Performances : 7.2/10
Story : 9.3/10
Production : 7.7/10
Overall : 8.06/10

The Lady from Shanghaiis easily the worst Orson Welles production that I've seen. The camera work doesn't blow me away...which isn't necessarily fair, as it really is fine, I'm just used to so much more from Welles. The lighting doesn't quite work for the genre and the score was out of place. Also I didn't really love his performance as "black irish". The accent just seemed so awkward and forced. However, besides Citizen Kane this film is probably Orson Welles' best story. It twists around more than most Noirs dare to do and it features some of the most thrilling closing moments I've personally ever seen put to…

The fact that I don’t hate this despite Orson Welles’ mockery of an Irish brogue and that nonsensically labyrinth plot says it all. Though I’m not as far off it as I’d like to be. It is frustrating as it’s films like this that give the Noir a bad name. There’s an art to the convolution. There’s value to be had even when they’re nigh-on indecipherable. Hell, I love The Big Sleep. But there has to be some semblance of interesting character or at least, mood bubbling under the surface to fall back on.

I was keen for more Rita Hayworth after her emblematic, eponymous performance in Gilda left an impression. Which was the right call really, as she’s far and…

Decades Project: 1/4 of the 40's

"Everybody is somebody's fool."

Everyone loves a good puzzle. The anticipation while you put it together, the satisfaction once it's complete; it's great. Mysteries are like puzzles (duh), except you have to watch someone else put the pieces together. You never know if they're hiding extra pieces up their sleeve or throwing out pieces that don't fit or making a different puzzle altogether.

So here's the deal with The Lady from Shanghai: it's definitely a puzzle (duh), but Welles puts the pieces together so many times and in so many different ways that by the end of it all you're not sure if you've got the final picture or if the edges of the…

"Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband." - Michael,

- Scavenger Hunt #52: boxd.it/3kIS0
Task 14. A film where the director is also a heavily featured actor. (15/31)

Love really will make you do some crazy things. One time I read a fiction book to impress a girl... A WHOLE BOOK!!!!

I've only seen three Orson Welles films and man this guy thinks he can do anything... and so far he is right. In The Lady from Shanghai, an Irish sailor (Welles) flirts with a pretty young woman before being asked to work on her husband's yacht. A noir tale of evil seduction, class conflict, deception, and double-crossing ensues and it is fucking awesome. Rita Hayworth and…

All those action films really did make my brain melt because The Lady Of Shanghai really made no sense at all.

This is especially telling in the last 10 minutes of the film where Orson Welles sums up in a voiceover what certain characters were really up to - and it actually makes the film even harder to understand! The thing is with Mr. Welles is that I'm not sure you could trust him as far as you could throw him because he did have previous form for being somewhat tricksy with his work.

So it's my contention that he deliberately made The Lady From Shanghai a dizzying experience that probably was not supposed to make all that much sense.…

Another touchstone in Orson Welles' career of films that shouldn't have bombed, but did anyway, leading him down the path of being Orson Welles---this film is notable for being a genuinely bizarre noir, applying Welles' love of angles, his sense of the world as a ridiculous stage, his sideways close ups and sorrow at the emptiness of life to the overstuffed murder mystery plot of the source material--the end result being a movie that feels almost too fast, and too slow, and when you pile his bizarre Irish accent on top of it, it becomes genuinely disorienting---so I can understand people who don't really dig this, but I find it remarkably effective, both at the way it builds to an…

Suspenseful film noir about an Irish seaman (Orson Welles) who finds himself implicated in a murder plot after getting hired to work on a yacht owned by a disabled defense attorney (Everette Sloane) and his estranged wife (Rita Hayworth). Welles, despite a questionable accent, gives a terrific performance as the ultimate film noir sucker. A man who thinks he's tough and has it all under control but is in fact doomed the minute he becomes involved with the quintessential femme fatale as played to perfection by Hayworth in a deceptively complex performance. Hayworth is certainly stunningly beautiful but it isn't her looks along which entraps Welles. There are many layers to her character and Hayworth brings them to life in…

Orson Welles said ACAB AGAIN!!!!

Mystery, absurdism, and pure comedy are all baked into this entrancing work of film noir, leading up to a final sequence that has earned every bit of its highly esteemed reputation. It's impossible too watch Orson Welles' films without thinking about the way they've molded everything about cinema since, and still his best scenes and moments are beyond replicable. The courtroom scene is simply hysterical. I've often thought of Welles as a master craftsmen (a reputation he is deserving of) but it is outstanding to me how forward-thinking and innovating he was as well.

The Welles performance and the Irish accent are weird and take a bit of time to get used to, but his…