The Magic World of Orson Welles (52 page)

These ironies are homologous with the contradictions in Welles's whole approach to his art. On the one hand, he resembled what Antonio Gramsci has termed the “traditional intellectual”; an antibourgeois with European tastes, he was cynical about industrialization and progress, interested in preserving a canonical dramatic literature, and nostalgic for certain values of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, he also resembled Gramsci's opposite type, the “organic intellectual”; a progressive and a populist from the American Midwest, he was a lifelong opponent of racism and fascism, a dazzling impresario of the age of mechanical reproduction, and a show-business personality. For a while he managed to hold these tensions in splendid equilibrium, generating a kind of egocentric leftism in theater, radio, and film. From the beginning, however, his plans were thwarted by the very institutions he sought to energize. Federal censors closed his and John Houseman's one attempt at truly radical drama,
The Cradle Will Rock
, forcing it into a stunning improvised performance that was also the most “directorless” show of Welles's career. Afterward, in the commercial realm, the Mercury Theatre became increasingly dependent on box office receipts, sponsors, and movie studios, until finally the irreconcilable tendencies in Welles's career split apart, giving him two public images. (“What you don't realize,” Kane says to Thatcher, “is that you are talking to two different people.”) To his admirers, he seemed a Byronic loner, forced into European exile and beleaguered independence (in his own words, a “neighborhood grocery in an age of supermarkets”). To his detractors, he seemed bombastic and anachronistic, an ex–boy genius who was the butt of Joan Rivers's jokes and the narrator of
Bugs Bunny Superstar
. Meanwhile the sense of Welles as adversary political artist was repressed or forgotten altogether.

Partly because of the contradictions in his public roles, and partly because of the very nature of his art, Welles produced relatively few things that could be called his “works.” His stage success is a matter of record, but the
shows themselves have vanished. His reputation as a film director has grown steadily, but most of his movies after
Citizen Kane
were incompletely realized; they did not reach the screen, or they were inadequately financed, or they were recut by his producers. This does not mean, however, that he left no marks. Using terminology from one of Roland Barthes's most influential essays, we could say that Welles's artistic activity usually manifested itself somewhere between “works” and “texts.” That is, it never became a series of neatly finished commodities that signify his full intentions or conceptions, nor did it become a radicalized, collective, or corporate discourse that bears no signs of an enunciating author. It operated instead in the “provisional” zone of theater, cinematic fragments, and archival material—a zone where, with varying degrees of success, he established an unorthodox way of speaking. In this zone his dramatic “conceptions” and political attitudes were constantly at play, but they never assumed a definitive shape.

By way of illustrating the situation I have just outlined, let me now turn to some specific cases from the Mercury archive. I shall concentrate on a single phase of Welles's career: the period 1943–47, just after his contract with RKO ended, when his fortunes seemed in precipitous decline. During that five-year period, which I have already discussed in
chapter 5
, he can hardly be said to have been inactive. He wrote a syndicated newspaper column; he directed
Around the World
on the New York stage; he made dozens of public speeches about theater or politics; he appeared regularly on the radio; he placed almost weekly orders for magical equipment; he wrote or supervised several film scripts that never found backers (among them
Salomé, Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind
, and
Carmen
); he costarred in three pictures; and he adapted, directed, and acted in two memorable Hollywood thrillers, one of which is generally regarded as a masterpiece of film noir. Purely for the sake of convenience, my remarks center on the last two films, both of which are problematic “works,” released in a form different from what Welles planned and shot. I do not have space to treat them in detail, but I can at least indicate certain features of their prerelease construction that were not known to me when this book was originally published and that no other writers have described.

The Stranger
, produced by Sam Spiegel's International Pictures and first shown in May 1946, was reduced in length by almost thirty minutes. I have said that it is Welles's most conventional movie, but if we were able to see it
in its long version, that judgment might need qualification. Both the shooting script (presumably written by Anthony Veiller, John Huston, and Welles) and the studio's production log reveal that the film was originally structured as a flashback narrative. It began with a mysterious sequence in which Mary Rankin rises from her bed at midnight, makes her way through a graveyard, and emerges into a New England town square, where she enters the door of a church and begins to climb an enormous clock belfry. A crowd gathers in the square, armed with scythes, pitchforks, shotguns, and any weapon at hand. From the crowd's viewpoint, we see two figures emerge onto the ledge of the clock tower—a male and a female, locked in a struggle. Both figures topple from the ledge and fall to their death. The crowd is as shocked and baffled as we are, and people begin to ask questions: “Know who they were?” “What happened?” “Who was he?” Fade out. Against a dark screen the main title of the picture appears. Behind it, the grotesque figure of an iron demon moves forward out of the darkness and toward the camera. As the credits appear, the camera tracks backward, revealing that the demon is part of a huge clockwork. Moving out of a portal, it turns and begins to circle the pedestal of the clock, followed by another figure that enters behind it—an iron angel in feminine robes, brandishing a sword. Just as Welles's name appears as the final credit, the clock strikes twelve.

