The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray Movie Review

You know the drill. Orson Welles will probably forever be consigned to the role of wunderkind, the young genius who supposedly burnt out (or at least burned bridges) after making Citizen Kane. If one were actually foolish to dismiss Welles' post-Kane filmography, that would mean missing an awful lot of interesting if sometimes flawed offerings, and certainly high on that particular list would be the 1947 noir The Lady from Shanghai, Welles’ only film with his erstwhile wife Rita Hayworth. In what many will probably see as a welcome development, Mill Creek has released a new Blu-ray sourced off of the same 4K restoration done by Sony and released previously by TCM Vault (twice, in fact), one with a cheaper price point and new, higher bitrate encode, as well as lossless audio, if admittedly no supplemental material.

The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Lady from Shanghai is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Mill Creek with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. For some overall comments on the provenance of this master as well as inherent issues like opticals, I refer you once again to my The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray review. This new Mill Creek release is sourced off the same 4K restoration handled by Grover Crisp and his ace team at Sony that served as the basis for both the first TCM Release, encoded via VC-1 at fairly anemic bitrates, as well as a later TCM reissue, encoded with AVC at signficantly higher bitrates. With just the feature taking up real estate on this single layer BD, bitrates quite often outpace even the improved rates of the TCM re-release, though there are expected peaks and valleys. While the TCM re-release tended toward the low to mid 20 Mbps range, this new release often tops 30 Mbps and even pushes toward 40 Mbps on occasion. While that may account for at least some of this new release's improved clarity and better grain resolution, there's also a notably brighter overall look on display in this new release. It's incremental enough to be easily noticeable but (to my eyes, at least), not significant enough to seriously hamper the film's brilliant chiaroscuro lighting schemes. In fact, the brighter ambience actually gives at least minimally better shadow detail, without looking forced, in moments like the aquarium sequence, and black levels are still impressively deep. A lot of people felt the TCM reissue was decidedly too dark, and those people especially should be appreciative of the overall brightness of this release.

The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Lady from Shanghai features a fairly robust sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono mix which can't quite overcome some inherent limitations of the source stems. Ironically it's Heinz Roemheld's contentious score that fares the best, with good clarity in some of the overwrought cues. There's noticeable ambient difference in Welles' voiceover narration and the bulk of the film's dialogue, but aside from a certain era appropriate boxiness, there's nothing serious to worry about.

The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements on this Blu-ray disc.

The Lady from Shanghai Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Lady from Shanghai is a wonderfully florid, almost hypnotic, film experience. That said, there's also some "meta" content here which is beset by a certain melancholy, knowing that Welles was once again colliding head on with a Hollywood which never really fully understood him. You can almost feel Welles more or less grabbing the studio system by its lapels and shaking it violently throughout the film, and that provides a viscerally intense analogy, especially once Welles' character of Mike O'Hara starts circling the drain. This new Mill Creek Blu-ray presentation is the brightest of the bunch we've seen, but not problematically so in my estimation. This version also features better clarity and a finer, more naturally resolving, grain field. If you haven't yet bought a version of The Lady from Shanghai and don't mind a lack of supplements, this is the version to get. Even those who sprang for either/both of the TCM versions may want to consider adding this to their collection, perhaps considering the price of the TCM version(s) the cost of admission for the supplements those offered. Recommended.