At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 17
The next day Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloan), who walks with two crutches, personally seeks out Mike at the seaman’s hiring hall. Mike again refuses the job, but allows Bannister to buy drinks for him and his sailor chums. Bannister passes out, drunk, and the sailors return him to his yacht. Seeing Elsa again, Mike agrees to take the job. They depart for San Francisco.
Bannister’s law partner, Grisby, joins the yacht party in Cuba and immediately makes a distasteful impression, goading Mike by saying that he had been on a “Pro-Franco committee” during the Civil War. Grisby also witnesses Elsa and Mike’s first kiss and gleefully lets the couple know they’ve been caught.
In Acapulco, Grisby tells Mike that he forecasts atomic destruction – “first the big cities, then maybe even this” – and makes a bizarre proposal to pay Mike $5,000 to murder him. Later Elsa argues with her husband at Ciro’s nightclub and flees down to the streets to find Mike. Their conversation is interrupted by Bannister’s nosy private detective, Broome (Ted de Corsia). Mike knocks him out cold. The party picnics on the coast, and Mike compares the bickering Bannisters and Grisby to a cannibalistic school of sharks he witnessed off the coast of Fortaleza.
Docking in Sausalito in San Francisco Bay, Mike tries to persuade Elsa that they could have a future together. Mike agrees to participate in a bizarre scam to fake Grisby’s murder. Without a corpse, Grisby explains, Mike cannot be tried, but with his signed confession Grisby will be legally dead and able to collect his life insurance. Broome has twigged to the scam and tries blackmail. Grisby shoots him. Then Mike and Grisby stage the murder on the Sausalito docks. The plan goes bad. Mike speaks by telephone to the dying Broome, who believes Bannister will be murdered by Grisby. Mike is shocked when Grisby himself is found dead. Now that signed confession is as good as a death sentence.
Bannister represents Mike at a farcical trial, and delights in losing the case so his client will be sentenced to death. Mike causes a disruption of the verdict by swallowing a handful of Bannister’s painkillers and then escapes custody. He flees into Chinatown. He passes out in the Mandarin Theatre and is taken by Elsa’s Chinese associates to an amusement park. He wakes up in a semi-coherent state inside the bewildering crazy house. Outside he encounters the Bannister maid, Bessy (Evelyn Ellis), who leads him to Elsa. Bessy refuses to call the police on Mike’s behalf. Mike and Elsa step into the hall of mirrors to talk. Bannister appears and the unhappily married couple shoot each other. Mike survives, leaves Elsa to die, and walks out in solitude.
* * *
Welles claimed to have previewed one version of the film in Santa Barbara with a temporary track of incidental music. After late February, Cohn imposed large deletions, a narration, and a schmaltzy music score by Heinz Roemheld to which Welles emphatically objected. He wrote to Cohn: “If the lab had scratched initials and phone numbers over the negative, I couldn’t be unhappier about the results.”7 Perhaps tellingly, Welles’s credit reads for screenplay and production, but not direction.
The Lady from Shanghai was one of the first Hollywood thrillers to be shot substantially on location, although other thrillers of this period, such as Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), made a point of their semi-documentary realism.8 By contrast, Welles was moving further away from anything resembling realism to embrace the carnivalesque, the absurd, the obviously artificial. James Naremore describes Shanghai as a film “characterized by a sort of inspired silliness, a grotesquely comic stylization that has moved beyond expressionism towards absurdity”.9
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The Lady from Shanghai is a tale of three port cities. Most of the exterior shots of Acapulco and San Francisco were made on location, with some studio-made insert shots using back projection. The exteriors of New York were largely created at Columbia’s Hollywood studios.
