The Magic World of Orson Welles (38 page)

Herr Fritz Mandel, presently of Buenos Aires, smoked in silence. Everybody watched him do this, waiting for the oracle to speak again. Finally it did. “If the Russians should march west today—they'd cross the Rhine tomorrow.”

In Germany you were almost blinded by the glare of that political reality. Still blinking from it, you'd journeyed down from Berlin, and, in a break in the journey, you'd come upon this real, live munitions maker. How it brought back melodramas of a pre-war pacifist past! There he was, with a flower in his button-hole, an Argentine girl at his side, a respectful ring of Swiss bankers all about him, smoking a Havana cigar on the banks of an Italian lake. The eyes in the sharply drawn, solid-looking head are set in a questing expression, . . . like the vacuum in the heart of a tornado.

“Wait and see what happens this time,” Mandel again. He took the cigar from its holder, carefully extinguished it, and sat back, staring across the Lake of Como at nothing. An Italian prince roared by in a speedboat towing a mannequin
on water-skis. Some Americans at the next table were wondering if their 'plane reservations for home were soon enough. . . .

What was he thinking about? It's no use saying it doesn't matter. It matters that he makes the guns and tanks for Perón. Perón matters. And Mandel's thinking, wrong as it may be, is somehow related to the queerly changing shape of our world. He still had the cigar in his mouth and seemed to be looking for a match. . . . Maybe he was brooding over the third war.

Brooding is the word, not gloating. Zaharoff used to gloat. But then those were different wars. . . . I gave him a box of matches. He thanked me and we smiled at each other. After all, why not? We've got something in common: We've both been married in our time to movie stars.

The passage suggests
Mr. Arkadin
in its surreal mixture of nationalities. Swiss bankers, an Argentine girl, Havana cigars, and American tourists are blended together with an Italian prince and an English model on water skis. At the center of it all is an outlandish figure left over from prewar melodramas, a man devoid of personality but interesting nonetheless because of the power he represents. Gregory Arkadin is a more colorful fellow than this, but he has the same anachronistic flavor, the same empty expression “like the vacuum in the heart of a tornado,” the same brooding attitude. Welles seems to have regarded him as a savage, a total pretender to a radically changing European civilization and therefore a slightly different type from charmers like Kurtz, Kane, and Harry Lime. Like them he is a sort of hollow man, but he is seen chiefly in costume: first in a grand cape at a masked ball, then wearing a yachtsman's suit and dark glasses, then dressed as Santa Claus. Even when he appears in normal dress he wears a false face, his close-ups showing the artificial lines of an ill-fitting wig and spirit gum holding his beard in place. We never see what lies behind the disguise, a fact that Welles emphasizes in the credits, where the camera zooms in on Arkadin as he is about to remove one of his masks and then fades to black. Arkadin is so blank, so rudimentary, that he seems to exist outside time. We are told that he profited from the Russians, from Mussolini, and from the Nazis, and that he is presently interested in air bases the Americans plan to build in Portugal; thus he seems to exist outside nations as well. He is almost a mythical creature, a man of animal ruthlessness and lusty appetite, made quirky by his obsessive love for his daughter. (Like the ancient pharaohs, he is isolated to the point of becoming incestuous.) “It's as if he had come from some wild area to settle an old European civilization,” Welles told André Bazin. “He's the Hun, the Goth . . . who succeeds in conquering Rome.”

Figure 7.7: Arkadin about to remove his mask.

But he is not the only invader. Over against this modern Attila, this doomed gothic rebel, Welles has placed a more believable type: Van Stratten, the minor savage. Robert Arden's portrayal of the role has been criticized, but his slightly brutish, hirsute looks and his repellent air are exactly in keeping with the barbarian theme; in fact, quite by accident, he bears an uncanny resemblance to a young, athletic Richard Nixon. Certainly he is very different from the urbane narrator of Welles's novel,
Mr. Arkadin
(which Welles has disowned), and he gives a stronger impression of an interloper from another culture. Welles concentrates mainly on the way the two men clash with their surroundings: we see Arkadin's plane whizzing over the turrets of his castle while Van Stratten and Raina dodge in and out of a herd of goats on the streets of San Tirso. Later that evening a procession of mendicants makes its way through the village, the huge peaked hoods of medieval costumes creating a disturbingly surreal spectacle; suddenly Van Stratten steps in between the line of monks, his flowered sport shirt flashing out in the dark. Joining Mily and a group of tourists beside the road, he explains that the men in the procession are paying for their sins. Mily (who has posed in kinky black leather underwear in an advertisement for her striptease act) takes one look at the parade and cocks an eyebrow. “They must be awfully sorry,” she says.

Inside Arkadin's castle, which has been photographed against storm clouds that make it resemble El Greco's painting of Toledo, the same cultural ironies are visible everywhere. Van Stratten wanders about amid papier-mâché reminders of Spanish art (designed by Welles), all of them jumbled together into a nightmarish costume party. In his bewilderment, he asks a guest about the strange masked faces that fill the room:

THE MARQUIS OF WADLEIGH
: All these people are supposed to represent the painters. Now some of us have come as the visions and monsters . . . Goya.

VAN STRATTEN
: Who?

WADLEIGH
: You know, Goya.

VAN STRATTEN
(assuming he is being introduced to a passerby)
: Glad to meet you.

Arkadin, of course, is not so dense nor quite so alien as Van Stratten, although his desire for moral respectability in the eyes of his daughter leads to his suicide. He is what Raina calls an “expensive gypsy,” a new, sometimes rather pitiable barbarian. He seems most human when he is seen through the eyes of Sophie (Katina Paxinou), a maternal, world-weary female rather like Tanya in
Touch of Evil
; she carries one of his old photographs and remembers him from another age, when he called himself Athabadze. It is Sophie who gives the film its only moment of nostalgia, offering Welles another occasion for lament over the twentieth century, another opportunity to show the link between a restless egocentric and the mania of a society.

