Ep. 8—Rachel Walther Discusses "The Lady from Shanghai" Orson Welles’ Fractured Dreamscape of San Francisco Noir

This installment is all about the wild 1947 film noir The Lady From Shanghai, and guest Rachel Walther, a film historian with a book coming out soon called Born To Lose, The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon, breaks down the chaotic story behind it. 

The Lady From Shanghai film was a last-ditch effort by Orson Welles to get back in Hollywood’s good graces after his studio battles over The Magnificent Ambersons. He literally phoned up Columbia head Harry Cohn and pitched a thriller based on a random book title he saw, just to get the cash for a play he was staging. The drama ratcheted up when Cohn insisted Welles cast his then-estranged wife, superstar Rita Hayworth, which Hayworth was actually into! She saw it as a chance to ditch her "sex goddess" image, even cutting and dyeing her famous red hair platinum blonde as a big middle finger to Cohn. However, Welles—being Welles—turned a simple plot into a "noir dreamscape fantasia" with a confusing story, kicking off the shoot with a crazy production on Errol Flynn’s yacht in Mexico where a cameraman tragically dropped dead on the first day. Errol's suggestion to simply put the corpse in a duffel bag and throw it overboard was ignored.

Rachel explains that while the plot is "nuts" and full of holes, the film's stunning visuals, especially once the action moves to San Francisco, are what make it a classic. Welles shot in distinct city spots like Chinatown, the Steinhardt Aquarium, and the iconic Hall of Mirrors at Playland at the Beach, which was a huge, custom-built set back in L.A. This visual feast, full of off-kilter energy, is why the film sits so high in the pantheon of SF noir. Interestingly, the film was a flop at the time because audiences and critics just weren’t ready for how strange and abstract it was. The discussion wraps up by exploring the tragic arc of Welles' career after Citizen Kane, where his inability to compromise and his obsessive creative nature led him to be constantly shut out of his own projects, proving that the film's theme of duplicity was really Welles’ commentary on his hostile relationship with Hollywood, not just his messy divorce from Hayworth.

Transcript

This is the Frisco The Secret History Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. I’m here with Rachel Walther again to discuss Orson Welles 1947 movie, The Lady From Shanghai, for the second installment of our ongoing series FRISCO NOIR, the great noir movies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s set in San Francisco, the cool grey city that seduced the world.

I don’t know if you’ve listened to our first installment where we discussed the original Maltese Falcon of 1931, made ten years before the Humphrey Bogart version. Before we move on, I want to mention that you can watch both the original Maltese Falcon and The Lady From Shanghai on the Frisco The Secret History Website.

Rachel is writer and a film historian and I’ll her tell you a little about herself and her new book that is coming next year. Rachel?

Rachel: Yes, well I write for the Noir Foundation regularly, for their Noir City Journal and other publications. Classic movies, more contemporary movies. I try to focus on crime films.

My debut book is due out in the spring and it’s all about dog day afternoon how the movie got made the real life story it was based on and then how the two continued to influence each other in the 50 years since the film came out. It’s called Born To Lose, The Misfits Who Made Dog Day Afternoon and yes i think around march is when that’s going to come out.

Knox: Well, let’s talk about the movie. You know, we’ve talked about, we’re going to do a series about the film noir movies that were made in San Francisco in the 30s and 40s. And this one is, was it 1947?

Rachel: Yes, released in 47, shot in 46. You want to just talk about…

Knox: Orson Welles, where he was at and all that, everything. I’m just going to let you go.

Rachel: Well, this movie was sort of his last-ditch effort to sort of toe the line in Hollywood. He had an amazing debut success with Citizen Kane when he was still in his 20s. And then there was a very famous…
I guess a dramatic fraught story of his follow-up film making The Magnificent Ambersons and that was more of a period piece and that book adaptation and in a lot of ways it was much more technically proficient narrative-wise, a really mature story about a family going through modernization and sort of how they get undone by that but, you know, he went over budget, his edit was too long, and so the studio just took that film away from him.

They re-edited it, they shot a new ending, which Wells didn’t like, and so the movie just sort of got mangled, and he was so disillusioned by that experience that he left Hollywood. He went down and tried to shoot some documentaries in South America, which ate up a lot of time and money and didn’t really lead to much.

