Spider-Noir Season 1 Finale Pays Tribute To A Classic Orson Welles Movie

Sony Pictures Television

Spoilers for "Spider-Noir" Season 1 Episode 8 "The Man in the Mask" follow.

Whether you watch "Spider-Noir" in full color or black and white, the influence of the black-and-white movies of 1940s Hollywood is undeniable. (It's called "Spider-Noir" after all.) The show's cast even includes Jack Huston, grandson of John Huston, the director of several classic film noirs including the Humphrey Bogart-led classics "The Maltese Falcon" and "Key Largo." The show's influences don't end there.

In the season finale "The Man in the Mask," lounge singer Felicia "Cat" Hardy (Li Jun Li) confronts mob boss Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), who once jealously had her fiancé murdered. Cat has spent "Spider-Noir" trying to murder Silvermane in return, and she succeeds. However, the scene is no simple gunfight; it unfolds in a hall of mirrors. Several reflected duplicates of Cat and Silvermane appear onscreen simultaneously, and it's practically impossible to tell which is the real one. When they eventually fire their guns, the mirrors break one by one, and Cat gets lucky by nailing Silvermane.

Cinephiles might recognize this scene as cribbed from Orson Welles' 1947 "The Lady from Shanghai." It's one of the best films Orson Welles directed, and he also plays the lead character Michael O'Hara (not the "hero," as O'Hara tells us in narration). 

O'Hara is infatuated with the rich and beautiful Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth, then married to Welles). Hired as a sailor by her husband Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), Michael is drawn into a tangled murder plot as the fall guy. The movie's closing moments take place in a hall of mirrors, where Michael, Elsa, and Arthur confront each other after all the secrets have been unveiled. "The Lady from Shanghai" also culminates in a shoot-out that shatters the mirrors and leaves only one person standing.

Columbia Pictures

To put multiple close-ups onscreen at once, "The Lady from Shanghai" mirror scene uses not only the actors' real reflections, but also double exposure. (That's a process of capturing two images on the same film stock, so that the second image appears to be superimposed upon the first.)

Columbia Pictures

Like "Spider-Noir," "The Lady from Shanghai" also culminates in a shoot-out that shatters the mirrors — with several shots of broken reflections on cracked mirrors — and leaves only one person standing.

This wasn't the first time Orson Welles played around with mirrors and reflections onscreen. There's a famous shot near the end of "Citizen Kane" when Kane (Welles) walks past opposing mirrors, creating reflections of Kane ad infinitum. It complements the movie's theme of Kane's acquaintances having different views of him, and people trying to grasp who he was through those fractured perceptions.

RKO

Would Welles appreciate the "Spider-Noir" homage to "The Lady from Shanghai," though? During a public appearance in France in 1982, Welles sharply criticized filmmakers more interested in films than life itself:

"The more virgin our eyes are, the more we have to say. The most detestable habit in all modern cinema is the homage. I don't want to see another goddamn homage in anybody's movie. There are enough of them which are unconscious."

Then again, Welles subsequently stressed that "of course you must see films, and you must see great films." Knowing Welles and his supreme self-confidence (you can't be arrogant if the pride is warranted!), he'd probably be unsurprised that modern filmmakers now count his own pictures among the "great films" to pay homage to.

"Spider-Noir" Season 1 is streaming on Prime Video.