FILM · 1947 · USA
The Lady from Shanghai
- Directed by
- Orson Welles
- Runtime
- 87 min
- Studio
- Mercury Productions, Columbia Pictures
33 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
A romantic drifter gets caught between a corrupt tycoon and his voluptuous wife.
Summary: TMDB
All facts (33)
- #001
Everett Sloane bitterly complained about the pain the role caused him and refused to wear the leg braces made for his character. Sloane was reported to be impossible to deal with and to have shut out everyone on the set.
- #002
Glenn Anders, who played George Grisby, said that before he shot any of his role live, he filmed the scene in which his character's corpse is carried on a stretcher. It was while lying on the stretcher that he signed his final contract for the film.
- #003
Orson Welles's original rough cut of the picture ran 155 minutes. The many cuts made by Columbia Pictures executives included shortening the famous hall-of-mirrors finale.
- #004
Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn told Orson Welles that he would never again hire a single person to produce, direct and act, because he could never fire that person.
- #005
Orson Welles was not at all happy with the music the studio-assigned composer produced. At a test screening he laid in a temporary stock score meant to serve as a model for the composer. The composer ignored Welles's carefully prepared plan entirely. In particular, the final mirror scene was supposed to be unscored in order to create a sense of dread.
- #006
The yacht where much of the action takes place was the "Zaca," rented from its owner, Errol Flynn. Flynn served as the Zaca's captain between shoots and can be seen in the background in the scene outside a bar.
- #007
Orson Welles thought of Everett Sloane primarily as a radio actor who did not move very well on film, so he gave the character crutches.
- #008
Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn thought the film would ruin its star, Rita Hayworth, and delayed its release by a year. Cohn ordered director Orson Welles to add glamorous shots (close-ups) of Hayworth. Because of Hayworth's singing success in other films, Cohn ordered the shooting of a scene in which Hayworth sings "Please Don't Kiss Me."
- #009
During reshoots, Orson Welles had to match footage of Rita Hayworth, who was paid 500 dollars to have her hair cut and bleached like a star, with a stand-in.
- #010
Shooting was delayed by Errol Flynn's long absences. His contract stipulated that the yacht could not be used while he was not there.
- #011
The Mexico shoot was plagued by a series of problems, many of which producer William Castle detailed in his diary. Temperatures during the day were often extreme, and Rita Hayworth fainted from the heat at least once. At night millions of poisonous insects gathered around the arc lights and often put them out. When an insect bit Orson Welles it caused a significant delay in shooting, and his eye swelled to nearly three times its normal size and closed shut.
- #012
For a shot simulating O'Hara's point of view as she goes down the slide, Charles Lawton Jr. and camera operator Irving Klein held the camera on a mat and slid on their stomachs down the entire slide.
- #013
Orson Welles initially wanted sound to be a disturbing element in the film, a device to unsettle the audience (for example, bringing sounds down to such a low level that the viewer would have to strain to understand what was being said). Apart from a few small examples of this effect (the grating voices of Bannister and Grisby, the over-amplified final dialogue in the hall of mirrors), nearly all of it was corrected by the Columbia sound department.
- #014
Orson Welles wanted to design the hall of mirrors on the expressionist imagery of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). Stephen Goosson designed an elaborate set featuring sliding doors, distorting mirrors and a 125-foot zigzag slide descending from the roof of the studio soundstage into a pit 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep.
- #015
Just as Flynn's yacht "Zaca" appears in the film, Errol Flynn's own pet dachshund is also visible in the yacht scenes. Flynn also shot all the aerial photography of the film's yacht scenes.
- #016
Some scenes were shot near a river infested with alligators. The rock from which Elsa dives into the ocean had to be scraped clean of poisonous mussels. A Mexican swimming champion armed with a spear had to swim in front of the camera near Rita Hayworth to fend off the deadly barracuda in the waters.
- #017
Errol Flynn was paid 1,500 dollars a day for the use of his yacht and lunch for its crew.
- #018
During a chase scene, Orson Welles passes an old Mexican film poster for Resurrection (1927). The film stars Welles's former girlfriend Dolores Del Río.
