Movie Night With Urbaniak: The Lady From Shanghai
I was, until last night, completely unfamiliar with The Lady From Shanghai. Mr.
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wanted to see this 1947 Orson Welles picture for the performance of Glenn Anders, who plays a giggling, weird, creepy heavy, and I was interested because I haven’t seen enough Welles.
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.
Hi, I’m Bubba Beau Bob Brain.
at least it wasn’t a southern accent like that one episode.
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.
I think 2 reasons lend to the Coen’s success versus Welles’ difficulty: Welles had to deal w/ a militia like Studio System, the Coen’s didn’t. The Coen’s have an ability to deal w/ a more artist friendly Studio system w/ political acumen, Welles was known to sneer at such studio heads as George Schaeffer (particularly after CITIZEN KANE was shelved)and not play the game.
Personally, though, I adore Welles’ O’Hara; the ultimate man over his head.
The Coens are both blessed by having talented, protective people who deal with the money for them and by their total lack of pomposity, both areas where Welles ran into serious difficulty.
Welles kept insisting that he was making Great Art, the Coens keep insisting the opposite. Not only do they not claim to be making great art, they claim they have no idea what they’re doing.
I agree w/ Welles.
But Debbie Trutnik, former assistant to the King of the Idiosyncrats, David Lynch, gave me the best advice: “Always play the game.”
It’s the only reason why I’m still in it.
I remember liking this a lot when I saw it during my initial Welles phase, but that was mostly because I found it more Wellesian than The Stranger, which immediately preceded it. After Welles prepared his cut, though, Harry Cohn had it re-edited, which may account for some of the inconsistencies. There’s a reason why this was Welles’s last Hollywood project for a decade.
Oh, and Woody Allen used the mirror sequence to good effect at the climax of Manhattan Murder Mystery.
I’m probably as surprised you hadn’t seen The Lady from Shanghai as you were that I hadn’t seen The Godfather (although I’m willing to stipulate that the latter is the better film, and it’s not like I haven’t seen it at all, I’ve just never seen it start-to-finish, uncut, etc. But I digress.)
Anyway, I really like Welles and I’ve spent a lot of time watching his “lesser” (or at least later) works, this, Mr. Arkadin, F For Fake, etc. I do love this film (and Anders in particular is marvelously disturbing and weird), but I mostly agree with what you’re saying about everybody being in a different movie. I get the sense that part of this is intentional, deliberately trying to cast the characters in a different light, because he does it a lot in his other (later) films (not so much in Kane/Ambersons.) But I think another part of it is Welles showing off. He does that a lot, and sometimes it’s distracting. Kane set an amazing standard, and I think Welles spent the next 15 years bending over backwards trying to show it wasn’t a fluke, that he was still an artistic genius, thinking somehow studios would care about that and not his box office track record.
I know what Welles was going for with the Irish accent/characterization (and alternately the Chinese influence). He has a real fondness for sort of “ethnic” mythologies and spinning yarns in a particular regional way (the way Arkadin seems to be drawn from some kind of Slavic folk story and F For Fake seems like a drunken Mediterranean gypsy rattling off a tall tale.) But his Irish accent is terrible and his performance is a little off, a little too commanding. You never believe this guy’s getting duped, and you can’t help but get the vibe he’s directing this movie. I was going to say Welles is usually not great at completely submerging himself in any role, but he does it brilliantly in Touch Of Evil, where Heston’s the distracting ethnic whatsit as Welles spins another (much more artistically successful) ethnic/regional-influenced noir.
Also, making a movie is probably not the best way to try to save your marriage even if your wife is a movie star. But hey.
What the Coen brothers do best is create that hyper-realistic world consistently. Tone, character, setting, pacing, twists, it’s all happening in the same world according to the same rules. Coen Brothers actors “get” it the same as Hartley actors know they’re in a Hartley film. Welles actors mostly do, too, but he was just trying to do too many things at once. Like McCartney, he spent too much time and effort trying to prove he was great, and not enough time just being great.
“Hey honey, how’s this? I’m an innocent man who gets duped by you — you take advantage of my weaknesses and get me drawn into a vicious trap, but I finally suss you out and you wind up dead. Why are you looking at me like that? Oh wait, did I mention this is an idea for a movie?”
So you’re saying that’s going to come up in couples counseling.
New Bond book
Hi.
A bit off topic, but are you aware that the estate of Ian Flemming have commisioned a “well=known” author to continue to Bond series on the 100th anniversary of Flemmings birth. The author is Sabastian Foukes (who I have heard of but dont know).
When asked if Bond would be up-dated, the publisher says it will be Bond as we left him in 1966!
Could be promising!
Re: New Bond book
I’ll buy it, just to see what Faulks has done with it. I’ll be interested to see what he devoted most of his energies to: plot, character, or style – whether he’s tried to synthesize the Fleming flair and essentially create a pastiche (which could very well be a good thing) or whether he’s taken it off in a new direction (which could also be good, since no author has ever done that with Bond).
I’m a big Fleming fan but have always despised the continuation novels, not because they were being written by someone else but because they were being written by mediocre thriller writers. It was like reading something by Geoffrey Archer or Clive Cussler, but with a protagonist who happens to be named James Bond. I hope it will be different with a real author at the helm for a change.
I also assumed it would be updated, but I’m really glad it won’t be.
Re: New Bond book
The publisher was on the news today. When asked about the style, he said Faulks ;0) was aware of Flemmings style and was keen not to lose it, but he also was writing with his own skillful prose so it would be a wonderful blend (but what else is a publisher to say?).
But with the Flemming estate signing off on it, and a comitment to not lose what made Bond Bond, this does sound promising. A return to the martini swigging, charming, but cold blooded killer of old should make all Bond fans rejoice.
HORRAY!!!!