And so he was sort of lured back as a fixer to fix a film, like an espionage spy thriller. I want to say like ’44, ’45 at RKO. And so he’s like, okay, you know, he needed the money. Get back into the swing of things a little bit. And after that, he had an opportunity to direct, star, write again, a B picture called The Stranger, where he plays a Nazi in hiding disguised as like a professor in a small town. And that movie actually did really well. And so it was a very normal movie by his standards, but it gave him a second wind and it made people interested again in what was going on with him. And so he, in the meantime, had… um was also working a bit in theater so he had this move excuse me a play in New York that was over budget it was due to close before it even opened because they’d already run out of money it was an adaptation of Around The World In 80 Days which just kind of sounds insane and so he was working with the producer Mike Rodd who was married to Liz Taylor eventually and all that um …

So he called up Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia Studios, and said, “Hey, I got a deal for you. Do you want me writing, directing, starring in a movie? Send me 50 grand right now, and I’m yours. Whatever you want to do.”

And Cohn’s like, well, what are you going to do? What’s the story going to be? And as Wells tells it, there’s this, you know, whether it’s true or not, it’s a different story, but he said that as he was in a phone booth, he just glanced at a paperback rack and, like, the train station or the … corner, you know the street corner he was at and he just saw a title, he just said, “If I Die Before I Wake. It’s a great story. You’re gonna love it. It’s a thriller It’s got everything we want,” so Cohn wired the money.

He threw the money into the [play’s] production The show still closed within two weeks after it opened. I think it didn’t do well and now he was on the hook for this movie. He had to buy the book, figure out what it was about what he wanted to keep what he wanted to change and um … it kind of ratcheted up a notch when Cohn suggested, well, why don’t we put Rita [Hayworth] in the movie? And Rita was his, he was separated from her at the time.

Knox: Orson Welles was separated? They were a couple? Were they married?

Rachel: Yeah, they had been married for, I want to say about two years at that point, but they’d stopped living together, I want to say maybe six months ago. And why Cohn thought it was a good idea, you know, it’s like, hey, you know, you’re already doing all this work on this film. Let’s throw in your ex-wife into the mix to just lower the stress level, soon to be ex-wife.

But, you know, at the same time, it was definitely going to make them, it was going to amp up the budget. It was going to turn like a C movie into a B, maybe an A movie for Wells. And so he realized, okay, this is going to give me a lot more freedom. And him and Rita were still getting along decently at that point. They were estranged, but they did have a young daughter, Rebecca,

Rita really saw this as an opportunity to kind of she just had a big hit with Gilda so she was super hot but she was really not happy with what her image was becoming as like the sex goddess who was this um just sort of like mixed up mixed-up emotionally volatile temptress which is funny that she thought a role like this would maybe change things a bit but the way that both her and Wells envisioned her character she saw it as an opportunity to really kind of stretch her acting chops and just hit a reset button. And she was also thinking that maybe it would thaw things out between her and Wells. She always was kind of in awe of him. She knew what a smart guy he was. She always felt a little self-conscious about the fact that she hadn’t finished school because she went into performing so young. So she had never had an opportunity to work with him professionally. And so she wanted to do that and to have him see her in that way, thinking it would bring them back together. Didn’t really work out that way but at the same time the story of the production like there weren’t as many explosions or insanity between the two of them as one might have you know as you might expect so it did okay but wells was just too caught up in his own madness you know this film just turned into a fantasia, this noir dreamscape fantasia …

Knox: Did he actually base it on that book?

Rachel: A bit. Actually, the characters’ names, a lot of them are the same as the book. [Editor’s Note: The book is available here.] And personally, I haven’t read it, so I just know based on second-hand accounts and reading the synopsis. But that book, the plot all takes place in Long Island. And so Wells’ immediate was like, okay, how far from Hollywood will my budget take me? So let’s go to Mexico. Let’s get away from the prying studio heads. And I think that’s also maybe a big reason as to why he chose San Francisco for the second half of the film rather than just going back to L.A. So they decamped to Mexico to shoot the first half of the film. Errol Flynn let them use his yacht that he had down there to shoot all the scenes. And so I guess to back up a bit, the plot loosely, it’s … not only don’t want to give anything away, but also the plot’s kind of nuts. I think if you try to actually stitch it together and follow it, there’s a lot of holes, it doesn’t make any sense. But again, it’s almost like a, it’s like a dream of what a film noir might be where, you know, in dreams how you’re in one chamber of logic and then things slowly shift and suddenly you’re in a completely different environment and you can’t quite remember how you got there. So the first 45 minutes,

