rshapiro@uunet.UU.NET (Richard Shapiro) (12/14/90)
I just picked up the laser disc of The Lady From Shanghai, and while watching it I was reminded of an aspect of this film that's always puzzled me. Much emphasis is placed on the general issue of nationality and ethnicity. Welles makes a point of letting the audience know that the (caucasian) female lead (Rita Hayworth) was born in Shanghai, that she speaks Chinese, and that she has some familiarity with Chinese culture (the Chinese theater scene). Yet the significance of her "Chinese-ness" is not at all apparent. Aside from a passing reference to Shanghai being a sinful city, the character could just as easily have been Turkish or Brazilian or, for that matter, Anglo-Saxon, and no thematic damage would have been done to the film. Likewise the male lead (played by Welles) is quite pointedly marked as being Irish -- he does the voice-over in a rather heavy-handed brogue, and the character's nickname is "Black Irish". But, again, despite the strong emphasis on the character's ethnicity, no thematic conclusions seem to flow from this. Other, minor characters also brandish their nationality or ethnicity (Jewish, Mexican) but still for no apparent reason. In short, the film is full of references to ethnicity and nationality, and yet it could have been made without these references and nothing would have been lost. Or have I missed something significant in this movie? I know of some Hollywood films that use foreign-ness as an important marker of character, but this particular movie doesn't really follow that paradigm. There are no clear moral or thematic lines separating the familiar from the foreign. Instead, The Lady From Shanghai follows the more ordinary schema of film noir: weak, somewhat feminized men victimized by a strong, phallic woman, where the men are distinguished primarily by their innocence or lack thereof. Possibly some insights into this would come from comparing The Lady From Shanghai to other films by Welles. His film The Stranger is an example of the familiar vs foreign. In this case, the nationality of the Welles character is crucial to his identity -- he is a stranger, and thus evil. And certainly nationality is important in Touch of Evil, though in this case Welles casts himself as the jingoistic American rather than as the foreigner. It would seem clear that ethnicity, and the general question of familiar vs foreign, is important to Welles. And yet I'm afraid I still don't see how it functions in The Lady From Shanghai, or in fact why it comes up in that movie at all.