A handsome new restoration of Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai” underwritten by Sony and The Film Foundation arrives Tuesday in a dual-format DVD/Blu-ray release from the TCM Vault Collection. It looks vastly better than the last time I watched this title all the way through. It was 1980, and I had copied it on VHS recorder from an over-the-air broadcast on a Boston station that had been relayed by microwave to my local cable provider in North Jersey.
I was living at the time in an apartment in a grim garden complex in Bergenfield, a yards from where four teenagers would die in a suicide pact in a carbon monoxide-filled garage in 1987. One day I got a call from Peter Goldenbock, a celebrated writer of sports books who I had met while we were both copy editor at The Bergen Record.
Peter asked if I had “The Lady From Shanghai” on tape — practically no non-pornographic movies were available on VHS at that point — and I replied affirmatively. He said he’d like to bring a friend by to see it with him.
That friend turned out to be Glenn Anders, a veteran stage actor whose handful of screen roles included an unforgettable performance in “The Lady From Shanghai.” Anders — Peter met him while volunteering at the Actor’s Home in Englewood (where Anders died in 1981, aged 92 — plays Grisby, an associate of Rita Hayworth’s lawyer husband Everett Sloan, who offers Welles’ Irish seaman a handsome sum to fake Anders’ murder.
The elderly actor told us he had never seen “The Lady From Shanghai” before. After 90 silent minutes, he told us he was pleased with the way his performance and movie had turned out, as well as stories about working with Hayworth and Welles, who were married at the time.
Welles had leveraged his collapsing marriage to Hayworth into what turned out to be his final major studio film (before “Touch of Evil”). Columbia Pictures boss was not pleased when Wells had Hayworth’s trademark red hair dyed blonde to play the duplicitious femme fatale in the black-and-white film. And even less pleased when “Lady” became Rita’s first box-office flop since she had achieved stardom.
It couldn’t have come as much of a surprise: “Lady” is a triumph of style over coherence that took decades to find an appreciative audience.
The triple-cross plot may not stand up to close scrutiny, but fans of Welles’ bravura style of filmmaking will find his visual signature throughout. The fun-house climax, which ends with a much excerpted and imitated shootout in a hall of mirrors, is one of the greatest sequences he ever directed.
For a film of this importance, the new extras are on the light side: an introduction by Robert Osborne and the usual selection of stills, posters and text articles typically found on TCM Vault releases. There is a 20-minute interview with Peter Bogdanovich ported over from the 2003 DVD release — but no English titles, unlike on TCM’s only previous dual-format release, “The Iron Petticoat.” And also unlike that one, “The Lady From Shanghai” is packaged in a clunky DVD case rather than a sleeker Blu-ray one.
“Man in the Dark”
Another beneficiary of Sony’s tendency of late to farm out its deep catalogue titles is the boutique label Twlight Time — which has ambitiously brought out its first 3-D title, Lew Landers’ minor noir classic, “Man in the Dark” (1953).
Reputedly shot in just 11 days (other sources say 19) to beat Warners’ “House of Wax” (by 48 hours) into theaters for bragging rights as the first 3-D film from a major studio, “Man in the Dark” is a noir-ified remake of the 1936 Ralph Bellamy vehicle “The Man Who Lived Twice.”
This time around, noir icon Edmond O’Brien plays the gang leader who undergoes an experimental operation to remove his criminal tendencies. It’s a success — but not to his former criminal associates who want to know where he hid $130,000 from a heist. Ditto an insurance company investigator.
With the help of erstwhile moll Audrey Totter, another noir mainstay, he tries to find the loot. The trail leads to a packed California amusement park (which is oddly decorated for Christmas) and an exciting climax involving a roller coaster.
Shot in black-and-white using a pair of cameras lashed together (rather than the fancy mirrors used for “Bwana Devil”), the 3-D effects are sharp and highly effective — especially when O’Brien drops feet-first toward the camera lens from a great height.
The Twilight Time transfer of this highly entertaining, fast-paced 67-minute thriller is razor sharp with deep blacks and greys. Julie Kirgo provides her usual perceptive liner notes for “Man in the Dark,” and a 2-D Blu-ray with the title is also included in this much welcome package.
“The Belle of Broadway”
Sony continues to release some super-deep-catalogue titles through its manufacture on demand line, the Sony Choice Collection. One of the more intriguing recent releases is a rare Columbia Pictures silent, “The Belle of Broadway” (1928).
The title is something of a misnomer for a charming comedy about a once-celebrated Parisian actress (Edith Yorke) on her uppers who, at an elderly-looking 60, asks a 25-year-old maid (Betty Compson, who also plays Yorke’s character in the prologue) to impersonate a “rejuvenated” version of her 40-year-old self. Who falls in love with the now-grown son (Herbert Rawlinson) she lost through a long-ago romantic indiscretion.
Director Harry O. Hoyt (“The Lost World”) spins a charming and witty hour out of this preposterous premise. This rare film was restored from a tinted nitrate print and this release features a sprightly new score by Christopher Calliendo.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ “Five Fingers,” a classic World War II thriller starring James Mason and Danielle Darrieux, is finally making its DVD debut this month. Other titles coming from the Fox Cinema Archives manufacture-on-demand program include Otto Preminger’s rarely-seen “Love at Work” with Ann Sothern and Jack Haley; “Margin for Error,” teaming Milton Berle and Preminger; “Mother Wore Tights” starring Bette Grable, “The Great Profile” with John Barrymore; the sports biopics “Pride of St. Louis” with Dan Dailey and “Follow the Sun” starring Glenn Ford, “Sing Baby Sing” with Alice Faye and Adolphe Menjou; “Home in Indiana” starring Lon McAllister and Jeanne Crain; and “Island in the Sky” — not the John Wayne film but a 1938 whodunnit programmer starring Michael Whalen and Gloria Stuart.
The Warner Archive Collection,which has already released a Fibber McGee and Molly double feature, a seventh volume of Monogram westerns with Johnny Mack Brown, Jimmy Wakely and Whip Wilson; and a nine-film Dr. Kildare collection starring Lew Ayres (including an unsold 1960 TV series pilot with Robert Redford) has a collection with a forgotten Allied Artists detective series starring westerns star Bill Elliott out Tuesday. Promised for Feb. 4 are Robert Wise’s “Mystery in Mexico” with William Lundigan and Ricardo Cortez, as well as “Brother Rat” (1938) and its 1940 sequel, “Brother Rat and a Baby.” Both films feature Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman, Wayne Morris, Priscilla Lane, Eddie Albert and Jane Bryan.
On the Blu-ray front, Flicker Alley has scheduled “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1923) with Lon Chaney Sr. for March 22. A 75 th anniversary high-definition upgrade for George Cukor’s “The Women” (1939) starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell is due from Warner Home Video on June 6.