that is a genre type, the homicidal, simple-minded “big lug” who’s bound to be manipulated by the smarter, cannier society folk who have a use for him. On top of being obviously “too smart” for the role, Welles puts on a distracting, phony-baloney Irish brogue that somehow makes him sound more like The Brain than himself. It’s a very “technical” performance, full of all sorts of wonderful tricks and intellectual nuances, designed to draw attention to the actor’s proficiency than an emotional truth.

Whenever I watch a Welles movie, I cannot help but be reminded of the Coen Brothers. They have similar outlooks on acting and have no trouble finding (or creating) contexts for all manner of oversized, twisted, exaggerated performances. Somehow, they have been able to spin gold out of this outlook in a way Welles, another cinematic visionary, never could. The Lady of Shanghai could have easily been a Coen Bros movie, an eclectic noir with indelible characters, a skewed point of view and a twisty, unpredictable story.