Whenever Orson Welles starts his fertile mind working on a picture, the result is going to be, to put it mildly, out of the ordinary. Welles wrote, produced, directed, and took the lead role in "The Lady from Shanghai," which has a more complex plot than did "The Big Sleep" a few years back, and which gets Welles into more unusual situations than Bugs Bunny ever dreamed of.

Not that the movie has any similarity to a Bugs Bunny flick. As a naive Irish seaman, Welles becomes involved with as sinister a party of rich people as ever paced the deek of a pleasure yacht. Working for them on a trip to the Tropics, he falls in love with Rita Hayworth, the wife of "the most successful criminal lawyer in the country." In order to make enough money to take her away with him, he gets mixed up in a setup murder that is as bewildering to the audience as it is to Welles.

The climax of the movie comes with what is perhaps the best trial scene ever done in the movies, and with an escape that takes the hero to a Chinese play and a deserted amusement park crazy house There, in the hall of mirrors, Rita and her hubby shoot it out, shattering a lot of glass before touching each other. Certainly, for imagination and advantageous use of the camera, "The Lady from Shanghai" is unsurpassable.

Miss Hayworth, who naturally plays the title role, picks convenient moments to dive off rocks, kiss Orson Welles, and just lie around looking dewy-eyed and shapely, and she still finds time to do a satisfactory job of acting out her part in the story. Welles, as the philosophic Irishman, affects a brogue that is not objectionable, while Everett Sloan and Glen Anders, who play Hayworth's husband and his partner respectively, give excellent performances as two rather evil individuals.

The scenes in "The Lady from Shanghai," from New York to the West Indies to San Francisco, are all fresh as well as realistic, and the peculiar Welles touch is always there. The tortuonsness of the plot will provoke interest and armchair detective work rather than boredom, but it is important to make sure of the times and arrive at the beginning of the picture.