“A magnificent mess of switchbacks and revelations, climaxing with one of cinema’s most outrageously inventive sequences.”
Accusations of infidelities – followed by actual infidelities on both sides – had caused Orson Welles and his then wife-of-three-years, Rita Hayworth, to become estranged by 1946. A year later Welles cast Hayworth as a femme fatale playing opposite himself in this brilliantly odd film noir. And while this casting may have looked good on paper (and indeed, on the screen) it did little to help their marriage and the couple divorced in 1947. Whether Welles’s perverse decision to order Hayworth to cut off her trademark long red hair and dye it blonde had anything to do with this we may never know. But it probably didn’t help.
