A Film Canon

The Lady From Shanghai takes Welles' aesthetic of disorientation to its logical conclusion. Not only is speech persistently jettisoned from both its agent and object, but every utterance takes on the elusive, paradoxical and, above all, self-sufficient quality of the Chinese proverbs for which femme fatale Elisa Bannister (Ava Gardner) has such a proclivity. To this end, Welles choreographs conversation so as to ensure that one participant nearly always starts speaking just before the other has finished, creating a tangible sense of the materiality of language, script and line, as well as tweaking Sherwood King's original pulp novel so as to transform its convoluted plot into a systematic reduction of the word 'murder' to a meaningless sound, by way of a series of legalistic pedantries that explicate the proverbial, or paradoxical, as a mere cipher for the emptiness of language itself: "According to the law, I'm dead if you say you murdered me. But you're not a murderer unless I'm dead. Silly, isn't it?" Concomitantly, Welles and cinematographer Charles Laughton Jr. create some of the most astonishing configurations of their careers - a careening surface that repels immersion, reaches its apotheosis in the iconic mirror-maze sequence, and imagines the world from the jerking point-of-view of Elisa's lover and collaborator (Everett Sloane), whose lazy eye and dual walking-sticks are matched only by the superlative weirdness of his delivery (itself epitomised by his ambiguous address of 'lover'), and whose perception ultimately is more animal than human, continuous with the inhabitants of the aquarium at which protagonist Michael O'Hara (Welles) and Elisa meet to plot a betrayal that he has already fully apprehended. The result is a pervasive ventriloquial drone, analogous to the foghorns drifting continuously across San Francisco Bay, that, like the defence lawyer at the trial at which these are most foregrounded, persistently cross-examines itself, transforming every conversation into a meta- conversation (often literally, through the intrusion, or commentary, of a third party, all ciphers for Welles), and bringing the film closer to a genuine meta-film than any to date.