The film is based on a novel written by Sherwood King. It is about an Irish-American sailor rescuing a beautiful woman from muggers in Central Park. He falls in love with her so he does not that he is related to a insurance plot.
The climax, a shootout in a funhouse hall of mirrors, is one of the bravura sequences in all film, a triumph of hey-look-at-me form over just-the-facts content.
For all the violations it suffered, The Lady From Shanghai seems strangely coherent in its extant form -- or rather, coherently incoherent, and in a way that seems quite deliberate.
Welles and Hayworth were married at the time; he gives her closeups of unmatched rapture even while allegorizing his own fate as a free spirit caught in the trap of Hollywood's delusional pleasure dome.
The film is as tangled and ingenious as any of Welles's conjuring tricks. The shoot-out in the hall of mirrors is the most famous sequence, but there are other moments just as memorable.
