by Simon Callow
Though so much of the plot and most of the characters derive directly from the novel, virtually none of the dialogue has been used. King’s dialogue is perfectly workable, but Welles prefers a more highly charged note of eloquence; in the novel, when people start to talk in that way, King undercuts them (‘we were talking like high-school kids and we knew it’). Michael O’Hara, as we have seen, is Irish and of a meditative bent; Welles has added to this a romantic politico-criminal past (he killed a Franco spy during the Civil War) and a disgust with the idly destructive rich, giving him a highly characteristic Wellesian fable about sharks tearing each other to pieces. He is also – a vague memory, no doubt, of Larry Planter’s literary ambitions in If I Die – seen briefly at a typewriter, though no reference is made to him having any writerly aspirations. In the novel, Larry the would-be novelist is aware that when he makes love to Elsa, he is simply quoting: ‘I gave it everything I had, all the things I remembered out of books.’ Interestingly, in The Lady from Shanghai, in their most intimate scene together, after Michael has hit the spy Broome, Elsa and Michael speak in similarly self-consciously high-flown terms: ‘I’m the Princess in the Fairy book,’ says Elsa. ‘So you hit him and make a pretty speech to me and we ride off together into the sunset.’ ‘Well,’ says Michael, ‘why don’t we? … it’s been known before you know, with real life people. That’s where they get the ideas for the books.’ ‘Books aren’t like people,’ says Elsa. ‘People try to act like books.’ ‘Oh no, Rosaleen,’ says Michael, using his nickname for her. ‘People are much better than books.’
The most important quality Welles adds to King’s Larry Planter is innocence – ‘stupid[ity] more like it’ as he says at the end of the film – and a certain chivalric gallantry. In this, he is deeply contrasted with Elsa Bannister (in the novel, oddly enough, a red-headed ex-chorus girl), who is shown to be a woman of extraordinary calculation and deceitfulness. The Chinese background indicated in the title may or may not be the source of her inscrutability and ultimately her ruthlessness, but the screenplay takes away from her the fierce outbursts against Bannister she is occasionally allowed in the novel – ‘has it honestly never occurred to you,’ she screams at the crippled Bannister, ‘that you might be better off dead?’ – replacing all her feelings with a perfect mask. Welles also endows her with a profound sense of what she calls ‘badness’: ‘Everything is bad, Michael, everything. You can’t escape it or fight it. You’ve got to get along with it – deal with it – make terms.’ King’s Elsa may well have felt that, but she doesn’t say it. In virtually every other regard, the film’s Elsa is the novel’s, as are the film’s Grisby and Bannister. Needless to say, vitally important though it is, a screenplay is the merest maquette for a film, providing structure and dialogue (though both can be changed); the visual realisation – in conjunction with the actors’ contribution – is the crucial process, giving the film so much of its meaning, its identity. But it is fascinating to observe how thoroughly Welles responded to his raw material, changing the balance here, altering the stress there, subtly transforming character, translating implicit ideas into statements. This was his first screenplay since The Magnificent Ambersons, which was scrupulously faithful to Tarkington, both in action and in dialogue. Journey into Fear was Jo Cotten’s, with help from Welles, and departed substantially from Ambler, as much due to wartime internal pressure as any other consideration; The Stranger was not Welles’s, though he certainly added dialogue to it and influenced structure. The Lady from Shanghai is more personal, more private almost, than any of his other films to date, and might have been even more so, had it been shot as he wrote it.
The first stumbling block was the censor. Welles completed the initial draft of the screenplay that was then called Take This Woman (and had earlier been called Black Irish, before finally settling into The Lady from Shanghai) in September 1946, shortly after the last of the Isaac Woodard broadcasts, and submitted it to Breen’s office, only to have it immediately rejected: ‘this basic story is unacceptable under the provisions of the Production Code in that a murderess escapes justice by committing suicide. Any such basic story could not be approved.’ There were countless other objections: there must be no drunkenness, no illicit sex and, above all, the censor refused to allow a scene in which a judge was shown to have a racing form with him on the bench. As usual, these obstacles were negotiated away without excessive losses; Elsa’s suicide was not a critical element and her death at Bannister’s hand served exactly the same function. The next hurdle was Harry Cohn, who required the deletion from the screenplay of a number of scenes on the grounds of excessive complication; in so doing he seems to have added to the confusion rather than alleviating it. It is hard to judge – given that it is in the nature of noir thrillers for the audience to be as confused as the protagonists – whether Cohn’s input on this matter was positive or negative. For the most part, and for the time being, that was the extent of the interference; for better or for worse, Welles was left to himself for the duration of the shoot.
