THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI   1947. Directed by Orson Welles. 88 minutes. In English.
Once the film was shot the studios took it away and hacked it to pieces against the director's wishes. The story is therefore like a broken mirror, which fit with Orson Welles's original vision, but also because he had to make do with less footage. This lovely flick is stylized like a noir-thriller with expressionistic shadows, chiaroscuro lighting schemes and wild camera angles.

One of the crucial masterpieces of the legendary Orson Welles, who not only directs but also takes on the lead role. An Irish sailor named Michael O'Hara rescues a beautiful blonde (Rita Hayworth) from being robbed by some muggers, and this chance meeting sends him on a cryptically weird journey that involves double dealings and sinister plot twists, murder, a femme fatale and an absolutely delirious climax.

It was typical Hollywood behavior to cut out half the material a director had shot, and something they did to all of Orson Welles's flicks starting from his second movie. The result is a brooding, complex, disjoint, broken, camp, deranged experience. It's both hypnotic and melancholic. The story is so wild and crazed that it hits you like a whirlwind that you can't piece together.

Welles had burnt his bridges in Hollywood so he got no support from there, and films like this one were too inventive for the American public. Although the film was never given a chance in his home country, it was very much praised here in Europe. Today it is considered to be one of the director's gems, and some of its key sequences would go on to influence John Woo, Jacques Rivette, The Simpsons, Jim Jarmusch, Sergio Leone and Bruce Lee.

This will be a high-definition projection