In a career full of little gimlets of cinematic madness, The Lady from Shanghai is Orson Welles' most demented work. With an incomprehensible plot and a cast willing to go to the extremes of grotesque, it's a waking nightmare on celluloid. Through surrealism, Hollywood's most famous enfant terrible untethered himself from the demands of audiences and studios alike, spitting on their face as he went about it. The result is a film noir in the process of imploding unto itself, unencumbered by reality it projects shrapnel of shock and provocation every which way.
Beautiful stars turn into fleshy gargoyles and the dialogue gets increasingly florid, like drunken poetry coming directly from the pits of hell. Appropriately enough, an atmosphere of apocalyptic nihilism infects the hearts of everyone involved, onscreen characters and offscreen audiences alike. And then, this melodrama for the end of the world explodes into an ecstasy of beauty. As the lunatic plots converge and the characters reach their nasty apotheosis, Welles' venomous flower of a film loses itself in a hall of mirrors…
Since my love for The Lady from Shanghai is as great as my love for taking screenshots, I leave you with a collection of frames from that legendary scene, where cinematic language itself seems to take leave of its senses. Come peruse the beautiful images and admire the combined efforts of Welles at his most unhinged, Rita Hayworth at her most glamourous and a team of genius cinematographers made up of Charles Lawton Jr., Rudolph Maté and Joseph Walker.
The Lady from Shanghai, like many of Columbia's best noirs, is available to stream on The Criterion Channel.