The Lady From Shanghai
the piccritic review
No one goes to Shanghai, but to Chinatown in San Francisco; Rita Hayworth is blonde; Orson Welles speaks throughout in an elastic, Irish-inspired brogue and, in the end, the love triangle (or was it a quadrilateral?) dissolves into a black and white kaleidoscope of funhouse mirrors and shattered preconceptions. It’s a noir that hews close to the genre’s melodramatic origins and a surreal film with a straight, if convoluted, narrative. So many sweaty protagonists in Orson Welles’ movies, so often at the edge of madness, their rationality, their sense of order tussling with sentiment like Captain Kirk with an alien, wrestling at the edge of an oblivion that either terror of tumbling in to: it’s a good movie, thumbs up!
