Discussion: The Lady from Shanghai

After Sunday afternoon Noirvember screenings, join Northeastern professor Nathan Blake in the Education and Community Engagement Center to discuss the film, the genre, and the gender tropes it defined and defied.

ABOUT the Lady from shanghai

Orson Welles’s puzzle-box noir scrambles the conventions of the genre to create a triumph of Hollywood surrealism. The director stars as an unwitting Irish sailor who finds himself drawn into a web of treachery when he takes a job as a crewman on the yacht of a famed lawyer (Everett Sloane) and his bombshell wife (a blonde Rita Hayworth, whose marriage to Welles dissolved shortly after filming). The famously byzantine plot—a tangle of head-spinning twists and double crosses—takes a back seat to the shadow-etched visuals, bravura set pieces (including iconic hall-of-mirrors shoot-out), and dreamlike mood.

ABOUT NATHAN BLAKE

Nathan Blake is a Teaching Professor in the Media and Screen Studies Program at Northeastern University. He teaches courses on film theory and analysis, genre films, American culture, and digital media. With publications on combat simulations and motion capture alongside the visual rhetoric of disabled veterans and athletes, he is currently developing work on ecocinema and the posthuman.