Orson Welles' shoots were always Homeric adventures, as cast and crew struggled to meet his obscure, brilliant visions while Orson himself struggled to keep one step ahead of his creditors, and just out of reach of apoplectic studio heads. The Lady From Shanghai, one of Welles' most brilliant works and one of the great American surrealist works of art, was as ill-starred as any of his films. Its production was marred by everything from costly retakes to death. Perhaps by some perverse Wellesian logic that accounted for its brilliance.

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shanghai.

Shooting was plagued with so many disasters and rancorous personal squabbles that The Lady from Shanghai seems more like a documentary of its own making than a fiction film. Much of the film was shot on location near Acapulco, aboard Errol Flynn's infamous yacht, Zaca, which Flynn maintained as a perpetual floating party. A drunken Flynn often captained the boat during shooting, and his rages and debaucheries put the film hugely behind schedule. When, on the first day of work on the Zaca, a camera assistant died of a heart attack, Flynn ordered the corpse sewn inside a duffel bag and buried at sea; quietly, the body was put ashore in Mexico and the incident hushed up. Then, one night, Welles was bitten by an exotic insect. His eye swelled up to three times its normal size, and he wailed from a bunk aboard the Zaca that he was surely going to die. Matters were complicated even further by the fact that Welles and Rita Hayworth's stormy marriage was on the rocks. Incapacitated by the heat and sinus problems, nervous about her radically changed appearance and role as a villainess, Rita still seemed hypnotized by Welles' fabulous vision, and to her credit, worked tirelessly on the film. The Lady from Shanghai was finally finished in the early spring of 1947, after further savage cutting by Cohn, including the fun house finale, which was dramatically reduced. Yet Cohn ordered the completed film shelved for nearly a year. When it was released, Columbia was as confused with the film's art house intricacies as RKO studios had been with Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons a few years previously. As RKO had done with Ambersons, Columbia allowed The Lady from Shanghai to languish on the bottom half of double bills, and it quickly slipped away, a hideous financial disaster for all concerned. Perhaps, as historian Frank Brady has suggested, this treatment was intentional; maybe a pained Cohn saw the parallels between the Michael-Elsa-Bannister triangle in the film and the Welles-Hayworth-Cohn armature in real life, and was instinctively reacting to paralyze his rival. Like the scorpion who stings the toad on whose back he is swimming, ensuring his own drowning, Cohn played his own part in the offscreen drama of The Lady from Shanghai only too well.

Kevin Jack Hagopian teaches African American literature and American studies at the University of Memphis. He is the former Editor of The Film Literature Index. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Journal of Communication, The Velvet Light Trap, Wide Angle, and other publications.