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The main plot: Orson, a "philosophical" merchant seaman who finds it "very sanitary to be broke," signs for a long yacht cruise because Rita Hayworth, who much prefers to be filthy rich, will be aboard. For love of her, he also signs a phony confession to a supposedly phony murder. When the murder turns out to be real, Orson finds himself caught in a frame and the toils of the law. He escapes, literally, through an optical illusion: the real villains of the piece mow each other down in an amusement park's House of Mirrors.
The film sometimes lies limp under such feeble abracadabra, but sometimes it stands on end at a weird glimpse of real black magic. Everett Sloane, as Rita's lame and jealous husband, crawls through the picture as horribly as a spider; and Glenn Anders, as a man who madly plots his own murder, has developed a soundless laugh as chilling as a razor's edge scraped across plate glass. Orson has done a capable job with his brogue, a flashy one with the camera. But not all of his magic works. He makes a blonde out of his onetime wife, redhead Rita Hayworth, but not an actress.
···
Orson Welles, back in Hollywood last week, called The Lady from Shanghai "an experiment — in what not to do." He figures he was trapped into making it by Columbia's Harry Cohn, who lent him $60,000 to get him out of a hole, made him promise to make a picture to pay it back. "But I'm not bitter," says Welles.
"It taught me how to shoot a sexy dame singing a song and stuff like that." Welles has spent the past six months touring Italy, mostly vacationing. But he tossed off Cagliostro, a film biography of the great 18th Century charlatan, in between an audience with the Pope, an interview with Togliatti, and writing occasional pieces for the New York Post. "I've never seen what I wrote in print," he says. "It was like writing in sand.*
" Welles is now at work assembling his quickie film version of Macbeth, which he shot in only 21 days.
He will soon return to Italy to make a movie for Britain's Sir Alexander Korda —based on Luigi Pirandello's difficult Henry IV. Says Welles: "So much first-rate talent is going in the direction of the literal. I don't even like the word 'documentary.' You can't go on proving that a rusty faucet is rusty and a dirty alley is dirty. They are using the camera as a recording instrument. I want to use it as an instrument of poetry."
*Or in thin air. None of the pieces was printed.