MOVIE REVIEW : A Wonderful and Peculiar ‘Lady From Shanghai’ : Orson Welles’ exploration of film noir is grimy, cynical and a lot of fun. The Newport Harbor Art Museum shows it tonight as part of a Welles retrospective.

“The Lady From Shanghai” (1948) is a grimy, cynical thriller but it’s also a lot of fun. Part of the kick: director Orson Welles’ obsession with star Rita Hayworth. They were married at the time, and it’s that clear he had the supernova hots for her.

Welles’ camera--always a simultaneously suggestive and revealing presence--fairly leers at his lovely actress. The lens dives in for close-ups, then moves off to trail over her pinup body. It vamps Hayworth and she vamps right back.

This fascination is a tad crazed (and amusing) but it keeps with tradition for film noir, the genre Welles was exploring here; film noir always has fixated on beautiful, dangerous dames. “The Lady From Shanghai” is being shown tonight at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

As Elsa Bannister, Hayworth first turns up riding in a carriage through New York’s Central Park, an angelic light illuminating her face. Welles, as “Black Irish” Michael O’Hara, strides up out of nowhere and their eyes meet. The adventurer is hooked immediately, and the two form a lusty pact that creates both heat and major headaches.

Elsa is married to Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), a wealthy lawyer with twisted legs (he scurries like a crab, with the help of two wickedly long canes) and a nasty heart. His partner is Grisby (Glenn Anders), a grinning loon with ulterior motives. Actually, everyone has ulterior motives in “The Lady From Shanghai,” and O’Hara gets caught between them.

Welles’ usual technical invention is everywhere, from the quick-jump editing and wide camera pans to the oddly compelling set designs. Some scenes are wonderful, some are merely peculiar. O’Hara’s trial scene is so stylized and false that it’s laughable; it’s as if Welles had never been in a courtroom before. And O’Hara, the film’s moral anchor, resorts to self-righteous speeches every now and then that are pretty silly.

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But Welles (who wrote the screenplay based on Sherwood King’s novel “If I Die Before I Wake”) deflates these orations just in time with some biting, last-minute lines from Bannister and Grisby, no-nonsense villains who cut through all the high-minded glop.

Besides, there’s the picture’s famous finale: O’Hara, Elsa and Bannister meeting up for a brutal confrontation in a boardwalk Hall of Mirrors. As recriminations and bullets fly everywhere, all the mirrors shatter. Welles being brilliant, that’s what it is.

The second of four films in the Newport Harbor’s Welles retrospective, “The Lady From Shanghai” will be introduced by Arthur Taussig, who teaches film classes at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa and writes a newsletter called “The Film Analyst.”

* Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai” is being shown tonight at 6:30 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. $5 ($3 for museum members, seniors and students). (714) 759-1122.