Critics reviews

At once fluid and discordant, "The Lady From Shanghai" is filled with virtuoso set pieces... The climactic shootout in a fun house hall of mirrors is justly famous, but scarcely less impressive is the sequence shot on location in the hills around Acapulco, Mexico. Climbing through the town, with Anders musing on the inevitability of an atomic Armageddon, Welles invokes the notion of "a bright guilty world.

Each shot is constructed to infuse reality with the nightmarish qualities of an alternate reality. Certain images stand out: sweaty close-ups of jury members; Mr Bannister's cane protruding from dark shadows; and Michael tip-toeing through a fun house dream sequence. The entire film is one big maze, a confounding dip into the skewed psyche of a woman tainted and defined by her past living and dying in the Far East.

For all the violations it suffered, The Lady From Shanghai seems strangely coherent in its extant form -- or rather, coherently incoherent, and in a way that seems quite deliberate. Central to the appeal of the film is the sensation of unease, of anxiety and dread, it so effortlessly conjures. Indeed, it suggests noir's extreme: convolution pushed into abstraction, a plot so sinister it is impossible to comprehend.

The plot—about a drifting yacht crewman (Welles), a bent criminal attorney (Everett Sloane) and his bored wife (Hayworth)—isn't especially brilliant, but Welles did notice something special about the deceptive nature of shiny surfaces. The thriller's final sequence, set in a hall of mirrors, is cinema's peak moment of overt style, impossible not to read as Welles's smashing of his own celebrity. Be warned: This is a film that collects obsessives.

What an overstuffed, wondrously weird movie it is. Retrospectively, The Lady from Shanghai plays as a rough draft for Welles's Touch of Evil, as it similarly operates as the audio-visual equivalent of a draftsman's sketchbook, with the nearly incoherent plot serving as a springboard for a variety of self-contained vignettes, ostentatiously symbolic shots, motifs, and probable ideas for future projects.

It's a young man's film about an old man's problems: regret, and the sense that the best time of his life has already passed him by... Welles is one of the most deliriously inventive stylists ever to make a film.

Orson Welles famously adapted this noir story on the fly to satisfy contractual obligations. And yet THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI is as inventive as any of Welles' "proper" masterpieces, creating an Expressionist phantasmagoria out of the story's bizarre characters and situations.

The weirdest great movie ever made (1948), which is somehow always summed up for me by the image of Glenn Anders cackling "Target practice! Target practice!" with unbalanced, malignant glee... The film moves between Candide-like farce and a deeply disturbing apprehension of a world in grotesque, irreversible decay—it's the only true film noir comedy.