The Magic World of Orson Welles (25 page)

Did you ever hear of a “B” picture getting one of the prizes or even a nomination? “The Informer” doesn't count as a “B” in spite of its low budget because its director was famous and successful and well-paid. A real “B” is produced for half the money and is twice as hard to make worthy of attention. . . .

Gold statuettes for score and photography aren't enough. The movie industry is the only big business I know of which spends no money on real research.
A valid Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would be a laboratory for experiment, a studio—by which I do not mean a factory building for the manufacture of a product—but a place removed from the commercial standard and reserved for study, for honest creative effort.

Of course Welles's notion of an Academy “removed from the commercial standard” was somewhat naïve, because unless one contemplated revolution, such an Academy would always be influenced at long distance by commerce. Just as the Mercury could not long remain an independent theater, free of both government dictates and the pressures of a “free” market, so a research unit funded by Hollywood would inevitably face compromises; nevertheless, Welles continued to imagine an ideal setting for the performing arts, a place uninhibited by capitalists or commissars.

Welles's suspicion of these twin evils is apparent in his discussion of Sergei Eisenstein's
Ivan the Terrible
(part one), which he and Rita Hayworth had seen in May 1945 at the United Nations Theatre in San Francisco. He devoted two entire columns to the film, developing a fascinating comparison between it and 20th Century-Fox's
Woodrow Wilson
, which had also recently opened in San Francisco. Here were two major productions by the two postwar Leviathans; both claimed to be portraits of historical figures and both had specific political implications. “The man in the Kremlin,” Welles wrote, “is remembered for a certain ruthlessness of action and the man in the White House for a certain chilliness of personality. Eisenstein and Zanuck try to show how their heroes got that way, surrounding them respectively with scheming politicians and scheming courtiers. The Boyars, it seems, did it to the Tsar, and the Republican Senators did it to the President.” Of course there were certain important differences between the two subjects; because Eisenstein was dealing with a remote historical period, his unorthodox historical interpretations were easier to accept, whereas Darryl Zanuck had problems with even the most discreet adjustments of the facts. In both cases, however, Welles felt the heroes were sentimentalized: “Maybe Ivan and Wilson were good family men, but the scenes to this effect are curiously lacking in significance.” Zanuck had attempted to make Wilson a hail-fellow, “but when his impersonator harmonizes ‘Down by the Old Mill Stream' we are not persuaded. . . . And as for Ivan, he is still ‘The Terrible' no matter how many times in a movie he slaps his friends on the back and chucks his wife under the chin.”

Welles implied that both films were propagandistic, suffused with establishment patriotism. The real interest and superiority of
Ivan
as against the American work lay not in its interpretation of history or in its implicit ideology, but in its extravagant, stylized approach to cinema, an approach the Russian audience had apparently been willing to accept:

Critics and audiences in the English-speaking world, accustomed as they are to the pallid stylelessness of the “realistic” school, are likely to be impatient, even moved to giggles by the antics of Ivan and his friends. This is because the arts and artists of our theatre have been so busy for so long now teaching the public to reject anything larger than life unless it be stated in the special language of glamor and charm that I'm afraid many good citizens who read the comic strips with utmost solemnity will laugh out loud at Eisenstein's best moments. Our culture has conditioned us to take Dick Tracy with a straight face. But nothing prepared us for “Ivan the Terrible.”

Welles must have had his own practice in mind as he wrote those lines. From infancy he had been fascinated with Shakespeare, with the European tradition of grand opera, and with the theatrical grandiloquence of large-scale magic shows; the bizarre imagery and deliberately anti-naturalistic acting in the Eisenstein film spoke to his own tastes, but they were doubly attractive because they ran against the grain of studio cinema, giving full expression to the director's personality. Welles praised the Russian film for its “courageously radical stylization,” noting how sharply it differed from American movies: “The Wilson picture, of course, has its own stylization and its own conventions. But these are Hollywood habits, not the conscious creation of Director Henry King.” In other words, the American film was conservative, built out of a narrow visual and literary code from which the director was not expected to deviate. The Eisenstein film was liberating, allowing the director to make stylistic choices free of a culturally predetermined idea as to what constituted truth to nature.

