Imagine a noir picnic at which you tell your hosts a shark-feeding-frenzy story. That’s Orson Welles’ idea of dark times in The Lady from Shanghai. Imagine, too, that the story told by Michael O’Hara is intended as an allusion to his host and entourage, among whom every relationship thrives on barbarity.
Listening to the the story of the shark frenzy.
The picnic takes place in Acapulco. Hosts Elsa Bannister and Arthur Bannister lead the way to a beach picnic in Acapulco that begins in the bright light of day and ends in a dark palapa lighted by torches.
The food is not mentioned. But as O’Hara relates his story, conversation ceases: Do you know, he says, once, off the hump of Brazil, I saw the ocean so darkened with blood it was black, and the sun fainting away over the lip of the sky. We’d put in at Fortaleza and a few of us had lines out for a bit of idle fishing. It was me had the first strike. A shark it was. Then there was another. And another shark again. Till all about, the sea was made of sharks and more sharks still. And no water at all. My shark had torn himself from the hook and the scent or maybe the stain it was, and him bleeding his life away drove the rest of them mad. Then the beasts took to eating each other. In their frenzy, they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes. And you could smell the death reeking up out of the sea. I never saw anything worse until this little picnic tonight. And you know there wasn’t one of them sharks in the whole crazy pack that survived. And with that, O’Hara leaves.
The cast: Orson Welles as Michael O’Hara; Rita Haworth Elsa Bannister; Everett Sloan as Arthur Bannister*
See Orson Welles. The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Directed and screenplay by Orson Welles; Sherwood King. If I Die Before I Wake: The Book of the Film (1938. Rpt. New York: Penguin, 2010). Welles’ screenplay is a free adaptation of Sherwood King’s pulp novel If I Die Before I Wake: The Book of the Film (1938). Welles’ other noir picnic is in Citizen Kane.