Wells’ character is sort of like this young hapless sailor who gets involved, I think like skippering or first mating for this rich woman and her husband. And he has a thing for the woman who’s played by Rita Hayworth and the husband’s this, you know, he doesn’t love her, he doesn’t respect her. And so her and Wells start to have an illicit affair. And then the husband sort of gets wind and he tries to snare up the young man in all these machinations involving his partner faking his death, all these sorts of things. It just gets nuts. So they’re in Mexico. Errol Flynn’s captaining the ship. Excuse me, yacht. I always use the wrong terms with boats.

And first day on set … You know, the director yells, you know, Wells yells action or however you do that when you’re both the actor and the director. And then the one of the cameraman just drops dead right there on the first day. And so Errol Flynn in his infinite wisdom is like, well, just shove them in a duffel bag and let’s just dump them out at sea. We got to get going. You know, let’s wear the drinks. And so.

They eventually didn’t do that. They did, you know, take his remains and send it off to the U.S. to be properly respected. I think that guy’s name was Ray Corey. And so it was that kind of like madcap nuttiness. And Wells was constantly rewriting the dialogue every day. So people were sort of off kilter, forgetting their lines. But Wells kind of liked that because it forced people to improvise when they couldn’t think about what they were supposed to say.

Knox: How far out at sea were they? Were they just out like a…

Rachel: Coastal. A little bit. Because there’s always… They had the whole crew there on the…

Knox: That must have been a pretty big yacht.

Rachel: Yeah, and they had a decent budget for this, too. And part of it is there’s scenes where, since it’s sort of Hayworth and her husband played by Everett Sloan, they’re sort of these bourgeois types, and so they always carry enough travel with this… unwieldy entourage of strange characters so it had that feel to it yeah you know well and flynn’s drinking and it’s just then rita hayworth’s getting sick so she had to go home at one point just because i don’t know if it was traveler sickness or something more severe so it was definitely fraught though and everyone was a little bit fried out and cranky by the time they got they they wrapped up that half and …
Knox: Where in Mexico were they? Puerto Vallarta or something like that? Acapulco?

Rachel: I don’t know the answer to that. I’ve got to say, I’m not quite sure. I want to say fairly close to the border. They didn’t go too far afield. I want to say somewhere near Baja, but I can’t say for sure.

Knox: I’ll look it up, and it’ll be in the show notes.

Rachel: Oh, but no, let me know, too. That’s one thing I wasn’t quite sure about. And so, yeah, so once they get back to San Francisco, the second half of the film, it’s this weird mix of there’s a whole …

Knox: Can you can you talk about why they decide to go to San Francisco without a spoiler?

Rachel: Well, no, honestly, I couldn’t I was trying to sort of look for the motivation behind that and I couldn’t find anything specific in the sense, you know, it was not in the original story. Yeah, but I really think Wells wanted to keep away as much as he could. And I mean, San Francisco is just the way that he treats that city visually in the movie. He knows what he’s doing. He knows how dynamic and wild the city is just by looking at it. So it really helps keep that off-kilter feel because, y ou know, Chinatown figures prominently in it. And then there’s the fun house, excuse me, fun house out at Playland at the beach in Ocean Beach. But I was thinking about that when I was watching that final scene with so many films from San Francisco in that era. They’ll show the main parts of the city, you know, North Beach, Telegraph Hill, Chinatown, downtown, and then sometimes the ocean. But you never see the outer avenues. You never see, you know, Richmond or the sunset.

Knox: They were just getting populated after the war at that time. People from the Midwest who had been passing through town on their way to or from war. And they came back and they started moving up. So there wasn’t a lot of … a lot out there …

Rachel: Makes sense yeah and so it comes across in films though is this just weird jump cut almost between you can’t you you’re never really quite sure how the beach exists in relation to the rest of the city.

Knox: Yeah well they built a little train that actually went out there at one point and it just went all the way out to ocean beach to Playland.

Rachel: But it it fits in so nicely with this hallucinatory dreamscape world where wells at one in one scene he escapes the courtroom that he’s being you know he’s being tried in and he just runs across the street and suddenly he’s in chinatown and so it’s that thing where and he actually is though like it’s oh gosh what’s the name it’s the um Portsmouth Square that was so he runs across Portsmouth Square into Chinatown off of Kearney …

Knox: Well the main police station was right there back then as well so i don’t know there might have been a courtroom there too.

