The Magic World of Orson Welles (46 page)

Man . . . the instrument of creation . . . will die. . . . But what is created by him will never die. And in order to live eternally he has not the slightest need of extraordinary gifts or of accomplishing prodigies. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? And yet they live eternally because—living seeds—they had the good fortune to find a fruitful womb—a fantasy which knew how to raise and nourish them, and make them live through all eternity.

—Luigi Pirandello,
Six Characters in Search of an Author

Welles's career was littered with abandoned or unfulfilled projects, the residue of a restless, energetic life. After 1955 he worked, in bits and pieces, on a film adaptation of
Don Quixote
, which he wryly predicted would have its title changed to a question he was always asked:
When Will Don Quixote Be Finished?
The picture was started as a half-hour television show but subsequently grew into a feature film composed of three episodes from Cervantes, framed by scenes of Welles himself explaining the story to child actress Patty McCormack. The episodes are staged in twentieth-century settings; for example, Welles has Quixote assault a movie screen in an attempt to rescue a starlet. Unfortunately, Patty McCormack is no longer a child, and the Mexican actor Francisco Reiguera, who plays Quixote, is now dead. Even so, Welles was able to complete most of the film. His former secretary, Audrey Stainton, has written a fascinating memoir in
Sight and Sound
(Autumn 1988), showing how he confronted and overcame many obstacles to the project, incessantly revising it like an impassioned amateur. He had begun shooting with no clear plan in mind, and as the picture slowly expanded, he perpetually added refinements. One of his editors, Mauro Bonanni, became the guardian of an almost finished, hour-and-a-half version—still in need of dubbing
and post-synchronization—fragments of which have been shown in Cannes, New York, and other venues. (See also Esteve Riambau, “
Don Quixote
: Adventures and Misadventures of an Essay on Spain” in Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 71–76.)

In the late sixties in Yugoslavia, Welles wrote and directed a thriller called
The Deep
, based on Charles Williams's novel
Dead Calm
, starring Welles, Laurence Harvey, and Jeanne Moreau. I have seen an early version of the script, titled
Dead Reckoning
, which is an almost pure suspense story told in the limited time span of a single day, without flashbacks or even much reference to the past lives of the characters. It all takes place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where a honeymoon couple, John and Rae Ingram (played in the completed film by Michael Bryant and Oja Kodar, acting under the name Olga Palinkas), are sailing to an island aboard their ketch, the
Saracen
. One morning on a calm sea they discover a man rowing desperately toward them from a sinking yacht called the
Orpheus
. He is Hughie Warriner (Laurence Harvey), and when he is hauled aboard he tells a gruesome story of how his wife and everyone else on the
Orpheus
have died of food poisoning. He claims he has buried them all at sea and has been adrift ever since, his radio broken and the yacht beginning to sink.

When Hughie collapses of exhaustion, John Ingram gets into the lifeboat and rows across to investigate the
Orpheus
. In the half-flooded cabin he discovers Ruth Warriner (Moreau) and Russ Brewer (Welles), both of them alive and hiding in fear of Hughie. Just as he is about to rescue these two, Ingram looks back at his own boat and sees that Hughie has regained consciousness and is starting the engines. When Rae struggles with him, he strikes her savagely and she collapses on the deck. John makes a frantic attempt to row back to the
Saracen
, but the boat moves off at high speed, leaving him and the two strangers back on board the
Orpheus
. The remainder of the film involves John's desperate attempt to keep the yacht afloat, hampered by the drunken Brewer, a broken engine, and faulty instrumentation. Meanwhile, on board the
Saracen
, Rae Ingram recovers and finds herself confronted with a madman whom she must outwit if there is to be any chance of saving her husband. By the end the Ingrams are in fact reunited, but not before Hughie Warriner and Russ Brewer—each of them revealed as psychotic—have had a fight to the death.

This early draft of the script is exciting to read and suggests a good many psychological tensions running beneath the suspense plot. It also calls for a number of complex technical effects, including underwater photography, several shots from the top of a ship's mast as it bucks and whirls in the open
sea, and a spectacular fire aboard the
Orpheus
. I have subsequently seen exciting clips from the film that make its loss all the more painful. Undoubtedly it would have differed from the screenplay, as Welles's pictures always did, and might even have employed flashbacks and a dream sequence. (For an important discussion of the production, see the interview with Oja Kodar in Drössler,
Unknown Orson Welles
, 24–29.) Although shooting on the picture was completed, the soundtrack was incompletely dubbed and Welles had trouble finding a distributor. Other filmmakers had better luck with similar projects: in 1977 Peter Yeats directed a Peter Benchley script called
The Deep
, and in 1989 George Miller directed
Dead Calm
, based on the same Charles Williams novel Welles had used as a source.

In the early seventies Welles became involved with Films l'Astrophore, a Paris-based company financed by the Iranian government, which proposed to back not only him but Elia Kazan, Sergio Leone, and John Boorman as well. The company distributed
F for Fake
in Europe and was prepared to support his other work, but then the Iranian revolution changed everything. Meanwhile, in order to keep his career alive, Welles endorsed Jim Beam whiskey and Eastern Airlines. Throughout the seventies and early eighties he made frequent TV appearances with Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, and Merv Griffin—and in an infamous series of commercials, he promised that Paul Masson would “sell no wine before its time.” Increasingly, he seemed willing to do the kind of jobs that his more puritan admirers thought were a prostitution of talent. He was simple and direct in explaining his motives. “It can be fun,” he told an audience in Boston. “I do it for the exposure. If you don't, you get forgotten.”

