The Lady From Shanghai

The lady from Shanghai, starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Wells is about a man called Black Irish who becomes a crewmember on a yacht. He falls in love with the captain’s wife and gets involved in murder and betrayal. The hall of mirrors sequence at the end of the film is classic Orson Wells, which is a great example when talking about mis en scene.

After Wells’s character is drugged and wakes up in an abandoned theme park, he goes through a bizarre fun house that represents the chaotic situation in which he has ended up. He’s been played with, a puppet in the hands of villains. He falls in love with a woman who frames him for murder and whose husband wants him to suffer. Wells walks through a dark corridor with elongated shadows intertwining on the wall. I feel like I’m inside his mind. He feels alone and very small at this point. Everything is larger than life. There is nothing he can do to escape these monstrous characters.

~Brianna P.

In the room of mirrors his ex lover faces her husband, both with guns drawn. Their images overlap and repeat into the distance. This implies an infinite nature about these evildoers. They talk about the natural state of a person. The repetition of their evil, the true nature of who they are, is evident. When the finally shoot, they miss each other and keep firing, shattering the glass and the reflection until they finally kill each other. Also referred to in the film is a speech by Wells who describes a situation in which he was surrounded by ravenous sharks, so blinded by their rage, that they started devouring themselves. This is what happens to his lover and her husband. They destroy everything they touch, including themselves.