Coffee and Noir: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
every instance of coffee in noir: 038
You learn a lot about a noir character by their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?
I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.
Coffee’s first appearance in the film is as a rich man’s prop: Arthur Bannister pointedly has a maid bring him coffee as a status symbol. (and boy do they light and angle to make him look like the bastard he is while doing it!)
Soon after, Welles’s O'Hara descends into the galley and asks Bessie why she keeps working for Bannister. Surrounded by coffee carafes and all the other utensils she cooks with, serves from, and washes all day, she bitterly notes she has no other choice.
Then coffee shifts from symbol to ‘something for a guy to do while plot happens.’
Right before Grisby double-crosses O’Hara, he asks O’Hara to make coffee . . .
which O’Hara is drinking when he hears gunshots.
The rest of the film gets more convoluted from there, and we’ll never know how many more instances were in Welles’s long-lost 2.5 hour cut, but coffee’s two short appearances are both involved in particularly noirish ways.