The Lady From Shanghai (1948) is an imaginative, complicated, unsettling film noir who-dun-it thriller, with fascinating visuals and tilting compositions, luminous and brilliant camerawork (by Charles Lawton, Jr.), and numerous sub-plots and confounding plot twists. Although the tale of betrayal, lust, greed and murder was filmed in late 1946 and finished in early 1947, it wasn't released until late in 1948 - it failed both at the box-office and as a critical success (there were no Academy Award nominations).
The film, originally titled Take This Woman and then Black Irish, was made when major stars Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth (in her last film under contract to Columbia Pictures) were still married although estranged and drifting apart. [Note: Their divorce decree was issued in November, 1947, thereby making the film itself and their characterizations a visualization of their own personal breakup]. Believing that Hayworth's sexy screen image (after her success in Gilda (1946)) was tarnished forever with her role in the film as a wicked and evil temptress, studio chief Harry Cohn was also incensed to find that his reigning, top box-office star's magnificent auburn hair was bobbed, waved and bleached blonde for the film.
Orson Welles served as director, producer, screenplay writer, and actor, basing his screenplay upon Sherwood King's 1938 novel If I Die Before I Wake. The film was shot on locations including Acapulco and San Francisco (such as the Sausalito waterfront and the Valhalla Bar and Cafe, Chinatown, the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, and Whitney's Playland amusement park at the beach), and on Columbia studios sets, and features numerous classic set-pieces including: the aquarium scene, and the funhouse and Hall of Mirrors climax. [Note: The numerous close-ups of Rita Hayworth in the film were later added by Welles in Hollywood upon orders of the studio, to lend strength to her 'star' power.]
Ultimately, the film's length was severely cut down by one hour, creating an almost incomprehensible, discontinuous, cryptic patchwork from numerous retakes and substantial edits. This was Welles' last Hollywood film until the making of Touch of Evil (1958) ten years later.
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