He was, of course, working for a studio, and the team assembled for him was not one with which he had ever worked before: the cinematographer was Charles ‘Buddy’ Lawton Junior, who had shot, among other things, The Thrill of Brazil, something that he could share with Welles; the editor, Viola Lawrence, was one of Cohn’s key personnel, and something of a famous dragon; the composer, Heinz Roemheld, was another of those musical journeymen who ran the studio music departments. It was not an especially congenial group from Welles’s point of view. Dick Wilson and the somewhat erratic William Castle were associate producers, under Welles. To cheer himself up, he cast a number of Mercurians – Everett Sloane as Bannister (whom he rechristened Arthur instead of Mark), Erskine Sanford as the judge and Gus Schilling as Goldie – with a couple of old hands thrown in playing walk-on parts: Bill ‘Vakhtangov’ Alland (Thomson in Citizen Kane) and Dick Wilson himself. In the sort of jovial actor-managerial what’s-the-play-and-where-is-the-stage style that few actors failed to respond to, he called the Broadway actor Glenn Anders to ask him to play the part of Grisby (rechristened George instead of Lee): ‘Glennie darling, get on the next plane to Los Angeles,’5 he told him. ‘Never mind what the picture is. It’s a great part. You’ll get the Academy Award. Just bring spring clothing.’
Welles put himself on one of his fierce, amphetamine-led diets to get trim; and he cut Rita Hayworth’s hair and dyed it blonde. This last decision, which made Harry Cohn’s jaw drop and the rest of Hollywood gasp, was provocative on several levels: it transformed one of the great cinematic icons of the day, gambled with the public’s devotion to one of the most bankable of celluloid stars, and asserted Welles’s potency, both as a director and as a man. He was doing to Rita Hayworth what men had always done to her: making her in the image they desired. What made it all the more startling was that it was done with her complete consent. She was as eager as he to be liberated from a self with which she did not identify, that of the sultry charmer. ‘Men go to bed with Gilda and wake up with me,’ she famously remarked. She also wanted to challenge her limits as an actress, and there was no one she trusted more to help her with that than Welles, the only man who – initially, anyway – had taken her mind seriously. She was, too, on quite a simple level, blissfully happy to be in daily contact with the man she still obviously loved, despite his unmistakable signals of indifference to her as a woman; he genuinely admired her as an actress and was determined to extend her range. Indeed, she suggested that he might like to move in with her again, and he did, as if nothing untoward had happened during the nine months they had been apart.
Before they all left Hollywood for location shooting in Acapulco, Welles screened that quintessential cinematic nightmare, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, for everyone, a very logical thing to do in view of the nightmare that Welles had envisaged in the screenplay, and they set off in high spirits. As Welles had told Castle, The Lady from Shanghai was no whistler: it was a big picture, with the substantia
l budget of $2.3m. Welles and Lawton scouted for locations in Mexico and Sausalito near San Francisco; it is suggested that Welles seized the opportunity to do pick-up shots for It’s All True, but that project seemed to have finally slipped away from him when – thanks to his haemorrhaging losses on Around the World – he was unable to meet the deadline that RKO had given him for paying the first instalment to buy the rushes. Besides, The Lady from Shanghai was quite demanding enough: it was as if Welles’s cinematic imagination, shackled on The Stranger and unused during his long fallow period of political commentating, had run riot, encompassing exotic location work in Mexico and San Francisco, long sequences at sea (always difficult to shoot because of constant and ungovernable motion), the creation of a massive fun-house and a shoot-out in a Hall of Mirrors; the last posing as complex a logistical challenge as could be imagined. Moreover, Welles was interested in creating an especially demanding cinematic language, one that eschewed conventional close-ups and two- and three-shots, using instead the sort of width and depth of shot that he had deployed in Citizen Kane – but on location, which created major problems for lighting and for the camera itself, particularly in the matter of tracks. As it happens, the shoot, which was embarked on in such high spirits, was no fun at all. Despite the relatively luxurious twelve weeks allowed for principal photography, it turned out to be a punishing schedule, given the frequent shifts of location and the attendant difficulties of each.
