This is a review that couples The Lady from Shanghai (1948) with
Norte, the End of History (2013)
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10 August
This is a review that couples The Lady from Shanghai (1948) with
Norte, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2013)
* Contains spoilers *
Compared with Norte, the End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2013), ‘slow burning’ is not a phrase by which one could still describe The Lady from Shanghai (1948)*. Certainly not as to overall plot or pace, though it does fall into three distinct parts of unequal length (set-up, court-scene, and symbolic hall of mirrors), the second of which is established by the purposeful, if leisurely, unfolding of the first – hence there is a smouldering sense, as if of a fuse.
A fuse implies (such is its purpose, although it may go out) that there will be a detonation, an explosion, which is delivered by the events that close on Michael (Mike) O’Hara at the end of the first part. This is the moment that we were (being temptingly) kept waiting to get back to, after what Mike (director and co-writer Orson Welles himself) told us at the opening, when a darkly lit craft had been coming in under the Golden Gate Bridge (in a film that plays with light and dark, not just in clothes).
Arguably, Norte never does more than burn through at a deliberately steady and slow rate, and, towards the end, balances fairly cowardly actions of restitution (because they risk nothing, even if they are done out of seeming guilt), with those that seem to make past actors guilty as a basis for wreaking vengeance on them (the equivalent of Fabian's earlier acts).
Someone may very well behave in this way, but, until this point, the screenplay retains enough of the story of Crime and Punishment, complete with its unsympathetic and grasping money-lender, to tease us into believing that it wishes to engage with re-telling Dostoveksy’s novel. Yet, forgetting that the figure of Porphyry (the detective in the novel) has been omitted, the closest person to Sonya that we see is when Fabian has gone to Manila, and reluctantly (because of the affiliations of his group of friends) has something to do with the church : alone as a way of understanding him, beyond his contentious arguments and justifications, his struggle to say what he has done in La Paz before a group at the church is one of the few expressive moments in the whole film that is not characterized by flatness of affect.
In its way, Michael O’Hara’s tripping brogue, sometimes more convincing than at other times (perhaps to remind us that all cinema is a piece of blarney, a tale being told), is staggeringly cool in its tone, however hot his driving feelings for Elsa Bannister (Welles’ wife, Rita Haywood) may be. With sangfroid, he has us credit (because we see it) that Elsa’s husband Arthur, a trial lawyer on crutches, searches him out as he works (on his novel !) at the hiring hall for seafaring men, and, after begging him to serve on his yacht for a cruise, gets so drunk that Mike and his friends have to see him home – whereupon it is a fait accompli that Mike join the crew.
Noir, which the first part of the film unquestionably is, embraces such plot-styles with relish, asking us to place trust in unreliable narratives and in devices and developments that are more Gothic than Gothic** – although we do go along with what we see, to further the purpose of following the film, we know simultaneously that the logic and reality of the dream is behind all of this, and that we are not to press too hard on its fabric. The veneer of veracity is never more than thin, and amounts to carrying off absurdity with poise (or, if you will, gravitas).
Who knows how much of what has already been outlined is owed to Sherwood King’s novel, but the film has all the trappings of a shaggy-dog story ! Coupled with Mike’s pithy poetic monologue about sharks off the coast of Brazil, the grotesquery of both Bannister and his unexpectedly arriving grinning business partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders), and the corny demeanour of both men towards Bannister’s wife, and one can see Mike smiling his way through an evening of drinks as he tells it.
Superficially, Norte simply asks us to place our trust in it for no other reason than it appears a naturalistic account (which it is not) of the consequences of an injustice – when Fabian’s lawyer friends eventually discuss, at his instigation, the merits of an appeal against JR’s conviction, it is clear that weight has been given to a confession (whose reasons for being made we know), and an incident that connects him with the victim, over such factors as JR having the alibi that, at the time, he was at the place where he was (somehow) found and arrested.
In Mike’s case, Arthur Bannister – although the screenplay has been quietly laughing throughout at what Bannister’s status as a celebrated criminal lawyer means – is presented to us as his only option for being acquitted, but the patent tomfoolery in the court-room suggests otherwise. (Meanwhile, no one stops to ask on whose typewriter Mike's ‘confession’ was supposed to have been written, not least in relation to the particular question - in relation to what we see happen (even if partly as set up by Grisby) - of when and where Mike could have had access to one to do so…)
In common with The Lady, we have murder, a judicial process (though, in Norte, we do not see any more than its artefacts and officers), and the question of innocence (in a conviction for acts that we know that the accused did not commit). Forgetting the question of justice per se, or of redemption (for which there is precious little evidence – in either film), we have in Fabian (as in Mike) a man who is jaundiced with life, but open to idealism. At any rate, we see the philosophizing with which his friends and he seem to entertain themselves, but which he – although they end up in laughter – seems to hold more dear, and (without such intellectualization) there are aspects of this make-up to Mike.
Both directors (Welles was uncredited at the time), in their ways, challenge us to look at the artefacts that they have brought into existence by the process of film-making, and towards the end not insignificantly so, with Welles’ mirror-scene and with the scenes that Lav Diaz gives us of the wreckage of a seeming coach-crash, followed by JR’s supine body levitating.
Yet, before then, the Gothic nature of Welles’ edifice was saying this all along. In Norte, we see this in the artfulness with which elements such as recurrent Christmas-lights, dogs and chickens, vegetables on a cart, and (returning to Christmas) JR’s inexhaustible production of three-dimensional five-pointed stars (which he not only brings when allowed out on release, but which litter the crash-scene) have been assembled.
Where Diaz may make a minor departure from Welles here (if not a new one) is in his disjunctive use of audio…
That apart, with two palpable fictions, one has to ask what function there is in following the form of Fabian's interactions, or even Michael O'Hara's wayward narration (though he enchants us more) :
Welles and his writing team seem to be trying to be too clever for their own good, with incrimination that does not stand up to examination (except with the dazzle of mirrors and reflections, though not intellectual reflection), and Diaz, if he assumes that we know the Dostoyevsky (maybe he does not care), only seems to want to play with our expectations of what he will do with the novel's bare bones.
End-notes
* Not to be mistaken for The Lady from Shanghai (1947), whose title-character seems to have kleptomania (and whose IMDb entry persists on coming out at the top of a search on Google, with no placing for Welles in the first ten hits)…
Apparently, not our film’s original title, but, before it, Take This Woman and Black Irish.
** Here, Mike making eyes at the lady in the carriage and then happening to rescue her : she has no reason to be in the carriage, even, for where it stops under his control is where her car is garaged. Or a screenwriter in debt, pulling off the road to stop his car being repossessed, and, discovering a slumbering villa, entering the place, as Prince Charming, that will enslave him (Sunset Boulevard (1950)).
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
