The Lady from Shanghai was inimitably Welles, but Harry Cohn hated Welles’ visual style and intricate plot, reshooting and recutting the film to an early box office grave. The restaurant that Mildred starts is a money maker and, with the help of business manager Wally Fay (Jack Carson) Mildred opens a chain of eateries and can give Veda all she wants, until into their life comes Beragon, a formerly wealthy playboy who married Mildred. White Heat is not a prototypical noir film of the time, but more of a gritty gangster film with noir elements. Although Key Largo has a sense of optimism at the end that is unusual for a film noir, it has the bleak tone and problematic characters that are typical of the genre.
Most of these early film noir are told in flashback with voice over and are shot with many night scenes featuring high contrast lighting, dark shadows and odd camera angles. Still, The Lady from Shanghai has survived as a triumph of Welles rare vision, and is one of the most stylistic and unique film noir of all time. Because there are very good noir films that come out of the fifties, we’ve included some. Like The Woman in the Window, Laura features a protagonist under the spell of a beautiful women in a portrait; in this case it is Police Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews).
As McPherson investigates the crime and questions the suspects, he becomes more and more obsessed with Laura until Waldo accuses him of falling in love with the dead woman. Welles used images of shattering glass and distorted mirrors to reflect the tragic, destructive relationships between the three characters. It is a term coined in French, meaning literally ‘black film’ that is used to define a genre, or possibly just a subset of the genre of the thriller. We won’t give up more of the plot, but suffice it to say that Gilda, with its sense of brooding hatred, distrust of beautiful woman and double crossing of friends and associates, has all of the elements of a classic film noir. Welles dyed his wife’s red hair blonde for the film and her mysterious portrayal of Elsa has become one of the best known femme fatale of film noir.
The protagonists of these film are men who are often in love with and yet betrayed by beautiful women and they often face the choice between a fair haired ‘good’ woman and a dark haired, sultry ‘femme fatale’ who is likely to lead them astray down the wrong path (which is the path that they take, for the most part). One night in Laura’s apartment, McPherson drinks himself into a stupor while looking at Laura’s portrait only to fall asleep and wake up to…surprise! Audrey Totter, the radio actress who became a silver screen star by playing femme fatales in 1940s film noir including "Lady in the Lake," has died.
When The Stranger was a box office success, Harry Cohn gave Welles a chance to direct his wife, Rita Hayworth, in The Lady from Shanghai, and Welles produced one of the most unique and interesting film noir, albeit one with an incredibly convoluted and complicated plot. When Joan Crawford left MGM and came to Warners, this was her initial outing as star (Bette Davis famously turned down the part before her) and it was an enormous success. White Heat has two memorable scenes, one in the prison dining hall when Cody freaks out after hearing the news that his mother has died and the second the film’s finale, a big shoot out at a chemical plant. Film noir thrived predominantly in Hollywood crime films in the early post World War II years, as men were returning from the military to their lives at home, and it expresses the anxiety that many men felt about being displaced as workers, boyfriends, husbands and fathers during wartime.
Directed by Raoul Walsh, the film features memorable performances by Cagney and noir regular Edmund O’Brien.Another veteran of 1930’s gangster films, Edward G. Robinson, was featured in Key Largo along with Humphrey Bogart, one of the definitive noir actors, and Lauren Bacall. See The Woman in the Window and its twin brother Scarlet Street (released a year later, also directed by Lang, starring Robinson, Bennett and Duryea) to find out. Reed and Wanley bury the body in the country but leave a number of incriminating clues, some of which come to light when Wanley is called in to consult on the crime by his D.A. On entering the club, Wanley has seen a portrait of a beautiful woman, Alice Reed, in the window of a nearby building and after his dinner he happens to meet Reed on the street and goes back to her apartment. When hard working Mildred (Crawford) divorces her first husband Bert Pierce (Bruce Bennett), she is determined to make a success of herself for her daughter Veda, who seems to want all the best things in life. Bogart is Frank McLoud, recent combat veteran who stops in at the Key Largo hotel of James Temple (Lionel Barrymore) and his daughter-in-law Nora (Bacall), widow of an army friend of Frank’s. Into Reed’s apartment bursts her rich and jealous lover, Claude Mazard and after a brief struggle with Wanley, Mazard is killed. Staying at the hotel is Johnny Rocco (Robinson), a gangster exiled to Cuba for the past few years, who is holed up with his gang waiting to make contact with some criminal associates. With the law closing in, Rocco forces Frank to pilot a boat to take Rocco and his gang back to Cuba. Surrounded by police atop one of the chemical tankers, Cody goes insane screaming “Top of the world, Ma!” as he blows himself up.
As with most of the films of this era, the story is told by Welles in flashback with a voice over. Michael, Elsa and Bannister end up in an amusement park ‘hall of mirrors’ for a final shootout and it became one of the most well known sequences in American film. Rocco holds the Temples and McCloud as virtual prisoners in the hotel after killing a police officer during a violent hurricane, at one point humiliating Frank as well as his alcoholic former girlfriend, Gaye Dawn (Clair Trevor).