Anders (George Grisby) first appears gazing lewdly through a telescope at the stunning Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister) as she gambols on the rocks somewhere in the West Indies. Perspiring heavily in geographically misplaced standard noir uniform––suit, tie, fedora––he steers his small boat to a yacht where Orson Welles (Michael O’ Hara) awaits. He immediately gets under O’Hara’s skin, both for his own palpable leering pleasure and on behalf of his scheming lawyer partner Arthur Bannister, the husband of Elsa Bannister, played with malevolent broken-ness by Everett Sloane. With a maddening grin and a false casual air, he grills O’ Hara on his past and how he once killed someone: ‘I’m very interested in murders … How did you do it? Now let me guess. You did it with your hands didn’t you?’ Cut to a close-up of Anders––all Lewis Carroll’s ‘grin without a face’––‘Tell me, would you do it again? Would you mind killing another man? … Would you kill me if given the chance?’ Then a typically eccentric contortion in his voice: ‘I might giiivve you the chance’.
The spell is broken when Rita Hayworth, immaculate and statuesque, calls to Welles from the rocks: ‘Is there lunch?’ We know Anders will be a malign presence from this point when he twists his head and leers: ‘Is there enough for two?’ Welles gets him off the yacht, but not before Anders intimates that Welles and Hayworth will become embroiled and that it won’t go well. Sure enough, a tremendously ambivalent love scene ensues in the very next scene, only to interrupted by Anders delirious call from boatside: ‘So long kiddieees!’––a phrase that would return later in the film when the voyeur interrupts another intimate moment. This is followed by another one of Anders’ utterly bizarre, elongated vocalisations: ‘BYIEEEEE, BYIEEEEE!’ O' Hara should have heeded the warning. Grisby is onto them. These scenes set the stage for a truly unhinged performance by Anders. In Welles’ deliberately idiosyncratic film, Grisby is at the most extreme edge in a spectrum of excess all around. In a general anatomy of cold and calculated self-interest, Grisby’s strangely irrational actions and expressions provide an overloaded barometer of the social madness that undergirds the clinical economic machinations of the Bannisters.
The plot itself revolves around Grisby’s plan that O’ Hara ‘murder’ him in a scheme to fake his own death. Promising $5000, he explains that since he would not actually be dead and since there would be no corpse, O’ Hara would not be convicted of murder (based on corpus delicti laws). O’ Hara agrees, thinking to use the money to run away with Elsa, and so furthering another classic noir doomed lovers’ plot. Apart from O’ Hara––a typically self-flattering creation by Welles: Irish rebel, radical dockworker, and Spanish civil war anti-Fascist––the characters are driven inexorably towards human ugliness by monetary concerns. An impromptu soliloquy by O’ Hara captures the tenor of this theme when he likens the behaviour of the Bannisters and Grisby to a pack of frenzied sharks he had once seen cannibalise each other in a zero-sum bloodbath of avarice. Two scenes are rightfully famous for their startling visual inventiveness and must be mentioned in digressive passing: an aquarium scene signifying both the murky, subterranean relationship between O’Hara and Elsa Bannister and O’ Hara’s descent into the world of ‘sharks’; and a brilliantly shot and choreographed shootout in the hall of mirrors of an empty fun house.
Despite Welles being Welles, Hayworth’s blond-headed statuesque presence and Everett Sloane’s quintessentially noirish portrait of a decadent, alienated man of wealth, Anders’ many eccentric utterances and gestures steal the show. In one cleverly constructed scene on the yacht Bannister lectures O’Hara on money while bikini-clad Elsa lounges nonchalantly on the deck. Grisby, in the foreground, provides a tittering meta-commentary on the discussion and at one point, in unflattering close-up, turns his head to the conversation with a deeply enigmatic and knowing grimace. Why? What does this strange ambivalent gesture mean? The magic of Anders’ performance is in how he raises such questions in the most idiosyncratic manner. When he makes his proposition to O’ Hara, all intense staring eyes and sweating brow––framed from above a vertiginous cliff––Anders growls, ‘I want you to kiiiill me’, before leaving Welles hanging precipitously with an unexpectedly cheerful: ‘So long fella’! In another scene he asks Welles to sign the confession of murder, ‘nothing very binding or important really, just a confession of murder’, before toasting the proposal with a ‘here’s to crime!’ and a bizarre little gulp-cum-sneer that no description can adequately capture. In another, after shooting Bannister’s aide––who is trying to bribe him––he barely misses a beat before pinning Welles to his car seat with a narrative of the murder O’Hara is yet to commit, replete with manic snorting and cackling: ‘Yeah, I was just doing a little taaarget practice, that’s what you’re going to say isn’t it when you shoot the gun down by the boat landing?...You’re going to say, I was just doing a little target practice’. ‘Course really you’re suppooosed to have shot me and later when no-one is looking, you’re suppooosed to have thrown my coooarpse into the bay’. Welles knew what he was doing with Anders, whose unexpectedly gleeful and queer utterances are framed in extreme close up to enhance their eccentricity.
Ultimately Anders’ character is killed by Elsa Bannister offscreen with little fanfare, going the same way as so many noir characters before him. This is perhaps a fitting allegory for the celebrated stage actor who made only a handful of films. With Lady of Shanghai especially, and also to a lesser extent in a small but notable part in Joseph Losey’s excellent 1951 version of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), he elevated the minor character to something far greater than the sum of its small part, memorably imposing his beguiling strangeness on proceedings. Noir fans can only mourn what cinema lost to the stage and be thankful for what we got. What we got in The Lady from Shanghai was an unrivalled performance of unpredictable and outlandish brilliance.
Neil Gray.
View Movie: https://archive.org/details/the-lady-from-shanghai-1947
