Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

slanting compositions, and brilliant camerawork by Charles Lawton, Jr. Orson Welles
shows again his singular talents, working with a film noir narrative and stylistic
conventions, fashioning a tale of passion and lust, adultery, and betrayal. In visual terms
the film displays much of the imagery used in Welles’s later film, Touch of Evil. Both
films start with a vivid re-creation of a Mexican nightmare out of the strange décor of
Venice, California and location photography. While in The Lady the city is quickly
replaced by the lush tropical locale of the Caribbean, which in turn gives way to the trial
and Chinatown; in Touch of Evil it is a seedy border town in Mexico that dominates the
film. And both films are full of shifting imagery and wild nightmares, which are illustrated
with baroque juxtaposition and misleading imagery. For The Lady, the fundamental
concept that both Lawton, Jr. and Welles applied was to use light to enhance the contrast
between the diverse scenes, almost as if several different films were being made.
The final sequence of The Lady from Shanghai with its celebrated hall of mirrors
confrontation (see fig. 104 on p. 359) constitutes another brilliant moment of camerawork.
To shoot this particular scene, a painted mirror had to be placed in front of the lens to
represent a panel of cracked glass that would create the impression of watching the action
through a broken two-way mirror. The mirrors visually split apart and duplicate the
characters representing their various (ambivalent) natures. Amid shattering images of Elsa
(Rita Hayworth) and the crippled lawyer, Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), the truth about
Grisby’s (Glenn Anders) death is revealed. Michael (Orson Welles) walks away from the
dying Elsa, alone and ultimately ambivalent about the entire affair. If Mike is duplicated
visually, he may be duping the viewer as well, by making them believe they have all the
answers. The duplicity of the film itself and the disruptive narrative create a greater degree
of difficulty for the viewer.
Of all his Hollywood films, Touch of Evil is the one in which there is the greatest
degree of improvisation, with Welles persistently exploring new possibilities during the
course of a shot that had initially been very cautiously planned. The over-three minute
nonstop tracking shot opening the film is generally accepted by critics to be one of the
greatest long takes in cinematic history. The shot begins with a close-up of a time bomb
and then cranes up to reveal the bomb being planted in a car before exploding as it crosses
the Mexican border into the United States. Cinematographer Metty – who had worked on
The Stranger and was now with Universal - and Welles carefully calculated this impressive
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