The Lady from Shanghai (1947) | Presenting Hitchcock Podcast

Gooooood evening. In this month’s episode of Presenting Hitchcock, Cory and Aaron are just young and plotting as they discuss The Lady from Shanghai.

Written by: 

Screenplay by Orson Welles

Based on the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King

Starring: Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, Everett Sloan, Glen Anders, Ted de Corsia, Erskine Sandford, Gus Schilling, and Carl Frank

Directed by: Orson Welles

Trailer:

Our Favourite Trivia:

Hitchcock comparisons:

Vertigo

Family Plot

Strangers on a Train

To Catch a Thief

In the summer of 1946, Welles was directing Around the World, a musical stage adaptation of the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, that Welles financed himself. When he ran out of money and urgently needed $55,000 to release costumes that were being held, he convinced Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn to send him the money to continue the show and in exchange Welles promised to write, produce, and direct a film for Cohn for no further fee. As Welles told it, on the spur of the moment, he suggested the film be based on a book that he happened to see in front of him during his call with Cohn, one a girl in the theatre box office was reading at the time. Welles had not read the book at that time.

Welles cast his wife Rita Hayworth as Elsa and caused a good deal of controversy when he instructed her to cut her long red hair and bleach it blonde for the role. “Orson was trying something new with me, but Harry Cohn wanted The Image—The Image he was gonna make me ’til I was 90,” Rita Hayworth recalled. “The Lady from Shanghai was a very good picture. So what does Harry Cohn say when he sees it? ‘He’s ruined you—he cut your hair off!'” Not long after the film’s release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce.

Cohn also objected to the appearance of the film. Welles had aimed for documentary-style authenticity by shooting the film almost entirely on location (making it one of the first major Hollywood pictures to be shot in this way) in Acapulco, Pie de la Cuesta, Sausalito, and San Francisco), and by using primarily long takes, while Cohn preferred the more tightly controlled look of footage lit and shot in a studio. The release of the film was delayed due to Cohn’s order for extensive editing and reshoots. Whereas Welles had delivered his cut of the film on time and under budget, the reshoots Welles was ordered to do meant that the film ended up over budget by a third, contributing to the director’s reputation for going over budget. 

The further edit took over a year to complete, Welles’s ending was cut down from 20 minutes to just 3 minutes. As with many of the films over which Welles did not have control over the final cut, the missing footage has not been found and is presumed to have been destroyed. Surviving production stills show elaborate and expensive sets that were built for the sequence and which were entirely cut from the film.

Elsa’s dog on the yacht was a dachshund named Chula owned by Errol Flynn who also owned the yacht used in this picture.

A remake of this movie came close to production from producers John Woo and Terence Chang, and screenwriter Jeff Vintar. The script was based on both the original Orson Welles screenplay and the original pulp novel by Sherwood King. Brendan Fraser was eyeing the Welles role of Michael O’Hara and wanted Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones to play Arthur and Elsa Bannister. The project was suddenly scuttled when Sony Pictures studio head Amy Pascal decided to focus primarily on “teen pictures.”

The Random Draw for Next Picture:

Next up, we’ll be discussing Dead of Winter (1991)

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