One Paragraph Movie Review: The Lady from Shanghai

Three hundred and eleventh film: The Lady from Shanghai, a 1947 noir thriller that Orson Welles wrote the screenplay for, produced, directed and starred in next to a cropped, blonde Rita Hayworth. Forgivably inconsistent, the film starts with an Irishman being convinced to work on a rich couple’s yacht for what feels like suspicious reasons, hits a murder trial just past the middle, and ends in a fantastically weird amusement park funhouse shoot-out. Extremely twisty and complex, it’s hard to tell who the killer and murder victim are, but if I were to guess I’d say Orson Welles and the Irish accent respectively. It’s funny too how when you write and direct a film you star in that your character ends up staring broodingly to the horizon a lot with his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. Still, once you get past the staring and the accent and how much young Orson Welles looks like middle-aged Vince Vaughn, and once you get over the jarring shock of Rita Hayworth suddenly speaking Cantonese on the phone for four seconds, it’s a pretty good movie. Three embarrassingly heavy-handed nautical-themed sailing outfits out of five.