Welles had shot on location only once before, in Brazil for It’s All True, and though the world was no longer at war and communications were generally functioning, the hazards of shooting on the spot remained considerable. Surprisingly, Columbia seemed no better organised than RKO four years earlier. Dick Wilson insisted that they had sent too large a crew, which would only hamper them, and so it proved. They started shooting in mid-October, in Acapulco, at the worst possible time of the year, the height of the hot, humid rainy season. Both Welles and Hayworth succumbed straight away to his old bugbear, sinusitis, a nearly incapacitating condition for an actor. More alarmingly, they were shooting in shark-infested waters; the Mexican swimming champion was hired to swim near Hayworth when she was shooting in the water, in order to ward off marauding barracudas. Hurricanes threatened and storms constantly blew up, impossible conditions in which to shoot and record sound; being on board was bad enough. On more than one occasion they managed to get no more than one or two shots a day.
William Castle had been sent ahead to arrange the yacht. ‘Orson, an insomniac, refused to believe that anyone required sleep and picked the wee hours of the morning to call with any new idea he had at the moment.6 “This is Orson,” his voice would boom. “I hope I didn’t wake you.” “No, Orson,” I yawned. “I’m always up at four a.m.” “You’re leaving for Mexico,” he said. “Acapulco, at noon today.” I was now wide awake. He continued, “I want the Zaca.” “What’s a zaca?” I asked. “Not a – the Zaca,” he replied, “Errol Flynn’s yacht. I want you to make a deal with him.” “Yes, Orson, but how do I find the Zaca and Errol Flynn?” “That’s your worry.’” Presumably Welles thought they could save money by hiring the yacht from Flynn, but before long it was clear that any savings were more than counterbalanced by the sheer obnoxiousness of the man – drunken, lascivious, racist, potentially violent – and by his preciousness with regard to the Zaca. ‘Flynn joked, cajoled, needled, threatened, blackmailed us about his boat,’7 reported Dick Wilson in an official report on the shoot. ‘He never stopped expressing his misery about the fast deal he claims we put over on him.’ Inevitably repairs were needed; Flynn had them done by his own people at vast expense, at which point, catastrophically, it was discovered that the company had forgotten to take out insurance. Flynn himself had lied about his third-party insurance. Over and above the nefariousness of Errol Flynn, the impression given by Dick Wilson – who, admittedly, was trying to shift blame for a massive budget over-run – is that ‘the organisation of the studio is inefficient for the Class “A” pictures’. The set dresser was ‘a 90% incompetent’; the production manager ‘reacted on our production in a manner which slowed it down rather than speeded it up’; the unit manager proved ‘disastrous rather than helpful’. The schedule started slipping from the first day, and it only slipped further and further.
Very early on, actual disaster had struck when Don Corey, the assistant camera operator, suddenly keeled over and died. The production closed down out of respect, and deep gloom set in. Illness was rife throughout the company almost from the beginning: the crew were constantly going down with dysentery, which attacked both Welles and Hayworth, losing precious days of shooting; on another occasion Buddy Lawton was struck with the virus, but somehow carried on working, albeit at half-pace; Welles, multi-allergic, succumbed to histamine poisoning. He was never fully well throughout the shoot, chronically lacking sleep. Hayworth’s ailments were more persistent and more severe; from early on in Mexico, Dick Wilson reported her ‘general condition of fatigue … which made possible only about a half day’s results no matter whether she worked a full day or not’. Eventually, he says, it became a serious problem for scheduling and completing important scenes in the film. The second location, in San Francisco, cold and damp, was no more satisfactory; they had to cancel shooting twice on account of adverse conditions. All of this created more pressure on Hayworth, and on 27 December she collapsed on the set and had to stay away for ten days. Welles, too, was seriously ill at the same time, as well as spraining his ankle on more than one occasion and sustaining some unspecified injury to his face.