- #019
When Glenn Anders arrived on the set on his first day, Orson Welles immediately ordered him to lie down on a stretcher under a sheet and play dead. The actor did as he was told, and while he lay there a studio representative handed him a pen and a contract to sign, he said. At that point Anders claimed he still knew nothing about the film or the role he was playing. During the shoot Anders was so upset by Welles's bullying that the crew nicknamed him "Glenn Anguish."
- #020
Shooting in the confined space of the yacht created particular difficulties that Orson Welles and Charles Lawton Jr. turned to good effect by using cramped, claustrophobic compositions. Filming against the glare of the sea and sky, however, often rendered light meters useless and caused overexposure. A series of experimental tests was carried out to overcome the problem.
- #021
After the film was screened for Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn, he found the plot so incomprehensible that he offered $1,000 to anyone who could explain it to him. He later decided to clarify the film by opening with the trial scene and telling the earlier part of the story in flashbacks, but he abandoned the plan because so much new footage would have had to be shot that it would have nearly doubled the film's cost.
- #022
Orson Welles never watched the rushes. He sent them to Viola Lawrence, Columbia's chief editor, who had just been assigned to the picture. Seeing that Welles had not shot a single close-up, not even a single close-up of Rita Hayworth, she went straight to Columbia boss Harry Cohn, who ordered the director to shoot some. Although Welles eventually complied once he returned to the studio, he ignored the order on location.
- #023
The Hall of Mirrors labyrinth was designed with the help of special-effects wizard Lawrence W. Butler, who had provided the screen's magic in films such as Things to Come (1936) and The Thief of Baghdad (1940). It contained 2,912 square meters of glass. Some of the mirrors were two-way, allowing Charles Lawton Jr. and his crew to shoot through them. At other times they shot through holes cut in the glass.
- #024
After distinguished service on coastal patrol off California during the Second World War, the "Zaca" was sold from Errol Flynn's estate and endured years of neglect and ownership disputes. Rescued from near ruin and restored by a wealthy Italian businessman, the yacht now sails out of Monte Carlo and is considered one of the finest yachts in the world.
- #025
The House of Fun/Hall of Mirrors sequence required extensive work. The two sets were meant to be separate locations (as at San Francisco's Playland, where the exteriors were shot). A scene in an earlier draft of the screenplay could have made this clear and explained not only how the characters moved from one to the other but also how they were able to enter the interiors.
- #026
The Central Park scene was shot using a car bought in Mexico and shipped to New York. Huge arc lights, a sound boom and a 20-meter camera crane followed the car for nearly a mile to capture a single shot of it. Unfortunately it was later cut by the editor Columbia brought in to fix the picture, which completely ruined Orson Welles's concept.
- #027
In a scene set in Acapulco, the song "Amado Mio" plays in the background. Rita Hayworth had sung the song in Gilda (1946), released two years earlier.
- #028
Wide-angle lenses were used to create distortion in the close-ups.
- #029
Rita Hayworth fell ill while shooting in Mexico, and the production had to shut down for a month. Orson Welles was unfairly criticized for the film going over budget.
- #030
The exterior portions of the amusement park scenes at the end of the film were shot at the Playland at the Beach amusement park in San Francisco, located across Ocean Beach and just south of the famous Cliff House. Playland closed and was demolished in 1972.
- #031
Orson Welles and cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr. held long pre-production conferences, during which they decided to use plain interior lighting and natural light wherever possible. Filters were used on the outdoor sky to prevent the transitions between exterior and interior scenes from being too glaring. Sharp contrasts were created in exterior shots to achieve dramatic modeling of faces. In one scene between O'Hara and Grisby, for example, Welles wore a white linen suit so that his face would look dark and gloomy.
- #032
Other titles considered for the film were "Black Irish" and "If I Die Before I Wake," the name of the novel on which the film was based.
- #033
In the scene where Mrs. Bannister goes to the Chinese theater to look for Michael, she speaks Cantonese, a Chinese dialect spoken mostly in southern China and Hong Kong.
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