The Magic World of Orson Welles (2 page)

In the late 1980s I saw parts of three other unfinished or un-exhibited films by Welles:
Don Quixote, The Merchant of Venice
, and
The Dreamers
. I've subsequently also seen bits of
The Deep
, discussed in
chapter 10
, and some other films discussed below. Even when shots or sounds are missing or when optical transitions are marked with wax pencil, all of these films provide evidence of his undiminished intelligence and artistry.
Quixote
is especially impressive for its black-and-white, wide-angle perspectives of Spanish landscape and for the performances of two exceptional actors, Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff, who play Quixote and Sancho Panza. Welles narrates and frequently dubs his narrator's voice in place of the actors' so that nearly everything remains at the level of discourse rather than pure representation—a technique motivated by Welles's plan to frame the film with scenes of him reading the story to a young girl (originally played by Patty McCormack). Sometimes the actors directly address the camera/narrator in a style similar to the opening scenes of
The Magnificent Ambersons
, and they play scenes in contemporary settings; at one point, for
example, Sancho Panza gives Quixote a bath outdoors on a rooftop, and in the distance we see a neon sign advertising “Don Quixote Cerveza.” Throughout, Welles's identification with the aging knight and love for the beauty of preindustrial Spain is palpable. Probably he wants us to see the film and his entire career as a quixotic adventure. Unfortunately, his
Quixote
will always remain incomplete. In 1992 Spanish director Jesus Franco assembled a feature-length version of the film by mixing Welles's footage with completely different material from a 1961 documentary Welles had shot in Spain. Franco's film is currently available on YouTube but is an unattractive and unreliable guide to Welles's intentions.

Also from the last years of Welles's life were two screenplays that were posthumously published. The first of these,
The Big Brass Ring
, cowritten by Welles and his late-life companion, Oja Kodar, concerns Democratic senator and presidential candidate Blake Pellarin, who tracks down his aging, disgraced Harvard mentor and arranges a secret meeting with him in Spain. Described by Welles as a “terrible love story between two men,”
The Big Brass Ring
is also a hallucinated political allegory with echoes of
Heart of Darkness
and
Citizen Kane
, climaxing with revelations of the senator's conflicted sexuality and murderous instincts. (In 1997 George Hickenlooper and F. X. Feeney freely adapted
The Big Brass Ring
for a Showtime TV movie directed by Hickenlooper, but the locale was changed from Spain to St. Louis, and the senator's mistress was transformed into his long-lost brother.)

Like most of Welles's films,
The Big Brass Ring
contains a number of autobiographical references, but the second of the published screenplays,
The Cradle Will Rock
, is completely autobiographical, recounting the events leading up to the twenty-two-year-old Welles's 1937 staging of a famous WPA-sponsored “labor opera” by Marc Blitzstein. On its opening day this production was locked out of its scheduled theater by federal agents and given an improvised performance by the cast and crew, who took the audience with them as they marched down the street to another venue. Ring Lardner Jr. had been the initial writer for the film, which was originally titled
Rocking the Cradle
. When Welles was offered the chance to direct, he completely rewrote Lardner's script, making himself a central rather than minor character. But his screenplay never found financing. In 1999 Tim Robbins wrote and directed a quite different film version of
The Cradle Will Rock
that is not only historically inaccurate but also turns Welles into a minor, unsympathetic figure concerned chiefly with his star reputation.

In addition to Welles's late projects, I should mention in passing some of the growing body of critical and biographical literature that has appeared
since the last edition of this book. Of particular importance are Michael Anderegg's volume on Welles, Shakespeare, and popular culture; Alberto Anile's discussion of Welles's years in Italy; Catherine Benamou's study of
It's All True
; Jean-Pierre Berthome and François Thomas's two books,
Citizen Kane
and
Orson Welles at Work
; the two volumes of Simon Callow's projected three-volume biography of Welles; Youssef Ishaghpour's three-volume critical study; Joseph McBride's commentary on Welles's late career; Patrick McGilligan's biography of young Welles; Jonathan Rosenbaum's book of essays on Welles; and the Welles-Bogdanovich interviews in
This Is Orson Welles
, edited by Rosenbaum and appended with his invaluable data on Welles's career. Full information about these and other important works can be found in the bibliography to this edition. We may never discover everything Welles did as an artist, but scholarship in the last two decades has brought us much closer to a full appreciation of his work.

