High Contrast Cinema ends its Femme Fatale season with Orson Welles' fourth film as a Hollywood drector, The Lady From Shanghai (1947).

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Welles plays a sailor who becomes entangled in a web of murder and deceit after a rich couple employs him to work on their yacht.

 

Although the director bemoaned studio interference (a common complaint with everything that followed his debut, Citizen Kane), it remains one the highlights of his filmography, featuring a bleach-blonde Rita Hayworth as the dangerously seductive femme fatale and an iconic hall-of-mirrors sequence that has been imitated repeatedly across the decades.