The Magic World of Orson Welles (26 page)

The Stranger
is quite good at these satiric touches, and it skillfully suggests the class structure of a Connecticut village. (This village, and the school where the Nazi teaches, is modeled on the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, where the young Welles was a student; indeed the film contains several inside jokes about that school.) Occasionally, too, it rises to a truly Wellesian intensity of style—especially in the scenes involving the drugstore-cum-soda-fountain run by House, where extreme naturalism coexists with suggestions of madness. The store is recreated in loving detail and is usually photographed in long takes and subtly distorting deep-focus compositions that emphasize clutter on the shelves. Along the walls Welles has posted mirrors and scrawled notices done in his own hand: “No slugs,” says a note in the phone booth. Matrons and shrill adolescent types wander in and out, helping themselves while the proprietor watches carefully from his table near the entrance. Here, and in the brief opening scenes involving the journey of a mad Nazi to Connecticut (scenes that were severely cut by Spiegel), we have all the earmarks of Welles's technique. In several other places the film could have been directed by anybody.

Like the Welles-Foster
Journey into Fear, The Stranger
is a patchwork, but in this case the reasons for the disharmony are not easy to determine. Charles Higham has written that Ernest Nims, the editor, had planned a cutting continuity in advance and that Welles's contract ordered him to follow Nims's design to the letter. But this does not explain why a number of scenes—including the long, extraordinarily difficult tracking shot of a murder in the woods—are clearly inventions of the director. Probably the film looks the way it does because Welles was suppressing his style to some degree in order to prove that he, too, could do ordinary good work. “I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else,” he said. “I did not do it with cynicism, however.” In any case the film was completed under budget and under time and did fairly well at the box office. It was not until his next project, a vehicle for Rita Hayworth done in return for Harry Cohn's investment in a failing stage show, that Welles was able to follow his own instincts. As a result he produced one of the most radically stylized films of his career in Hollywood.

By many standards
The Lady from Shanghai
is more unorthodox than Welles's previous work, but its strangeness did not result from an early, deliberate plan. The idea for the film originated when Welles entered into an agreement
with Columbia Pictures to help save the foundering Mercury production of
Around the World
. This latter show had been initiated by Welles and Mike Todd and was a fairly expensive musical extravaganza featuring old-time movies, a magic show, and a “slide for life” down a rope from the theater balcony. When Todd withdrew from the partnership early on, Welles enlisted the help of Richard Wilson and continued as producer/director, feeling a certain obligation to Cole Porter, whom he had persuaded to write the score. (Welles later recalled wryly that Porter, who was born with twenty million dollars, who made another twenty million from his music, and who then married a woman worth fifty million, never contributed money for the production.) With the shakiest financial backing,
Around the World
opened in the dog days of August in New York, just when wartime gas rationing had been lifted and everyone had left town to escape the heat. The show received mixed reviews and was plagued by one financial disaster after another; ultimately Welles persuaded Harry Cohn to advance him money for doing a movie, in the hope that he could keep the play running until audiences returned in September. His original plan was to film a thriller on a low budget, entirely in the streets of New York, at the same time that
Around the World
was continuing its run. The film would be made in the manner of Castle's
When Strangers Marry
, using no big stars or major studio paraphernalia. Almost immediately, however,
Around the World
plunged deeper into debt and was closed. Welles found himself back in Hollywood, where his plans for an offbeat potboiler were transformed into a big-budget vehicle for Rita Hayworth.

The resulting film (originally titled
Take This Woman
and then
Black Irish
) tells the story of how Michael O'Hara (Welles), a naïve vagabond, is seduced by the moneyed glamour of Elsa Bannister (Hayworth), allowing himself to become a duped accomplice in murder. First O'Hara takes a job as captain of Arthur Bannister's yacht on a cruise to San Francisco and is then persuaded by Bannister's mad law partner, George Grisby, to participate in a supposedly phony murder scheme. Grisby claims that he wants to collect money from his own faked demise and then hide out on a South Sea island, where he can be safe from the atomic bomb. As O'Hara commits himself to this deceitful group, the film becomes increasingly farcical and demonic; from the fantastic love scene with Rita Hayworth in the San Francisco aquarium until the Magic Mirror Maze at the conclusion, the world around O'Hara turns utterly lunatic, with no release until he walks out of an amusement park Crazy House across a pier in morning light. The complex but conventional plot machinations are delivered through hallucinatory visuals, the whole movie becoming a satiric dream work or magic show based on a standard thriller. (This method was natural to Welles, but it was suggested by the repeated references to dreams in
Sherwood King's
If I Die Before I Wake
, the novel that was his source; it also has some interesting parallels with Robert Siodmak's less brilliant but highly expressionistic film,
Phantom Lady
.)