Rachel: I think there was yeah and then is that where that weird hotel is now.

Knox: Yeah, the one on Kearney.

Rachel: I know it’s one of those sort of old, now retro, futuristic looking structures, which now there’s a fondness for that in the Embarcadero. So to get back to that, I mean, Wells was comfortable with Chinatown because he had taken some trips to Shanghai with his dad. He had this very sort of eclectic colorful childhood that exposed him to a lot of the world and a lot of the arts so he was comfortable with something like that and um but for for that to be depicted so thoroughly in a movie at that time without any without as much
you know, like exaggeration or exoticization as most Hollywood did at the time, that was pretty unusual too.

I mean, a lot’s been made about how Rita Hayworth looks in the film. And the fact that, you know, she’s this lady of like a dubious past with a bit of a murky background, in some ways maybe a little similar to Gilda in that sense but um but again both her and Welles were all for it she cut she cut her hair she dyed it platinum blonde which really pissed off harry cohen the studio head you know because he considered her private property and the fact that Welles did this without asking him without checking on him is just uh you know without checking with him but Hayworth wanted it as kind of an FU to Cohn you know she was under this restrictive contract she was tired of him dictating her professional life and her personal life so she thought that it would also really help in that effort to be be perceived as a different type of actress to have a completely made over look so they were really on the same page with that and i think it works really well i mean there’s the scenes in chinatown i guess that’s what i’m thinking about it is really when the true colors of her character really come out and um … It’s just dynamic and stunning. And there’s a lot of just really poignant close-ups of her face in a Chinese opera theater, especially, that are just stunning.

Knox: Oh, right, yeah. Yeah.

Rachel: And then we slam out to the Ocean Beach and the Fun House. Yeah. And they just shot the exteriors, actually, out there. Everything else was done back in L.A. in studios.

Knox: The Funhouse mirrors were done in LA?

Rachel: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Because, yeah, he, Wells really took a, he had a very personal hand in that sequence because I think he had been trying to do a Hall of Mirrors type sequence in a lot of different aborted efforts before. So I think it was just a personal idea that he finally could see how it would fit. But he was like, he was painting the sets himself. I think, you know, it was like $60,000 to get that all together. And I think I wrote it down because I wanted to make sure it’s 3,000 square feet of glass for the mirror sequence. And, you know, when you’re watching it, when you finally get to that point of the film, there’s no like point of view or, you know, one person’s perspective. It’s really just this amazing montage at this point of these characters’ motivations and ambitions and passions and sadnesses kind of smashing into each other.

But it’s definitely a fun house I want to hang out. And there’s a lot of cool modernist sequences. There’s a really exciting looking slide. And yeah, he went all out. That would have been a nice side gig for him, just designing these wild amusement attractions. But I mean, so he had just this wild, massive film that he shot, and he sort of just dumped it on the editors. I mean, not to say he abandoned the project outright, but Lady From Shanghai is another situation where he … Welles gets antsy at that point in a project, and so for a number of practical reasons, he already had spent the money he’d made from this movie before he started making it, so he had to move on to the next thing. Him and Rita had decided to separate officially and work towards a divorce, and so he … he was already off to the next project. And so V.O. Lawrence, the editor, came in and just had to make sense of this stuff and stitch it together and sharpen up a narrative cohesion out of this very frayed, abstract story. And so I think, I mean, I read an article of hers, not her, excuse me, I read an article about her pretty recently, actually, in the Noir City magazine.

Knox: The editor? Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah, the editor of V.O. Lawrence, because she, I mean, she’d been in films, I want to say since the silent era, and she’d worked with Von Sternberg a few times. So she knew how to deal with, you know, crazy geniuses who didn’t always follow the rules. Right. And she was able to do it with like a modicum of drama coming out of her.

And so this Mary Mallory wrote this really interesting essay. Sort of saying that, you know, Viola Lawrence, she’s often vilified as the woman who, you know, she cut down Lady from Shanghai and it wasn’t what it could have been if Wells had been able to do it. But this article was sort of arguing maybe she’s the only reason why we get to see it as a finished story at all is through her efforts.

