DVD of the Week: The Lady from Shanghai

When Orson Welles directed, wrote, and starred in “The Lady from Shanghai” (which I discuss in the clip above), he was thirty-two years old, and the character he played, Michael O’Hara, an Irish seaman and aspiring writer, played no older. Yet the movie and his performance have the retrospective air of rueful age. The key theme in Welles’s work is regret, lost opportunities, near-misses, fearsome or poignant falls, lives turned into ruins of past glories and shadows of earlier strength. He accomplished so much so soon (making “Citizen Kane” at age twenty-five, by which time he was already, thanks to radio, an international sensation), yet he seems to have spent his headlong rush of a life looking back to the fork in the path and bemoaning the road not taken. Whatever it took to clash on the world stage with the monsters of media, he paid for, with a Mephistophelian price. Welles’s hyperbolic yet wistful voice-over in “The Lady from Shanghai” leaves a hint that its protagonist will go on to write his book; it doesn’t suggest that he’ll end up very happy. On the radio the other day, talking with the critic David Thomson and the host Kerri Miller, of Minnesota NPR, about “Citizen Kane,” I offered the reason for its enduring, and likely invulnerable, pre-eminence in the history of the cinema: it’s the movie where the director came out from behind the curtain and made himself the ubiquitous master of ceremonies for the unfolding action. It turned out, for Welles, to be a position of terrible vulnerability, and “The Lady from Shanghai” suggests, among other things, just how badly he had already been burned during his time in the sun.