The Lady from Shanghai · reception & legacy
1947 · Orson Welles
How The Lady from Shanghai has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Columbia boss Harry Cohn hated it, the studio recut it drastically, and it flopped on release in 1948 — critics were baffled and it reportedly lost money. Today it's canonised as one of the great film noirs, its hall-of-mirrors finale taught in every film school.
What's debated
The eternal debate: is it a mutilated masterpiece butchered by the studio, or a gloriously incoherent mess that Welles's dodgy Irish brogue only makes stranger — and does the incoherence actually help it?
Its footprint
The shattered hall-of-mirrors shootout is one of cinema's most imitated images, echoed everywhere from Enter the Dragon to The Man with the Golden Gun to John Wick: Chapter 2.
Where it stands
Bedrock noir canon and essential Welles — the 'flawed masterpiece' every cinephile is expected to have an opinion on.