In the summer of 1946, Welles was directing Around the World, a musical stage adaptation of the Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days, with a comedic and ironic book by Welles, incidental music and songs by Cole Porter, and production by Mike Todd, who would later produce the successful film version with David Niven. When Todd pulled out from the lavish and expensive production, Welles financed it. When he ran out of money and urgently needed $55,000 to release costumes that were being held, he convinced Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn to send him the money to continue the show and in exchange Welles promised to write, produce, and direct a film for Cohn for no further fee.
As Welles told it, on the spur of the moment, he suggested the film be based on a book that he happened to see in front of him during his call with Cohn, one a girl in the theatre box office was reading at the time. Welles had never read it.[5] However, according to the daughter of William Castle, it was her father who had purchased the film adaptation rights for the novel and who then asked Welles to pitch it to Cohn, with Castle hoping to receive the directoral assignment himself. She described her father as greatly respecting Welles' talents, but feeling nonetheless disappointed at being relegated to serve merely as Welles' assistant director on the film.[6]
Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth shortly before her hair was bleached and cut for The Lady from Shanghai (1946)The Lady from Shanghai began filming on 2 October 1946, and originally finished filming on 27 February 1947, with studio-ordered retakes continuing through March 1947—but it was not released in the U.S. until 9 June 1948. Cohn strongly disliked Welles' rough cut, particularly what he considered to be a confusing plot and lack of close-ups (Welles had deliberately avoided these, as a stylistic device), and was not in sympathy with Welles' Brechtian use of irony and black comedy, especially in a farcical courtroom scene. He also objected to the appearance of the film. Welles had aimed for documentary-style authenticity by shooting the film almost entirely on location (making it one of the first major Hollywood pictures to be shot in this way) in Acapulco, Pie de la Cuesta, Sausalito, and San Francisco), and by using primarily long takes, while Cohn preferred the more tightly controlled look of footage lit and shot in a studio. The release of the film was delayed due to Cohn's order for extensive editing and reshoots. Whereas Welles had delivered his cut of the film on time and under budget, the reshoots Welles was ordered to do meant that the film ended up over budget by a third, contributing to the director's reputation for going over budget. Once the reshoots were over, the heavy editing ordered by Cohn took over a year to complete; editor Viola Lawrence cut about an hour from Welles' rough cut.[7][8]
Welles was appalled at the musical score, and he was particularly aggrieved by the cuts in the climactic confrontation scene in an amusement park funhouse at the end of the film. Intended as a climactic tour-de-force of editing and production design, the scene was cut to less than three minutes out of an intended running time of twenty minutes. As with many of the films over which Welles did not have control over the final cut, the missing footage has not been found and is presumed to have been destroyed. Surviving production stills show elaborate and expensive sets that were built for the sequence and which were entirely cut from the film.[9]
Welles cast his wife Rita Hayworth as Elsa and caused a good deal of controversy when he instructed her to cut her long red hair and bleach it blonde for the role. "Orson was trying something new with me, but Harry Cohn wanted The Image—The Image he was gonna make me 'til I was 90," Rita Hayworth recalled. "The Lady from Shanghai was a very good picture. So what does Harry Cohn say when he sees it? 'He's ruined you—he cut your hair off!'"[10]
The film was considered a disaster in the U.S. at the time of its release, although the closing shootout in a hall of mirrors has since become one of the touchstones of film noir. Not long after the film's release, Welles and Hayworth finalized their divorce. A remake of the film came close to production at the turn of the century from a screenplay written by Jeff Vintar, based both on Welles's script and the original pulp novel, produced by John Woo and Terence Chang, and starring Brendan Fraser, who wanted Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones to co-star. Although the screenplay was considered highly successful, and Fraser was coming off the highly praised Gods and Monsters, the project was abandoned when the head of Sony Pictures, Amy Pascal, decided to concentrate on teen films.
Filming locations
In addition to the Columbia Pictures studios, the film was partly shot on location in San Francisco. It features the Sausalito waterfront and Lee Kahn's Valhalla waterfront bar and cafe,[11] the front, interior, and a courtroom scene of the old Kearny Street Hall of Justice, and shots of Welles running across Portsmouth Square, escaping to a long scene in a theater in Chinatown, then the Steinhart Aquarium in Golden Gate Park, and Whitney's Playland-at-the-Beach amusement park at Ocean Beach for the hall of mirrors scene, for which interiors were shot on a soundstage.
Other scenes were filmed in Acapulco. The yacht Zaca, on which many scenes take place, was owned by actor Errol Flynn, who skippered the yacht in between takes and can also be seen in the background in one scene at a cantina in Acapulco.[12]
