The Lady From Shanghai (1948)

A drifter (Orson Welles, who also wrote and directed the film) meets a beautiful married blonde (Rita Hayworth) in Central Park. She talks her rich lawyer husband (Everett Sloane) into hiring him to work on their yacht as they travel from New York to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. He reluctantly agrees but it is a decision he will regret. Based on the novel IF I DIE BEFORE I WAKE by Sherwood King, Welles' film was interfered with by Columbia studio head Harry Cohn. But even in its present form, it remains a unique and dazzling contribution to the film noir canon. Welles and his cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. (3:10 TO YMA) shot the film on location rather than studio sound stages and it pays off in spades. The stunning fun house and subsequent shoot out sequence finale is justifiably legendary. The film keeps one off kilter, nothing makes sense. Whether this is intentional or the result of Cohn's editing and reshoots (not done by Welles) is hard to tell. But it does give the film a sense of uneasiness, of being tossed in a vortex beyond one's control. The performances are uniformly fine but Glenn Anders as Sloane's business partner gives one of the strangest, bizarre performances I've ever seen. When I first saw the film, I just thought it was bad acting but I've since realized it's a perfectly crafted performance. Anders positively makes your skin crawl! With Ted De Corsia and Erskine Sanford.