Both traditions, Welles recognized, had their own peculiar strengths and weaknesses:

When the American movie-maker becomes aware of a discrepancy between his film and the appearance of life, he corrects the difference in favor of “realism.” This search for the direct and literal produces some of our best effects. The Russians go out for the effect itself—and when they find what they're after—they manage moments of an exclamatory and resonant beauty on the level of eloquence to which our school cannot aspire. When the Russian method fails it is funny; it falls flat on its bottom, and we laugh. When Hollywood fails, it falls flat, the result is merely dull, and we yawn.

Welles did not want to choose between these approaches. “We have much to learn from each other,” he said, and the learning process, as he saw it, extended especially to matters of technique. Even the medium-distance, long-take photography that Welles had helped popularize (and had justified in the name of “realism”) made an interesting contrast with the Russian montage
school: “Because of the inferiority of Russian film stock, lenses, and other equipment, the camera must assert itself by what it selects, and by the manner of selection.” The less obtrusive Hollywood camera, Welles said, “has a merchant's eye” and devotes itself to “star-hogging closeups,” or to “lovingly evaluating texture, the screen being filled as a window is dressed in a swank department store.”

Hence, just as Welles's politics were progressive and liberal, seeking a middle ground between the White House and the Kremlin, so his aesthetics attempted to find a happy synthesis of two cultures. Where his own work was concerned, he had tried from the beginning to combine what he calls “moments of exclamatory and resonant beauty on the level of eloquence” with the dominant tradition of psychological realism. In both
Citizen Kane
and
The Magnificent Ambersons
he had chosen subjects that had many precedents in the tradition of “well-made” Hollywood films. What was relatively different about Welles was not his subject matter nor even his sophistication, but the degree to which he had brought unorthodox style and autobiography to the fore. In this respect he had attempted to import something “larger than life” into the mainstream of American movies, a force to countervail what he called the “pallid stylelessness” of studio realism.

Looked at today, the artificial conventions of American movies in the forties are quite apparent, but Welles was correct to say that these films were striving for the “direct and literal.” In costume films or in expressionist genres such as the thriller, there was indeed a degree of license, a “special language of glamor and charm,” but the tendency of the industry as a whole was toward aesthetic minimalism. Anglo-Saxon critics helped perpetuate this tendency, because they grumbled when they encountered anything unrestrained. It was precisely this quality that made certain reviewers unhappy with
Kane
and that caused Welles's detractors to portray him as a ham. Certainly he took greater risks than most with convention, and when his work failed, it failed on the side of histrionics and silliness, never on the side of dullness. Nevertheless, Welles's strengths came from the same sources as his weaknesses—namely, what he had called, in speaking of Eisenstein, a “courageously radical stylization,” which in his case meant a willingness to challenge not only the habits of the studio system but also the limits of popular taste.

Given Welles's position in Hollywood in the mid-forties, however, it would seem his romantic struggle against the studios should have come to an end. After his contract with RKO terminated, he worked infrequently, always in the sort of genre projects that might theoretically have put restraints on his style; even when he ventured into Shakespeare, it was under severe limitations of time and budget under a boss whose biggest star was Roy Rogers. And yet, by
staying within genres or B-budgets, Welles managed to retain more individuality than if he had been allowed into the more culturally ambitious, expensive productions. At the level of filmed biographies or adaptations of big novels, Hollywood was devoted entirely to the same conservative “tradition of quality” that Truffaut once attacked so vigorously in France. Conversely, the degree of convention in the standard Hollywood melodrama sometimes worked in the director's favor; producers took less personal interest in the texture of the film so long as the basic plot ingredients were satisfied. Thus the Hollywood movie of this period was at its most exciting when it operated under obvious constraints of money or content, at a moderately low level of respectability. Its meaning lay not in the manifest content of the script, which was usually based on potboiler novels or magazine stories, but in the almost libidinal warfare between a good director's style and the pressures of convention.

