Stage Irish in Orson Welles’ case is lousy Irish.
I again tried to watch The Lady From Shanghai.
Best I could do was to fight off sleep.
His blarney is baloney.
The sheer staginess obstructs the narrative, makes the film static and near to unwatchable.
The story is way too complicated and isn’t revealed in action so much as in set piece speeches, especially at the end.
Welles as actor and director exhausts me and frustrates my patience both in this movie, and, heretical as it may be, philistine as I may be, in Citizen Kane.
Give me Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca with Bogie et al, even with its schmaltzy ending, any day.
Its effects are filmic not static, the opposite of a weird, stagey bore.
It pops all the way through.
In my humble opinion.
The End
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