The provisional editing continuity preserves Welles’s original scripted conception of a pre-title sequence in New York:
It’s late August – very early morning … the city, fretfully awake, in the stuffy atmosphere of a closet, gasps for its breath. Spires and tenements seem to sweat in the dizzying heat like the New Yorkers living in them. It’s been a heavy summer, the whole weight of it seems congealed into one oven of a night.10
Although gestural rather than indicative of any specific approach Welles might have taken to filming this palpably hot summer dawn, the sketch recalls the Manhattan city symphony concept that opened the Heart of Darkness screenplay. There is no pre-title sequence in the final cut of Shanghai. A shot of waves plays behind the titles, followed by generic on-location establishing shots of the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park:
The Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park, New York City
The rest of Central Park was recreated at the Columbia Ranch in Burbank, California.11 The long sequence was hacked down for the final cut, eliminating its central theme of urban surveillance, which butts against Mike’s anti-police stance and Elsa’s desire for freedom from her husband.
As laid out in the provisional editing continuity, we first see Elsa outside the park being followed by Broome. Meanwhile, Grisby fruitlessly awaits a call from Elsa at the El Morocco nightclub. Broome reports to Bannister by telephone that he abandoned Elsa’s trail when she entered the park in a horse-drawn cab. All of these preliminaries were deleted.
The park itself is under the surveillance of police squad cars (aided by police radio). The first tracking shot inside the park was to have shown a police car overtaking Elsa’s horse-drawn cab as Mike walks on foot. As the cab and the police car are stopped side by side at a red light, Mike speaks to the cabby and makes an intentionally provocative comment in earshot of the police about the particular pointlessness of a traffic light inside the park, if indeed “there’s ever a point in a traffic light at all”. The unfriendly cabby says his is a “law abiding horse”, to which Mike responds, “Sure, there’s nobody obeys a law unless he’s afraid of something.” When Mike calls the horse Rosinante, after Don Quixote’s nag, the cabby warns, “Don’t be callin’ her names.”12
Mike offers Elsa his last cigarette, and as the squad car moves off, one of the cops warns Elsa about being out alone in the park. After she accepts the cigarette, her cab drives away, too, leaving Mike alone. When he sings an old Irish song, the squad car returns to question why he’s singing. He provocatively explains, “to keep [myself] from remembering that the world is full of cops”.13 An altercation is avoided when the police radio calls the squad car to an emergency in another part of the park. The scene was reedited to remove the police presence and the cabby’s dialogue, completely altering its drama and Mike’s behaviour. All that survive are a few glimpses of what is probably the squad car behind Elsa’s horse-drawn cab:
Later, after Mike rescues Elsa from three bandits, he spirits her away in the cab. The final cut’s narration glosses over Mike’s treatment of the cabby, who had also been attacked: in the provisional editing continuity he abandons the unconscious man in the park with nothing but a robe to cover him and steals his horse and cab, rather excessive revenge for gruff unfriendliness. That excised action would have further explained why Mike is so particularly eager to avoid the police squad car they spot.
Mike’s subsequent admissions to Elsa that he does not like the police survive in the final cut, although his aversion now appears to be due mostly to his unpleasant experience in a Spanish jail rather than to the ideological opposition to police authority suggested by his behaviour in the provisional edit. This is a loss of valuable nuance. Welles had spent a season publicly campaigning for justice in the Isaac Woodard assault case. It coincided with a radicalised attitude to police, and shifted his anti-fascism towards interrogation of the abuse of institutional power. The “aristocratic” Mike, for all his chivalric naivety, voices Welles’s own anti-police attitudes. In a UK television interview from 1955, Welles was asked how he would make use of a fortune. Rather than pitch a film concept, as expected of him, he answered, “I would start a foundation and hire a great numbe
r of constitutional lawyers and study the encroachment of the police on civil liberties all over the world in every country.”14
Mike spots a police car
In The Lady from Shanghai, Mike’s fellow veteran of the International Brigades, Jake Bejornson, puts a cop in the same category as any other ‘tough guy’, with just as little moral authority.