The movie was substantially reedited after the second preview and long held from release, becoming a victim of Columbia's desperate attempt to “save” a story Harry Cohn said he could not understand. (The earlier version is described in
chapter 11
.) The cutting was turned over to Viola Lawrence, a friend of Cohn's but an enemy of Welles's, and a musical score was added without the director's approval. (Welles later complained in a letter to the studio that the music used for Rita Hayworth's dive into a lagoon resembled “a Disney picture when Pluto falls into the pool.”) Like
The Stranger
the film is a patchwork, but it is far more energetic and dazzling, its very confusions a part of its fascination. The acting ranges from Welles's phony and inconsistent interpretation of an Irish sailor fallen among the right-wing American rich to the sublimely grotesque performances of Everett Sloane and Glenn Anders, a pair of unscrupulous lawyers who are scorpions personified. The dialogue oscillates between the bathetic (“Give my love to the sunrise”), the tautological (“One who follows his nature will keep his original nature in the end”), and the downright opaque (“I want you to live as long as possible before you die”), but this goofiness remains somehow in keeping with the general atmosphere of comic delirium. Everywhere the movie is filled with bizarre visual dissonances, Welles's imagery coexisting with scenes or sequences that serve to mock Hollywood. Again and again a brilliant moment is interrupted with gauzy close-ups or over-the-shoulder editing, awkwardly composed and badly acted. The real locales of Acapulco and San Francisco are intercut with retakes containing obvious studio settings or process screens, and the film student can actually make a game of distinguishing shots that are authentically Wellesian from the ones that are deliberate kitsch. It is a game worth playing, partly because the radical shifts of style in this film take on meaningful implications.

A logical place to begin is with Welles's habit of animating the environment, using it to express the emotions of his players or to comment on their behavior. As we have seen, Welles seldom does one thing on the screen when he can do three or four. Typically he gives as much information as possible, playing off the most subtle exchanges between characters against two or more levels of action. Even the kitchen dinner scene in
The Magnificent Ambersons
is not so restrained as is commonly supposed: the camera barely moves, but Tim Holt wolfs down strawberry shortcake, a gothic storm rattles outside the windows of the big kitchen, and the actors keep stepping on one another's
lines. Welles depends heavily on this multiplication of artistic stimuli so that he not only expresses psychology through the settings but also gives us the feeling of many actions, visual and aural, occurring simultaneously. It is this richness, this seven-layer-cake profusion, that most distinguishes his work in Hollywood.

The Lady from Shanghai
offers many examples of such density, the most obvious being the Magic Mirror Maze sequence, which is also the grandest example of Welles's delight in movie illusionism. The gun battle among the mirrors functions beautifully within the plot, compactly expressing the ruthless ambition and the self-destructive mania that has been evoked verbally in the hero's account of hungry sharks; indeed it is such a brilliant moment that it almost transcends its fictional content, turning Rita Hayworth into a series of insubstantial images that symbolize the gaudy unreality and fascination of movie stars. More to the point, however, is the way the sequence shows Welles's love of baroque dynamics; it produces an infinite depth of field and more information than we can absorb in a single viewing.

Not satisfied with the simple phenomenon of reflections in mirrors, Welles complicates the spectacle with a split screen; for example, we see two images of Arthur Bannister (Sloane) and his cane at either side of the frame, in between them two gigantic pictures of Elsa's blonde head. In another shot, two Bannisters are superimposed over Elsa's eyeball. Toward the climax, Bannister lurches to the left and produces three images of himself; the camera then pans and three more Bannisters approach from the opposite direction, the two converging groups separated by a single image of Elsa holding a gun; Bannister now takes out his own pistol, and as he points it, his “real” hand enters the foreground from offscreen right. All this time the actors are delivering crucial speeches that are intended to unravel the mystery plot—in fact so much happens so rapidly that only a lengthy analysis can lead to a full understanding of the sequence.

Perhaps the images reproduced in
figures 5.1–5.6
will illustrate some of Welles's methods. These stills indicate how the sequence has been designed to create a montage of conflicts between Everett Sloane and Rita Hayworth. If the ugly, crippled male is reflected many times in a single shot, the unreal sex goddess is usually seen alone; if both characters are multiplied, one is larger than the other. Each image has the disturbing quality of surrealist art, and yet each is motivated by the plot and the psychology of the characters. In the penultimate shot illustrated here, Bannister tells Elsa that in killing her he will be killing himself, and the hallucinatory image is perfectly expressive of the way the mind can become a hall of mirrors, a distorted, paranoid vision.

Figures 5.1–5.6: Montage of conflicts and reflections in
The Lady from Shanghai
.

The audience does not have to make this sort of analysis in order to appreciate the power of the images, but most viewers feel they have to “meet the film at least half-way,” as Herman G. Weinberg once said, in an effort to assimilate all the information. Thus, one of the pervasive qualities of this sequence and of Welles's movies in general is
wit
, which means not only a sense of humor but also what the
OED
defines as an appeal to the mental faculties, especially to “memory and attention.” Of course the typical studio film does not have much to do with wit; its chief desiderata are clarity and simplicity, and that is perhaps one reason why the scenes in
The Lady from Shanghai
waver between a complex satire of manners and a familiar Hollywood gloss.

Keeping to his original intention, Welles shot parts of the film on location, following a practice that was becoming increasingly popular just after the war. Even the interiors, including the sailor's hiring hall; the pier-side café; the dusty, oppressive courtroom; and the Chinatown theater, have a harsh surface realism overlaid with a busy, expressive shooting style. In the finished movie, however, many individual shots undercut Welles's expressionism; we catch only occasional glimpses of a startling mise-en-scène, usually shot in a real locale. What one recalls most vividly, aside from the trick effects in the Crazy House, are the huge close-ups of the four principals: Sloane and Anders are photographed with a mercilessly sharp lens, the camera highlighting every pockmark and bead of sweat on their faces; Welles and Hayworth, on the other hand, become gigantic, romantically blurred movie stars—as fantastic and disturbing in their own way as the ugly characters, so that a glamorous studio portrait photography contributes to the film's aura of surrealism.