I say “libidinal” partly because the Freudian model of id versus superego provides a good analogue to the system, and partly because the most interesting aspects of Hollywood movies in the late forties and fifties tended to be sexual. The fetishistic, overheated romanticism of the film noir became one of the few sources of rebellious energy in the movies, although admittedly it was a fairly timid rebellion. Welles, of course, was especially suited to work in this vein, bringing to it an intelligence and integrity of purpose that kept his films from becoming, like so many others, merely lurid or clichéd.

And despite the fact that he was seldom able to choose his own topics, he managed to keep his ethical and political themes virtually intact; even the familiar character types recur, sometimes adapted to fit the requirements for “glamor and charm.” When he worked at all now, his films became more radically stylized than ever, as if the limitations in subject matter and budget had to be overcome by an utter strangeness of mise-en-scène. From
The Lady from Shanghai
through
Touch of Evil
, Welles's style became more bizarre and circus-like; his films during this period reflect some of the chaos and uncertainty of his own career, becoming increasingly satiric, charged with self-conscious manipulation of popular sexual stereotypes and visual references to that most private of all Hollywood individualists, Josef von Sternberg. In one sense, therefore, these films were as “personal” as any of his others, and as one might expect, producers and audiences became increasingly unsympathetic.

The one exception to the trend I've just described is
The Stranger
(1945), about which I shall make only brief comments. (This film is discussed further in
chapter 11
.) An atmospheric and entertaining picture, it was praised
by James Agee for being a “tidy, engaging thriller . . . much more graceful, intelligent, and enjoyable than most other movies.” In fact, however, Agee was being consistent in his dislike for Welles's style, which he had always found pretentious. He had singled out the most uncharacteristic of Welles's films, a picture that barely deviates from industry habits; significantly also, he had chosen a film that was scripted by John Huston, writing without credit with Anthony Veiller.

Actually,
The Stranger
owes more to Hitchcock than to its real writer or director. The themes are ostensibly political, but the dramatic tensions are purely sexual, arising out of a confrontation between a sweet, repressed female (Loretta Young) and a sexually threatening male (Welles). The script borrows heavily from
Shadow of a Doubt
(1942), transforming Hitchcock's psychotic Uncle Charlie into Franz Kindler, an escaped Nazi war criminal who poses as a history teacher in a New England college. Huston and producer Sam Spiegel took most of the crucial elements from the earlier film, down to a scene where the villain sits at a family dining table and behaves oddly (in
The Stranger
, Kindler betrays himself when he remarks that Karl Marx was not a German but a Jew). They even include a lush musical score by Bronislaw Kaper and a vertiginous climax atop a bell tower. The only new elements were a dogged war crimes investigator (Edward G. Robinson), who manages to charm audiences despite the relative colorlessness of his role (Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead for this part), and a veneer of topical politics in line with Welles's own interests. Thus when Welles takes his protagonists to a high place at the conclusion of the film, he is as much interested in showing the Nazi will to power as in depicting a moral and psychological vertigo: Franz Kindler stands in the clock belfry, looks out over Connecticut, and refers to the people below as “ants”—a foreshadowing of Harry Lime's big speech in
The Third Man
.

The film has a superficially Hitchcockian sense of the absurd, and many of Welles's best moments derive from his ironic treatment of Americana, as if Norman Rockwell were being retouched by Charles Addams. Indeed, given the essentially patriotic tone of the movie, Welles is particularly skilled at avoiding a sentimentalized portrait of the townspeople. Billy House, as the checker-playing proprietor of a local drugstore, is slowly transformed from an unpleasant New England eccentric into the leader of a virtual lynch mob; Richard Long, who specialized in the sort of antiseptic kid-brother role he plays here, is at one point photographed in a harsh light that shows pock-marks on his face; Philip Merivale portrays a rather vapid, silver-haired state supreme court judge who is completely fooled by the fascist at his dinner table; and Loretta Young, giving one of the best performances in the film,
suggests a woman driven almost mad by the conflict between her sexuality, her complacent puritanism, and her dawning moral awareness.