What’s a tough guy? A guy with an edge. … A gun or a knife, a night stick or a razor, something the other guy ain’t got, a little extra reach on a punch, a set of brass knuckles, a stripe on his sleeve, a badge that says ‘Cop’ on it, or a rock in your hand, or a bankroll in your pocket. That’s an edge, brother. Without no edge, they ain’t no tough guy.15
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The pre-international draft of the script (17 August 1946) contains two noteworthy and unique New York City scenes. One was eliminated by the time of the shooting script, and the other was revised for a San Francisco setting. In the 17 August draft, Grisby’s assassination occurs on screen in the vicinity of Wall Street. He is killed in a distant shot, presumably to render his identity ambiguous, from the point of view of Bannister’s office window while the phone buzzes. The caller is the wounded Broome, who is attempting to warn Bannister of Grisby’s imminent attempt on his life. Welles sketches another of his never-realised sound schemes to provide a fuller dimension to urban space, this time in the isolated concrete canyons of the city’s financial centre:
The tiny figure of the man can be just made out on the black pavement… Suddenly, with the sound perspective matching this distance, there is heard a faint but sharp textured gunshot! The noise ricochets off the granite faces of the empty buildings echoing remotely. This during a silent phase of one of the measured pauses between the exclamations of the phone buzzer… Precisely on the instant of the gunshot, the moving CAMERA had pulled up and locked its focus in a fixed stare at the street below… The miniscule shape of the man is seen to fall… The phone bell clatters… The man lies motionless.16
For the shooting script, Welles chose to cut this scene rather than transfer the action to Bannister’s office in Montgomery Street, San Francisco.
When Mike escapes from court in the 17 August New York-based draft, he takes the subway uptown. The script leaps into Mike’s subjectivity. Having swallowed Bannister’s pills, he hallucinates while examining advertisements inside the subway car:
Through Mike’s eyes, the posters seem to change. A girl in a bathing suit suddenly becomes Elsa, the man next to her advertising the razor becomes Bannister. The man in the speedboat becomes Grisby. Each ad becomes some incident in Mike’s mind, leading up to the murder. A subway sign streaks over the scene with a roar, then stops, vibrating queerly.
A conductor’s offscreen voice orders Mike out of the car at 205th Street, but Mike hallucinates that Bannister – whose “face bolts into the aperture”, shot with a distortion lens – is speaking to him. We see money swirling; it becomes a whirling telephone dial.17 Elsa’s voice also intrudes into the subjective soundscape as she tries to spirit him away. Mike also hears the echoing voices of two dead men, Grisby and Broome. He passes out and wakes up in the crazy house at the Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey.18
The shooting script for The Stranger had featured a similar subjective sequence – as Welles called it, an “impressionistic montage” – of Mary Longstreet’s psychological breakdown (it also did not make the final cut). The New York subway ride in this early draft of Shanghai was rewritten as Mike’s flight into San Francisco’s Chinatown, although the final cut does not attempt to represent Mike’s subjective experience of the city while under the influence of the overdose of pills. Only what remains of the crazy house sequence gestures towards Mike’s bewildered subjectivity.
Acapulco proved an ideal setting to depict the greed of the postwar wealthy. The Lady from Shanghai delivers contrasting images of the resort city – glamorous spectacle from above, squalor down below. Although Welles recalled, “We didn’t build a thing. We used Acapulco as we found it,”19 the market street of the city was actually shot in a studio.