At his death, Welles had long been considered “un-bankable” by Hollywood, but, as I have indicated, he never ceased to write and direct. A good deal of his miscellaneous film and TV production, in various stages of completion, has been discussed and nicely illustrated in
The Unknown Orson Welles
, a monograph edited by Stefan Drössler of the Munich Film Museum. (See also
Orson Welles: One-Man Band
, an 88-minute documentary on the unfinished films, which is included as an extra on the Criterion edition of
F for Fake
.) For three decades Welles financed his work in the haphazard but heroic manner of
Othello
, the brilliant Shakespeare adaptation he produced and directed in Italy and North Africa in the early 1950s. Often he used earnings from his acting jobs to subsidize his films, or he found backers whose support was fleeting. This method resulted in one of his masterworks,
Chimes at Midnight
, but it delayed
Don Quixote
far beyond hope of finishing and had frustrating or absurdist consequences for several other films, including his color production of
The Merchant of Venice
, which was completed but never exhibited. His last major film,
The Other Side of the Wind
(discussed in
chapter 10
), occupied fifteen years of his life and remained incompletely edited when he died, largely because his French-based Iranian producer, Astrophore Films, kept him waiting interminably for “end money.” In 1977 Welles wrote an eleven-page letter to Medhi Bouscheri, the president of Astrophore, lamenting the fact that a few clips from
The Other Side of the Wind
had been shown for the AFI Life Award TV broadcast honoring Welles. The completed film was “‘eagerly looked forward to'” by the film community but had failed to appear. “‘And for me, personally,'” he wrote, “‘that failure has been mortal. As a director, my reputation by now appears to have been
blackened beyond reparation'” (quoted by James Pepper, introduction to
The Cradle Will Rock
, 8). After the Iranian revolution and Welles's death,
The Other Side of the Wind
was subject to protracted legal negotiations between the Iranians, Oja Kodar, and Welles's daughter Beatrice, who, although he had three children, claimed to be his sole heir. Then on October 29, 2014, very close to Halloween (often a lucky day for Welles), a front-page story in the
New York Times
announced that a Los Angeles production company, Royal Road Films, had cleared the legal hurdles and liberated the 1,083 feet of the film from a Paris warehouse. The producers, aided by Peter Bogdanovich, who acted in
The Other Side of the Wind
, intend to release the film in 2015, the centennial year of Welles's birth.

As I write the introduction to this third edition of
The Magic World of Orson Welles
, the centennial is approaching, scheduled to be celebrated by retrospectives, conferences, and memorial events at New York's Film Forum, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and the city of Woodstock, Illinois, where Welles attended school as a boy. Chuck Workman's documentary
Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
had its first theatrical run in late 2014 and will appear in many venues during the centennial. The revision and expansion of my book has been prompted by these events. If I were writing it entirely anew, it would no doubt turn out differently in some ways. (At the very least, the title would be different; the one it has, which sounds to me like an old Mantovani record album, was Oxford's idea—I proposed
Bright Lucifer
, but Oxford vetoed anything that might require a subtitle.) I nevertheless agree substantially with what I first wrote. I've been content to make several corrections and additions to the main text and to compose this introduction, which offers new information, expands on some major themes, and comments on Welles's career from a twenty-first-century perspective.