The only theatrical films by Welles to appear in the last decades of his life were two short works,
The Immortal Story
(1968) and
F for Fake
(1976), both of which are virtually meditations by the director on the nature of his art. Of course, Welles's movies were always self-reflexive, but these two took a distinctly Pirandellian turn, becoming somewhat less public and political. In them he thinks introspectively, immersing himself in notions about artifice and eternity, playing variations on the theme of art and counterfeit. The last and most ambitious film in this vein is
The Other Side of the Wind
, a movie about Hollywood that Welles began shooting in 1970. In some ways
Wind
invites comparison with Fellini's
8½
and Truffaut's
Day for Night
, but in others it is a unique, not-so-veiled meditation on Welles's legend and celebrity.

An equally important aspect of the three films is their overt preoccupation with sex, a theme Welles had previously treated indirectly—or, in the case
of
The Lady from Shanghai
, via the conventions of a censored Hollywood eroticism. By the 1970s the old production code had fallen and films everywhere were dealing with sex in fairly explicit terms. Like most directors of his generation, Welles was somewhat puritanical about showing too much flesh on the screen. His turn toward films with strong sexual elements was symptomatic of conditions in the industry but also had something to do with what Joseph McBride has called Welles's “Oja period”—that is, the years of his companionship and collaboration with his Croatian lover, Oja Kodar.

Born Olga Palinkas in 1941, Kodar was working as a TV news anchor in Yugoslavia when Welles met her during the filming of
The Trial
. He told her that she was a gift from God, and as a result she took the name “Kodar,” which is Croatian for “a gift.” A sophisticated, cosmopolitan young woman with a stunningly beautiful face and body, she was also a talented sculptor and writer who eventually exerted a strong influence on Welles's work. She provided the title for
F for Fake
and cowrote several screenplays with Welles, including
The Other Side of the Wind
, which, I suspect, she also partly directed. “‘When you see [
The Other Side of the Wind
],'” she has said, “‘you will feel that somebody else worked with [Welles] because there were things that he never would have done and never did before. He was a very shy man, and erotic stuff was not his thing. . . . I practically directed some of those erotic scenes, because Orson was a very shy person'” (quoted in McBride,
Whatever Happened
, 140).

Perhaps significantly, the three films discussed in this chapter—
The Immortal Story, F for Fake
, and
The Other Side of the Wind
—involve either an old man who is given pleasure by having sex with a young partner, or an old man who gets pleasure by watching a young woman have sex with another man. The last two of the films—
F for Fake
and
The Other Side of the Wind
—also bring to the fore themes of homosexuality and ambiguous sexual identity that were often suggested but not treated directly in Welles's earlier work.

The first of these late films is easily the most literary. A sixty-minute work produced originally for French television,
The Immortal Story
is based rather closely on a tale from Isak Dinesen's
Anecdotes of Destiny
; like Welles, Dinesen was an artist in the gothic tradition who was fond of exemplary fables, and Welles needed to make only minor alterations in the story in order to create meanings relevant to his own career.

The film is in color but is shot in almost rudimentary fashion, using a spartan decor and few ostentatious camera tricks. It opens in darkness, with an iris into an Oriental port city reminiscent of
Broken Blossoms
, and closes with a slow “burn out” to a white screen; periodically we hear a solitary piano playing a haunting melody by Erik Satie. Unfortunately, many individual scenes are marred by technical crudities and breaks in the visual continuity, but on the whole Welles's quiet style is beautifully appropriate. Occasionally one notices his typical mannerisms—a small chorus of townspeople like the ones in
The Magnificent Ambersons
, who provide exposition at the beginning; several deep-focus compositions and radical camera angles; a long, rather bumpy traveling shot down a colonnade; and a couple of scenes on an ornate stairway. But the relative simplicity of the film is in keeping with Dinesen's own style—a prose that is as economical as a biblical parable and that Welles reads quietly in offscreen narration. The resulting movie is like a charming miniature, a distillation of one of Welles's favorite themes to its most essential level.

Dinesen's tale is set in nineteenth-century Canton, although Welles changes the locale to Macao, the place that in
The Lady from Shanghai
is called the “wickedest city in the world.” It tells of a rich merchant, aptly named Clay (Welles plays the character and makes him an American rather than a European), who has lived like a god all his life, controlling the little Oriental figures that move in regular patterns across some of the film's landscapes. As the story begins, Clay has reached a crisis similar to the one that is met by most of Welles's central characters. Like Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness
, like Kane, and like Macbeth, his drive to power and autonomy has ended in tragic isolation and a forced recognition of his limits. Dinesen describes him as a “tall, dry, and close old man,” who sits in the midst of his rich house, “erect, silent, and alone.” Welles combines this comment with a visual allusion to Charles Foster Kane, showing Clay sitting down to eat, his head surrounded by mirrors that multiply his image.

Almost Scrooge-like, Charles Clay is unique among Welles's protagonists in being completely without outward charm or beauty. He believes, as he says later in the film, that his money will be “proof against dissolution,” and he contrasts gold with human relations, which always involve some giving over of the self. He has cheated his friend and former business partner, whom we are told was a warmhearted man, and has taken over the partner's house; in his old age his only companion is his accountant, Levinsky (Roger Coggio), a survivor of the 1848 pogrom against Polish Jews, who is equally dry and lonely. Levinsky lives in a solitary flat, viewed discreetly through a window from out in the street as he draws a blind for privacy. “Desire,” Welles comments, “had been washed, bleached, and burnt out of him before he had learned to read,” and yet “things not to be recounted and hardly to be recalled still moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind.” Both men, in their different ways, have tried to protect themselves against the passage of time and the dangers of life by retreating into their houses, by repressing their feelings, and by giving themselves over to an absolute materialism. Clay devotes himself to his goods, whereas Levinsky marshals columns of figures; between them, as Dinesen says, there is “a kind of relation.”