After taking a short break from it, Orson Welles returned to the noir genre with this film co-starring Rita Hayworth.
Sailor Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) meets the beautiful Elsa (Rita Hayworth) and rescues her from a group of hooligans. A short while later Elsa's husband, lawyer Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) hires Michael to be a seaman on their yacht. As he grows ever more infatuated with Elsa, Michael gets drawn into a complicated murder plot and finds himself put on trial.
Often film noirs have complicated plots but this one is especially complex. Michael is hired to confess to murdering someone to fake their death but when he is actually killed Michael is charged. The latter part of the film is a courtroom drama as we see the case unfold. For some reason no-one seems to have a problem with Arthur Bannister representing Michael despite the very clear conflict of interests- there's a really absurd moment where Bannister is called to the witness stand and ends up cross-examining himself.
Michael is Irish and has something of an Irish accent in the film which Welles doesn't do a particularly good job of it. As far as I could tell keeping the character Irish made no difference to the plot so they could have easily changed this when Welles decided to play the part. He also cast his wife Rita Hayworth and controversially got her to cut her red hair and dye it blonde. The pair work well together though I would have liked to have seen more of them sharing the screen.
The highlight of the film is the climax which takes place in a funfair that is closed for the winter. Michael finds himself in a fun house and there's a final shootout in a hall of mirrors. There are some great sets combined with some great direction from Welles that make this a really effective sequence which has been imitated many times.
Some things work well, not least that superb climax, but the narrative doesn't make enough sense for this to be truly fantastic.
Comments
Post a Comment