In addition to its close stylistic analysis of the films, one aspect of my book that most pleases me is its discussion of politics, which had not been emphasized in earlier writings about Welles. His political attitudes were complex and, like most people's, contradictory. As I've tried to show, he was a social progressive but also a critic of modernity—an artist who commanded the twentieth century's new media but who was romantically nostalgic for the past. He was a champion of equality for blacks and Latinos, but where women were concerned he was sometimes retrograde. His mother was an outspoken leader of the suffragist movement, and he became the father of three daughters, yet he was a womanizer who in the 1950s told French writer Maurice
Bessy, “‘I hate women, but I need them. . . . Women block all conversation. That dates from the day they won the right to vote. They should have stayed slaves'” (quoted in Bessy,
Orson Welles
, 71).

Welles was nevertheless an important public spokesman for the left in the 1930s and '40s, and it is significant that he became an émigré from the United States during the Cold War. It now seems much clearer to me than when I first wrote this book that his departure was motivated not only by Hollywood's dislike of his films but also by the political climate in the country at large. He had enjoyed his most dazzling success in the Roosevelt years, and the seven pictures he directed in Hollywood between 1941 and 1950 (one of them the incomplete
It's All True
) were an outgrowth of his Popular Front activities in the previous decade. The decline of his Hollywood fortunes was obviously related to his unorthodox film style, his so-called highbrow interests, and his need to remain independent, but these problems were exacerbated by the death of Roosevelt and the postwar reemergence of the American right wing. Beginning as early as
Citizen Kane
and continuing until 1956, Welles was closely observed by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which compiled roughly two hundred pages of reports about him. For nearly ten years FBI operatives tracked his political activities, personal finances, and love life, following up tips from industry insiders, the American Legion, isolated crackpots, and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, who worked for the Hearst press. In 1945, near the outset of a Red Scare that would influence Hollywood for the next decade, the FBI designated him a Communist and a “threat to the internal security” of the nation (see Naremore, “The Trial: The FBI vs. Orson Welles,” and Naremore,
Invention without a Future
, 201–204).

As the war came to an end, a purge of American leftists was in the offing. Welles had campaigned for FDR's fourth term, and over the next few years he would become involved in the newly formed United Nations and Louis Dolivet's Free World Society, meanwhile writing a syndicated, increasingly political column for the
New York Post
. But by the early 1950s, as the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and the McCarthy era dawned, and at about the time when Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey became expatriate directors, Welles was in Italy and North Africa making
Othello
. At this point an anonymous informant sent the FBI a photo of Welles dining with Palmiro Togliatti, the legendary head of the Italian Communist Party, along with a message in French saying that the photo ought to be brought to the attention of the State Department with the aim of having Welles “brought before a court in charge of prosecuting actors suspected of Un-American activities and perhaps even excluded from Hollywood.” But the investigating
agent concluded that Welles was being “bled white” financially, had never actually been a member of the Communist Party, and was no longer any particular threat.

Welles did not return to America for a significant length of time for almost a decade. In 1953 he was briefly in New York to act in Peter Brooks's TV version of
King Lear
(he also played Lear on stage, seated in a wheelchair because of a broken leg), and in the late 1950s he returned to the United States for a longer period, performing a magic act in Las Vegas; making guest appearances on TV; filming a TV pilot (“The Fountain of Youth”); and writing, directing, and acting in
Touch of Evil
. He then began filming
Don Quixote
in Mexico and returned to various European locations for another decade. From approximately 1968 until his death, he divided his time between Hollywood and Europe, making guest appearances on the Dean Martin television show, trying unsuccessfully to launch a talk show, and filming a number of mostly incomplete pictures. Late in his career he encountered tax problems in the United States because of money he had earned in Europe, but in 1976, after a routine security check for the Carter White House, the FBI cleared him of the old charges of subversion. By that time he had become a pioneering independent director/producer whose career made hash of highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow distinctions. As Michael Anderegg puts it, most of Welles's post-Hollywood work was an attempt to “drive his gypsy wagon outside the great hall of the culture industry” (
Orson Welles, Shakespeare
, 57). And although he had been more obviously political during the period of the Popular Front and the Roosevelt administration, he remained an opponent of the right wing. “I'm in no conflict with society,” he said in 1981. “I'm in conflict with the Reagan administration” (Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 108).