Lady From Shanghai

[tonyw]

Thanks also Jeff. For those of us who can not get to the archives (for various reasons) your generosity in sharing information is most appreciated.

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Jeff:

I would imagine (and hope) that some of the more crude melodramatic acts and dialogue would have been modified in revision or during the editing process. My remark, however, is not in defense of the ax which Harry Cohn took to THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI.

Glenn

[Tony]

I must say that sometimes I think God was watching out for Welles: this dialogue is so bad, so arch, so stilted, that it would have been laughed at in the theatre. The ending as it stands is a masterpiece...of editing, cinematography, and drama, though I could do without those screeching violins. Actually, this dialogue reminds me of The Big Brass Ring: Yikes!

[Glenn Anders]

Exactly, Tony.

It might be remembered though that the San Francisco "Playland-at-the-Beach" sequence was projected to last upwards of twenty minutes, most of it in a rhythmically nightmarish build-up (in Michael's mind and memory, we may surmise), crowned with the shoot-out among the mirrors. With the kind of on-set adjustments and editing room magic of which Welles was so fully capable, some of the this final scene might have come across not as outlandish but as a proper denoument; the kind of ending a Welles film always needed.

In any case, sad as I am that the scope of the conceived sequence was hacked away, I always have liked Michael's narration at the end as read by Welles. I sometimes think of it, along with that damnable but addictive song!

Glenn

[Tony]

Glenn:

I totaly agree: that naration is one of my favourite of Welles's narrating; and walking into the bright morning sun having survived all that...wow!

I too would love to see the whole fun house set piece, but I do think the dialogue is very bad; but then, the whole film has a nightmarish postmodern (yes: postmodern 25 years before the concept was articulated) bizarre sense of irony and surrealism: actually, it's one of my favourite Welles films, and the loss of the long version is as tragic to me as is the Ambersons loss.

Incidentally, my favourite shot is the one where Michael is standing on the deck of the ship, and a hand-held out-of-focus camera catches him, just for a second, puffing on a cigarette; it seems a collision of documentary and drama. It's almost as if someone was taking a home movie of Welles and when Welles saw it, he just stuck a few seconds of it in the film. There's nothing else like it in the film, and perhaps in all of Welles's work. For some reason, I adore it: it seems a leap into a parallel world...

[Glenn Anders]

Fascinating stuff in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, Tony. I like the whole tone of that sequence shot on Flynn's yacht doing the Panama passage. There is a sense of transition, the possibility winning out, and of sailing nevertheless toward doom.

And the scene of Michael seeing through Grisby and Bannister on the beach is as good as anything on film in its time. Then, there is the scene of Grisby and Michael on the mountain, looking down on Acapulco Bay . . . .

Can anything top it for depicting, almost surreally, as you say, the madness we are still trapped in.

There are evenings, at the Ha-Ra Club, when Baesen and I play on the juke box the Jazz at the Movies Band arrangement of the score for LAURA, followed by that for KEY LARGO. It's about as close to THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI experience, somehow, as an aural sensation can get.

Especially, if a Melinda, Kathleen, Mary Ann, or Nellie McKay wanders in from chilly Geary Street.

Glenn

[Sir Bygber Brown]

a) has Black Irish script ever been commercially available?

b) what is the likelihood an earlier cut of Shanghai exists?

Regards,

Sir.

[Jeff Wilson]

a) No

b) slim to none, with my money on none