When the monsters come in multiples.
The Lady From Shanghai (1947) examines how the drives of mankind become curiously perverted once we’re disconnected from our most basic needs. We meet Michael O’Hara, may be a master seaman, but is mastered by his impulses himself, whether they be liquid or hormonal. He knows it, yet he often cannot stop himself.
And Elsa Bannister is an impulse, a living, breathing creature of the upper crust, curvy in all the right places, in subtle distress of one sort or another. And, cooling Michael’s ardor, she’s married. She offers him a working position on her yacht, which is to sail from New York City to San Francisco via the Panama Canal, with other offers perhaps a little more veiled, but O’Hara, despite his impulse problems, turns her down. But when her husband, polio stricken (or perhaps some other malignant problem) defense lawyer Arthur Bannister, best and richest defense lawyer in the business, reinforces the offer, he finds himself setting sail with them.
Along for the ride is George Grisby, Arthur’s partner in their law firm, and despised by Arthur as well. Arthur might as well be the Old Man of the Sea, whom mythical Sinbad carried on his shoulders until he could persuade him to drink too much and, once freed of the now insensible old man/god, killed him. Grisby endures the abuse, a smile creasing his face, while slowly wooing O’Hara through obtuse remarks during the passage.
And Elsa? She slowly lets it be known that she once worked in Shanghai as a dancer, poor and desperate, and now that she’s not poor, she’s still desperate to keep the wealth, if not the provider.
That being the inscrutable Arthur Bannister.
The story really revs up when Grisby finally brings his plan to O’Hara, who shall play the key role: pretending to kill Grisby. While Grisby disappears to an island, evading wife and taxes, O’Hara will be unimpeachable because of the lack of a body. It will have been lost in the California surf.
But there’s a joker in the deck, a private eye, by the name of Broome, in the crew, hired by Arthur to keep an eye on his wife and O’Hara. When Grisby is surprised by Broome as he prepares for the faux-crime, he shoots Broome and leaves him for dead. But Broome manages to warn Elsa, who, in a discussion with O’Hara, reveals a key lie.
Grisby has no wife.
Soon, we do have a body and a body, as it were, and then a trial, and soon Bannister, the lawyer, in defending O’Hara finds this trial is spiraling out of even his legendary control. Indeed, memorably Arthur Bannister gets to cross-examine a surprise witness – Arthur Bannister. And then … O’Hara disappears.
This tense thriller operates on a number of levels, but perhaps the most interesting is the perverted ways of the ultra-rich, especially in their desires. Elsa may be driven to never be poor again, but Arthur is really a spider at the middle of its web, Grisby in one bundle of silk, Elsa in another, and now O’Hara being wrapped up. Did his polio – presumed – embitter him? Or did it simply move his arena of competition from where it would normally operate to another arena, where people are just chess pieces?
All the characters have interesting backstories, but the most interesting are, wisely, merely hinted at. This brings what could have been an improbable story to life and makes it plausible, as the narcissism of virtually everyone in the upper-crust reveals that their ultra-wealth has transformed them from human beings into …. something else.
And that something else is hideously unstable.
Recommended.