Knox: Did Wells have a prior relationship with San Francisco? Did he know it or did he just hold on a second …  well okay so so Wells did not have a prior relationship with San Francisco did he just sort of put it in the script and they came up here and he did a quick scouting of everything and kind of just made a bunch of shots and then the editor put it …

Rachel: Yeah, I think it was definitely sort of just a, hey, let’s choose this. I don’t know. That’s not something I know off the top of my head as far as location management. If he outsourced that heavily or if he had more of a personal … role in selecting that but also there’s a lot of neat shots in Sausalito that sort of get under mentioned because right when they first pull in back up to the US yes you’re coming into Sausalito looking at the city skyline and that sort of there’s a dramatic scene where he’s running away from a mob of people wells’s and so he’s zigzagging across those those boardwalks down to a pier and that kind of mirrors the the crazy house sequence at the end so Sausalito has a really nice little more than a cameo but a little little squink of a roll in there …

Knox: So in the pantheon of noir movies set in San Francisco, where would you put Lady from Shanghai?

Rachel: I mean, I think this is definitely a film that’s right up there. I mean, it’s always going to be associated with the city. And I forgot to mention the Steinhardt Aquarium, too. There’s a really memorable sequence in there. And especially for folks who grew up in the city, like my husband, he remembers going to that, because I think it’s just changed locations a couple of times. So he remembers specifically going to that building with the small tanks. But Wells really utilizes the light, the shimmering light that you get in that aquarium and the fact that, you know, sort of you’re being surveilled while you’re trying to get privacy, but the fish are staring at you, the passersby are staring at you.

It’s that same, it’s a much more claustrophobic feeling than say a zoo or a park because they’re sort of submerged and things are closing in on them. And so I think because not only the fact that they shoot in the city, but also the fact that he chose such distinctly, separate parts of the city and that they’re so visually dynamic in and of themselves, that stays with you more so than the plot for sure. And I got to say with these restorations that have happened to the film in recent years, it’s just staggering.

Looking at the shots of when he’s running up the streets in Chinatown, it’s just you shooting on location in the city was still something that was just getting underway. And so being able to see, just see the streets during that era, I think, um …

In her commentary, Imogen Sarah Smith points out, was it the Chinese Telephone Exchange? There’s a shot of that. There’s a shot of…

Knox: Which commentary is that?

Rachel: Imogen Sarah Smith. That article you’re talking about? Separate, actually. There’s been so much journalism about this. Send me the link and I’ll put it in the show notes, please. I think it’s the new… KL Edition Blu-ray has that. And I recommend it. Imogen is also the editor-in-chief of Norah City Magazine. And she’s also a regular commentator for Criterion Channel and their discs. And so it was really nice to hear her take on the film. And I think I agree with her on one point. A lot of the conventional wisdom is that the plot of this film and a lot of the camera work was a commentary on Wells’ relationship with Rita Hayworth and the, you know, the hostile, like this, you know, this ice woman, this cold woman who’s kind of just out for herself and she’s duplicitous, doing whatever she needs to, and here’s this guy just getting caught up in a web and doesn’t know where to turn, that sort of thing. People should just read that as him going through divorce and being cranky about it. But her attitude is it’s much more about Wells’ relationship to Hollywood and the seductive and duplicitous nature of that, which personally makes a lot more sense to me. So it was really nice to get her perspective on aspects of the themes of the film as well as its production history.

Knox: How did the movie do?

Rachel: Not good. It was just too strange. It was so unlike, you know, on a picture at the time. Everything. I mean, again, I need to thanks not only to Imogen, but also Eddie Muller, because I feel like I’m parroting maybe some of the things that they’ve said previously. So I don’t want to take personal credit for them. But I think Eddie said something like, Wells could not make an uninteresting shot if he tried. Everything in that film is just so inherently different and compelling that, you know, it just, it reads as strange.

Now we seek that out and we think it’s delightful. But at the time, just audiences weren’t going to it. And admittedly, people were kind of, I think, put off by Rita’s new look. The marketing really were pushing. I mean, they came up with that title, The Lady from Shanghai. I think Wells wanted to do something vaguer, more vaguer I think Black Irish was the title he had for a while. Cause his character is Irish. Um, I mean, I think later in Shanghai is a great title, but they were really trying to tie that into like Shanghai gesture, Shanghai express, making it this exotic thing. Right. All around Rita’s role, which makes sense. And, um, people just weren’t ready for what it ended up being put it that way.

