The Lady From Shanghai…Who Wasn’t…But Was

A little mystery here that maybe someone knows the answer to. I’ve been plugging the excellent Penguin Modern Classics (such as The Orwell Diaries, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the Mitford/Waugh Letters) and just recently read Sherwood King’s If I Die Before I Wake, an American noir classic written in 1938.  If I Die Before I Wake formed the basis for the Orson Welles-Rita Hayworth film The Lady From Shanghai (filmed in 1947 and released in 1948 – see the trailer here). Indeed the book features a great shot of Hayworth (uncharacteristically  blond rather than redheaded for the movie) smouldering on the cover. Now this is one of those cases where I’ve seen the film (several times over the years) before reading the book it was based on. The book makes no reference whatsoever to Shanghai. So I’m wondering how If I Die Before I Wake became The Lady from Shanghai?

Welles moved the action from New York estates and courtrooms to a yacht to heighten the tension a bit and some other changes were made on locations and some rather large plot details. But where did the Shanghai bit come from? At one point in the film verison Michael O’Hara(Orson Welles) a sailor vagabond type has a conversation with Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth). Speaking partly in the third-person, she tells him about her seedy past – she is a White Russian that she was born in Chefoo (now Yantai), on the China coast, where she was a prostitute (one of those legendary white flowers of the China coast a la Shanghai Lil and Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express):

Elsa: Her parents were Russian, white Russian. You never heard of the place where she comes from…Gamble? She’s done it for a living.
Michael: I’ll bet you a dollar I’ve been to the place where you were born.
Elsa: Chefoo.
Michael: It’s on the China coast. Chefoo. It’s the second wickedest city in the world.
Elsa: What’s the first?
Michael: Macao. Wouldn’t you say so?
Elsa: I would. I worked there…How do you rate Shanghai? I worked there too…You need more than luck in Shanghai.

Indeed you do!

But None of this is in the book. So who cooked that bit up and raised it to the level that it became the title of the movie? Welles is credited with the screenplay (and King with the original book) though, as far as I know, Welles had no particular bent for Shanghai or China. So where on earth did it creep in, especially when If I Die Before I Wake is a great title anyway? Answers anyone? theories? Did Shanghai simply signify wickedness and sin and so therefore take the audience’s minds straight to where Welles wanted them?

Until any answers are forthcoming this post is at least an excuse to stick up a Rita Hayworth picture (as if an excuse were really necessary)!