Grisby’s mysterious proposition to Mike is delivered in a series of impressively choreographed tracking and panning shots in the bustling sun-soaked hills. The Mexican locals serve as fishermen, load-bearers, washerwomen, and gigolos; wealthy tourists sunbake, flirt, and bicker. The sequence was abridged and altered after late February. Insert shots were added featuring obviously projected backgrounds that interrupted the virtuoso camera movements. Intentionally or not, the film’s political radicalism was blunted by the changes. Some dialogue was cut, silenced, or smothered with music, including most of the clever string of fragmented conversations of various tourists, all of whose petty comments concern money. This was surely the principal inspiration for Mike’s world-weary demurral in response to Grisby’s comment on the beauty of “everything”: “You mean the whole of the world? There’s a fair face to the land but you can’t hide the hunger and the guilt. Sure, it’s a bright, guilty world.”20
Moving shots through the Acapulco Hills
Inserted close-ups filmed in front of a process screen
Later, Elsa flees the luxurious rooftop nightclub to find Mike down in the Calle del Mercado. The realisation of working-class Acapulco is more elaborate than what was sketched in the 20 September shooting script, which simply staged Broome’s confrontation with Elsa and Mike around a crumbling adobe wall.21 This noirish side of Acapulco was filmed at the Twentieth Century Fox ranch in Hollywood.22 Welles and presumably art directors Sturges Carne and Stephen Goosson create a palpable early evening atmosphere of tranquillity interrupted by Broome’s menace. A tracking shot follows Mike and Elsa between colonnades and archways, past busy open-air eateries and a well-lit cantina, giving a stunning impression of a living city populated by working-class people.23 The physical structures of the street seem almost in ruins. The griminess of the building exteriors and the use of paper detritus anticipate the border town in Touch of Evil, which would be, by contrast, shot in a real urban location. The walls and columns are plastered with torn and overlapping film posters. Among these exotic images of romance is a stereotypical Polynesian wahine, perhaps an ironic foreshadowing of Grisby’s purported plan to escape the world of cities for the smallest Pacific island. That was a popular atomic age fantasy that explains the popularity of James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (1947) and the fad for pseudo-Polynesian tiki kitsch.
Of course, Grisby’s fantasy of island escape is just a ploy; Mike is the real romantic dreamer. In a cantina, Mike suggests to Elsa they escape to “one of the far places”. She tells him, “we’re in one of them now – running away doesn’t work … you’re such a foolish knight errant, Mike.”24
Welles would briefly return to sun-drenched Acapulco in Mr. Arkadin, although in that case the setting was recreated in Spain.
The action of The Lady from Shanghai culminates violently in a final port city, San Francisco, where Welles had reported on the birth of the United Nations in 1945. Welles used a variety of the city’s locations: Nob Hill, Portsmouth Square, the Steinhart Aquarium, and Whitney’s Playland-at-the-Beach for the exteriors of the amusement park.25 Sausalito is described in the script as a “Saroyanesquely ramshackle litter of old buildings”; it appears on screen as a quaint marine outpost across the bay from the big city. It is there that Grisby, in his unconvincing guise of pre-emptive atomic refugee, says: “I don’t want to be within a thousand miles of that city, or any other city, when they start dropping those bombs.”26
The streets of Acapulco created at the 20th Century Fox Ranch
San Francisco had already been mooted as the setting of at least two prior unfilmed Welles projects: John Fante’s weak 1941 ‘Love Story’ script from It’s All True, and Welles’s little-known attempt to adapt a novel by Mike Fessier, Fully Dressed and In His Right Mind (1934). The latter, a psychological drama with supernatural elements, is possibly the only one of Welles’s 1940s thriller projects without a politi
cal dimension. It is difficult to establish exactly when Welles worked on the Fully Dressed project, or if other writers were involved, but it provides a few insights into Welles’s unrealised sketches for putting San Francisco on screen.27
The story centres on a ‘Little Old Man’ (LOM) who freely admits to the protagonist, Johnny Price, that he has murdered the editor of the San Francisco Herald; he also reveals he once cannibalised a British Colonial Officer in Africa. The LOM stalks Price around the city. After reporting the man to the police, who dismissively eject him from the station, Price takes a crowded street car.
The Lady From Shanghai’s San Francisco panoramas
His attention is drawn to the windows of the car in which he sees 2 or 3 reflections (all different) of the LOM. He looks apprehensively around in back of him, but sees only the regular passengers standing. He turns quickly and looks at the windows, but the reflections have vanished.28
Welles’s visual interest in multiple reflections was most spectacularly expressed in The Lady from Shanghai’s hall-of-mirrors conclusion. Years later he would use reflecting windows in a stunning film-within-a-film sequence in The Other Side of the Wind shot in Century City, Los Angeles. Fully Dressed and In His Right Mind, however, was never realised. One of the few scholars to have researched the project, Bret Wood, compares it to The Trial for its “themes of guilt, injustice and sexual uncertainty”.29