The Lady from Shanghai

Director: Orson Welles

1947 / 92min / DCP

Welles took a cheap paperback potboiler and transformed it into a baroque, carnivalesque thriller, a movie with style to burn and deep deposits of feeling beneath, with the director starring himself as an Irish veteran of the Spanish Civil War opposite soon-to-be-ex-wife Rita Hayworth, the bait in a trap that makes him subject to the machinations of the amoral and rapacious rich. Contains some of Welles’s most striking set pieces, including an emotional awakening among the deep-sea monsters of the San Francisco Aquarium and the famous climactic rundown in a freaky funhouse hall of mirrors. A ringing indictment of the evils of capital, not long preceding Welles’s long absence from red-baiting America.