Knox: Um, I am curious and, and, uh, I mean people a lot of people say Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made.

Rachel:Yeah

Knox: How did Orson Welles fall so far after that. I just don’t quite understand.

Rachel: I think he would be the first one to admit, maybe eventually, that he had a lot to do with that himself. What I think is really interesting, especially when you watch interviews with him in the 1960s and 1970s, he’s really humble, or maybe that’s the wrong word. He has a lot of self-deprecation and retrospect about
(0:25:44) how he behaved during those years and what he could have done differently. I think he was someone who had a lot of regrets.

Interestingly, I don’t think it was substance abuse stuff ever.

Knox: Yeah, alcohol.

Rachel: Well, his dad died of alcoholism when he was young and it deeply affected him. So I think he always stayed away from that, but … It was his monomaniacal, obsessive nature mixed in with, if you can imagine, being a young guy in your mid-20s being told you’re the greatest thing in the world. Women are throwing themselves at you. Money’s being thrown at you. You can do whatever you want. But what you uniquely want to do is so strange, just no one gets it. Everyone fights you. Everyone’s wanting to water down your vision. And I think he would, again, he always had too many projects going at once. He would never see something through. He didn’t like to compromise. And so he kept getting edged out of things before the end, and the final product ended up not being what he wanted it to be.

Knox: That is the curse of Hollywood, though, isn’t it?

Rachel: Oh, my gosh, yeah. I mean, no, he didn’t make another… After Lady from Shanghai, he went to Europe for a while. Him and Rita were through … He did theater in Europe. He worked on a film production of Othello that took forever to finish, Mr. Arkad, in which took forever to finish. And it was 10 years later, he came back for Touch of Evil, which … is freaking phenomenal but it had the same it was the same thing all over again it was that fraught saying they took the edit away from him it wasn’t quite what he wanted and thank goodness they’ve been able to finally put that back the way he wanted it to be and i think we can really appreciate where he was going with it and how he wanted it to be but he didn’t get to make another film completely on his own terms until 1962 with The Trial which he made in France and Yugoslavia and personally for me i think that’s i mean that’s my personal favorite and there’s a lot of similarities between yeah it stars Anthony Perkins and a bunch of great European actors Jeanne Moreau in it um elson oh no um Elsa i can’t remember her last name and then Romy Schneider’s in it and it’s one of the only times wells is in the film without any adornment. You know he always wanted to have like a fake nose or a beard or a costume of some kind and even in Lady From Shanghai he has an Irish accent for an inexplicable reason that’s hard to maintain but in The Trial he’s just himself and i see that as a way because he’s so personally creatively satisfied with what he’s working on in his own terms that he can just let everything else go.

But that has a lot of similarities to The Lady from Shanghai in its hallucinatory quality where you’re just shifting from one environment that’s more visually dynamic than the next. And how I think he says at the beginning of the trial that the story is like the logic of a dream.

And I think you could apply that just as much to the lady from Shanghai.

Absolutely.

Rachel: And I think to go back to your question earlier, how does it stand in San Francisco as a San Francisco noir? I think that’s why it always is in the top one, two, three, is because it … shows us the city back to us in a way that we lose sight of sometimes especially when you live in the bay area it becomes so commonplace or you’re stuck in traffic and to see it in the sharp black and white at dawn or dusk or in the dead of night with all the neon blazing

Knox: once we got to san francisco i was started really enjoying the movie before that what’s going on here who’s this guy i mean you know just the way oh it’s …

Rachel: It’s maddening. Yeah. And it’s one of those things, like there’s the famous story when they were writing the script for The Big Sleep. Which one? Oh, the 40s one. They called up Howard Hawks saying, hey, wait. Hawks called Chandler saying, hey, wait, so who killed the chauffeur? We can’t quite figure it out from the book. And Chandler’s answer was, I don’t know. There’s just …

Knox: That’s right.

Rachel: But I love that. And that’s another reason why Lady from Shanghai, it’s so maddening that you keep thinking, oh, I just need to pay more attention … attention or look at it a different way and it will make more sense and it never does but we change you know as the years go by and we re-watch it we notice different things about it …

Knox: Well you know what Raymond Chandler said … “when you’ve written yourself into a hole into the corner just send a man into the room with a gun …”

Rachel: It sounds about right. Yeah. I mean. That always livens things up again. That’s fabulous. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, the other one would be what Vertigo maybe. I mean, some people might argue that’s not film noir, but to me that you cannot. It is to me. It’s so linked with San Francisco. Oh, yeah. But that’s such a different, even that, it’s such a different city than the Lady From Shanghai, San Francisco. It’s full color, bright sunshine. It’s sinister in a totally opposite way. Yeah. Yeah.