In San Francisco they had in addition to contend with the continuing strike of Hollywood technicians, which had been mooted before shooting started, but had not been expected to last; budgets had been drawn up on the assumption that it would soon be over and had to be revised drastically. Despite a large and in some instances retroactive pay rise, labour troubles persisted throughout the shoot. As a result of the strike, painting costs increased, Dick Wilson calculated, by 1000 per cent. To the disapproval of the union, Welles had personally designed the hair-raising murals on the interior of the Crazy House, and decided to paint them himself, his tiny chauffeur/butler/odd-job man Shorty Chirello at his side, holding the paint pot for him like a medieval apprentice. When Welles, dissatisfied, wanted the walls to be repainted, the production co-ordinator (Columbia’s man, Jack Fier) refused to authorise it, so Welles and a couple of chums broke into the studio and did it overnight. As a result they were picketed by the paint unions, who thereby won triple time to redo it. The construction of the Crazy House, which was done from scratch, was a massive job, with its 125-foot zigzag slide, which the cameraman had to ride to give O’Hara’s point of view. It was forty feet wide and twenty feet deep. The dragon’s mouth (itself thirty feet wide) ended in an eighty-foot pit. The maze of mirrors used 2,912 square feet of glass and eighty plate-glass one-sided mirrors; it cost $60,000 to build – at least $15,000–20,000 more than it should have done because the prop shop insisted on building it. Throughout the shoot on American soil, the camera crew were working an unofficial go-slow: ‘the guys walking up and down on the outside,’ as Wilson said, ‘radically affected the work of the guys walking back and forth on the inside’. Welles raged at them (‘there’s too much stalling around here … someone go put pressure on those men. Go rub up against them the wrong way’),8 but to little effect. For a while the great Rudolph Maté (Dreyer’s cinematographer on Vampyr and Joan of Arc) relieved Lawton and, according to Dick Wilson, things speeded up immeasurably, so clearly some of the slowness came from the cinematographer himself, always a nightmare for the mercurial Welles.
Somehow he maintained his exuberance. Thomas A. Brady found him on the set in Hollywood in December of 1946, chivvying the crew, indefatigably energetic, ‘followed by 23 assistants and technicians in a queue … when the queue had dwindled to three people, Welles turned and spoke charmingly to a minor actor who thanked him for his engagement on the picture’. In answer to another
reporter’s question, Welles very sensibly replied that Columbia had treated him with ‘the utmost generosity up to that time in matters of fiscal and artistic autonomy’. And it was true: up to that time. Brady reports that he went off to get some sleep. ‘Have the doctor meet me in the car,’ said Welles to some assistant. ‘He can attend to my needs on the way home. I am to be called at 6:30 tomorrow morning: I must go to the baths.’ At which, says Brady, he wrapped his coat around him ‘after the fashion of a black cape’ and strode out into the mists of the Hollywood night. The following morning, he directed the first scene of the day while a barber shaved him and cut his hair – a feat, says Brady, ‘which even Cecil B. DeMille has never equalled’. Welles’s instinct for publicity was clearly unimpaired. Despite what he had said, and in addition to what he clearly perceived as an obstreperous attitude from the crew, he was dealing with constant long-distance input from Harry Cohn, who was concerned to feature his star as prominently and as attractively as possible. To this end he encouraged Welles to create a sequence in which she sang (providing, as it happens, a musical equivalent of the scene in the novel in which Elsa somewhat unexpectedly recites a poem: ‘Deep on the couch of night a siren star/Steeping cold earth in swooning loveliness …’); this added a couple of days to the schedule. Another two and a half days were required to shoot a sailing montage decreed by Cohn. The fight in the judge’s chamber was another unscheduled extra, though this appears to have been Welles’s own idea.