Figure 7.8: Van Stratten amid papier-mâché masks in Arkadin's castle.

As a whole,
Mr. Arkadin
is too confusing, too lacking in a plausible dramatic center; it is weakest in those moments when it strives to create emotional interest in Arkadin—as when the tycoon is shown pleading for an airline ticket in a crowded terminal. As satire and spectacle, however, it seldom fails, and of all of Welles's European works it comes closest to the rebellious tone and the historical immediacy of his Hollywood days. It is in fact a Hollywood thriller seen from the vantage point of a European intellectual, foreshadowing the rise of “personal” art films in the early sixties. Sometimes it has the dreamlike power of a Fellini film and sometimes the abstract, rhetorical tone of Godard's
Alphaville
. No wonder it was greeted with such enthusiasm by the critics of the nouvelle vague, who hailed it, in the words of Bazin, as “completely the work of Welles.”

From the start of his career Welles alluded to Franz Kafka, with whom he had obvious affinities. One could hardly imagine two men of more dissimilar backgrounds or personalities, but both are artists of nightmare, their occasional lyricism mediated by a love for grotesque, satiric visions, their characters inevitably shown as victims of sexual and institutional torment. The gothic political rally in
Citizen Kane
, the furtive conversations on a grand oak staircase in
The Magnificent Ambersons
, the mad courtroom in
The Lady from Shanghai
, the police inquisition in
Touch of Evil
—all of these celebrated moments are made possible by Kafka, or at least by the modem sensibility that Kafka largely created. They are all examples of comfortable reality becoming as absurd as a dream, of recognizable daytime life beginning to turn into a hopeless, centerless labyrinth.

But note that I have said “beginning to turn,” for however angst-ridden and fatalistic Welles's stories may be, however irrational and sexually charged his images may become, he continued to insist, both inside the fiction and outside, that his characters are morally responsible agents in a society of their own creation. The Welles who was fascinated with the subconscious and the demonic was also the Welles who wrote political editorials for the
New York Post
; he may have been pessimistic, but he was never truly despairing, and in that sense, if in little else, he maintained a link with the dominant ethos of Hollywood cinema. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Salkind brothers gave him a free hand to adapt
The Trial
in 1962, he felt a need to make basic changes in the text. Consequently he produced a work of great
cinematic intelligence and some Kafkaesque terror, which nevertheless seems divided against itself.

The divergences between film and novel are most interesting in those areas where Welles and Kafka would seem to have something in common. For example, they are both fond of introducing fables or parables into the midst of dreamlike narratives, and Welles was naturally attracted to Kafka's parable of the Law. In fact he has moved this little story to a place of honor at the beginning of the film, telling it in the form of a slide show illustrated by Alexandre Alexeieff's “pin-screen” technique—a process whereby images are created from shadows cast by pins inserted into a mat. The drawings thus produced serve not only as an introduction to Kafka's world but also as an indirect commentary on the nature of movies; one by one they are flashed on the screen, flipping upward like pages and then becoming shadowy, three-dimensional figures. We are shown a massive stone wall with an arched doorway resembling a primitive version of RKO's art work on Xanadu while Welles's voice begins to recite the parable offscreen. “Before the Law there stands a Guard,” he says, and with each successive statement another image flips upward, transforming the sentences into “shots.” A man from the country appears, begging admittance to the Law. But the guard cannot allow him past the door. Can he enter later? Perhaps, the guard replies. Timidly peering beyond the open arch, the man sees another doorway, the first in a whole series of entrances, each more august than the one before. Respectfully he waits, growing old in the process. Seasons pass, but the guard remains at his post. The old man tries bribery and obsequiousness, even making friends with the fleas in the guard's fur collar in hope that they might have influence. Nothing helps, and when the old man nears death he asks the guard a question: Why in all these years has no one else come to the door? “No one else could enter this door,” says the guard. “This door was intended only for you, and now I am going to close it.”

The tale ends on a note of cosmic irony and is a superb instance of an effect Welles was hinting at in Michael O'Hara's account of hungry sharks or Arkadin's story about the scorpion and the frog. But there is a crucial distinction between the way the exemplary parable of the Law has been used in the novel and in the film, and it is here that Welles's particular viewpoint becomes apparent.

In Kafka's novel the story appears in the penultimate chapter, where it is told by a priest as a way of illustrating a “particular delusion” about the court. At the conclusion, Joseph K., who has been respectful and attentive, immediately deduces a lesson. “So the doorkeeper deceived the man,” he says. “Don't
be too hasty,” replies the priest. “I have told you the story in the very words of the scriptures. There's no mention of deception in it.” Then for the next half dozen pages the priest and K. become entangled in an elaborate exercise in hermeneutics, a debate that might be read as a dizzying satire of Talmudic scholarship and literary criticism. “But it's clear enough,” K. remarks. Not so, responds the priest, who lists various possible interpretations, alluding to several commentators and methodically undermining K.'s every effort to reach a judgment. “It is not necessary to accept anything as true or false,” the priest says at last; “one must only accept it as necessary.” “A melancholy conclusion,” says K. “It turns lying into a universal principle.” But K. can no longer really object to anything: “He was too tired to survey all the conclusions arising from the story, and the trains of thought into which it was leading him were unfamiliar, dealing with impalpabilities better suited to a theme for discussion among Court officials than for him.”