Knox: I assume that Rita Hayworth’s career rebounded from Lady from Shanghai.

Rachel: I think, yeah, it was kind of, as far as success-wise, a bit of a blip in the sense that she continued to do well for a while. But she personally, though, I mean, I think with her and Wells, you can’t think of a couple that disliked Hollywood more than the two of them. They were both thinking that this film was going to be their ticket to a different way of living.

Knox: Lady from Shanghai?

Rachel: Yeah, and since it wasn’t, she went right back to the redhead bombshell. She did Loves of Carmen, which really played into what she’d established with Gilda, but then she got married and took a break from Hollywood for a bit. Did she ever talk about Lady from Shanghai? Not a ton. I mean, she talked about it in the sense of what she was hoping it would be, and … how much she respected Wells and how she still saw it as a good film. And they were both very happy with what they did with it. Just no one else cared for 20 years. It was one of those stories.

But no, I mean, Rita Hayworth’s story, honestly, is very sad. And she got … married and took a break from hollywood she married prince Ali Khan right and i think you know they sort of lived all over for a bit but the marriage didn’t last too long they had a child and then it was a lot of bitter custody fights and so she you know kind of had to go back to Hollywood doing films with glenn ford but it was never quite the way that it was um and she was drinking a bit too much and just she would have these really sudden volatile emotional outbursts um she was a by all accounts a really sweet lady very kind but she really just wanted i think a more modest life than sort of what she was thrust into um i mean she’d been performing since she was literally like 11 or 12 because of her family. It was they were pushing her into the limelight and there was just so much abuse from all the men in her life early on that her relationships were always fraught because of that. So she really kind of, I think, wanted to have a life where she could relax, raise her kids, and have someone kind of protect her from all the lousy stuff in life.

And it just, it never worked out like that. And so the film roles started to dwindle to the extent that by the end of the 50s, she was doing supporting parts she was having well also she was having like these weird mysterious ailments people attributed it at the time to um you know she that she had a drinking problem and they’re thinking oh you know that’s why she’s not remembering what she said the night before that’s why she’s having trouble remembering her lines and it would take another 15 years to realize that she actually had early onset Alzheimer’s that set in very young and so yeah … She self-medicated a bit with the alcohol, but by the time they she was diagnosed successfully It was just a really hard road from then on Hollywood.

Knox: Hollywood,

Rachel: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Just crazy. And you think, too, like, because we’re talking about all this, you know, these wild lives and this amazing marriage. And at the time, Welles was, I think, 31 and she was 28. Yeah. And just thinking about that, how, oh, my gosh, you know, having the weight of the world on your shoulders and … that level of scrutiny on what you’re doing and in the film say you know the Everett Sloan character he’s this you know old rich husband he’s you know over the hill he’s got all these health ailments he was 37.

I mean admittedly he looks a bit older and i think he’s playing an older character but you’re just like want to slap your head like oh my gosh okay you know um i don’t know if that’s the thing you know the celluloid they remain the same age for for eternity and we age around it.

Knox: I can’t think of anything else. Can you?

Rachel: Gosh.

Knox: I mean, I feel like I’ve gotten an education about the movie. Having watched it and been totally baffled by it and then enchanted it. I love that ending sequences, the funhouse part. But also what he, like the hopscotch that happens through the city to get there. But thank you for, I mean, you certainly put a lot more into perspective for me.

Rachel: Oh, thank you. I hope I didn’t jump around too much. No, not a bit. And again, thanks to the folks that I mentioned from the Film Noir Foundation. I have to credit their research on the story.

Knox: I’ll get it from you. We’ll put it in the show notes. So visit the FriscoTheSecretHistory.com website and we’ll have the transcript. Yeah, we’ll have the transcript and we’ll have some show notes and links and stuff to other stuff. And thank you guys for listening.

Rachel: And thank you, Knox, for inviting me back.

Knox: Well, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure. And all right, this is, well, this is Knox. I’m just going to  ….