This witty, “magical” introduction was followed by a surreal opening passage in which Konrad Meinike—an escaped Nazi war criminal who is clearly schizophrenic—tries to locate a man named Franz Kindler in Argentina so that he can deliver a message from God. Meinike is picked up by fellow Nazis and taken to the offices of a dog-training farm somewhere in the countryside, where he is given truth serum and questioned. Throughout the sequence, we hear the vicious barking of German shepherds in the background:

FAIRBRIGHT
: Why do you want to see [Franz Kindler]? What is so important about it?

MEINIKE
: I have a message from him.

FAIRBRIGHT
: From whom?

MEINIKE
: From the All Highest.

(The three inquisitors instinctively stiffen. FAIRBRIGHT's heels actually click.)

FAIRBRIGHT
: Why did you not tell us this before?

Muttering incoherently and still feeling the effects of the drug, Meinike is then sent to a white-walled city morgue, where a bored night attendant sits at a desk trimming his toenails. The attendant explains the procedure for
making fake passports. Taking papers from a corpse, he tells Meinike to visit a photographer; indeed we glimpse that visit in the released version of
The Stranger
, and it is among the most striking, characteristically Wellesian moments of the entire picture.

Welles frequently commented on the loss of the Latin American sequences of
The Stranger
, which were far more eerie and complex than my summary indicates. He even told Barbara Leaming that he received a scar on his leg while shooting them—almost the only mark left to remind him they once existed. “You don't know what it was like on the screen!” he said, and attributed the loss to Ernest Nims, an editor “who believed that nothing should be left in a movie that did not advance the story.” To my knowledge, however, Welles never mentioned that Nims also removed material from a later point in the film, when Mary Rankin discovers that the man she has married is in reality Franz Kindler, one of the architects of the Nazi death camps. Mary collapses; at this point we were supposed to see an expressionistic, forties-style dream sequence, showing Mary's brother, Noah, suspended from an infinitely high ladder, a barking dog below him. Suddenly Noah transforms into Kindler. Meanwhile, on the soundtrack, accompanied by what the shooting script describes as “queer music,” we were supposed to hear dialogue representing “quite realistically” what goes on in the room after Mary faints: Noah arrives, accompanied by the investigator Wilson and Judge Longstreet, and calls the police. The last line of dialogue is spoken by a doctor: “We'll get her to bed and she'll be fine. . . . You need have no fear.” As the line is spoken, Mary's delirium takes over completely. The figure of Kindler, holding the rungs of a “cosmic ladder,” turns and addresses the camera, repeating the doctor's words: “You need have no fear.” The camera moves in on his face until one of his eyes fills the screen. “Failing to speak,” he says, “you become part of the crime.”

This sequence is pregnant with Wellesian possibilities, including an interesting montage of conflicts between sound and image. We cannot know exactly how it was realized, but at least we have Welles's next, more ambitious, film,
The Lady from Shanghai
, to show us what he could accomplish with similar material. As I have already explained, however,
The Lady from Shanghai
is also incomplete, reduced by almost one hour from its prerelease form. Welles had begun shooting the film at Columbia Pictures on October 2, 1946, and had completed the principal photography on January 22, 1947. From that point until mid-March 1947, the film was substantially revised, with Harry Cohn ordering various cuts and retakes. Production then resumed for about eleven days to reshoot certain material and add close-ups. (The last shot
photographed was a close-up of Welles in front of a process screen, making his famous speech about hungry sharks off the coast of Brazil. In the earlier version the speech was played on location in a tightly framed composition involving four people.) By the time the next stage of postproduction was completed,
The Lady from Shanghai
had gone about four hundred thousand dollars over budget and was a much shorter picture. Many of its most celebrated passages—including the “Morning Beach” scenes in Acapulco, the drunken seaside “Barbecue,” the San Francisco aquarium sequence, the chase through the Chinese theater, and the apocalyptic “Crazy House” finale—were abridged in order to bring the film down to ordinary length. Welles's evocative offscreen narration was added at the last minute, to smooth over the ragged condensation. Finally, after a somewhat disappointing preview, the film was given a new music score and was cut once again by Viola Lawrence, who, according to Welles, made drastic changes.

In later years Welles said little about what had been done to the film, although he often complained about the score Columbia used. It is clear from the correspondence in the Mercury archive that he had specific ideas about music; he wrote detailed instructions about how certain actions on the screen ought to be scored, and he and Richard Wilson negotiated long and unsuccessfully for the rights to a song titled “Caminante del Mayab,” which they hoped would be performed by the Mexican singer Pedro Vargas. The archival material also makes clear, however, that Viola Lawrence's editing of the film involved major alterations, leaving whole sequences on the cutting room floor.

In its penultimate form,
The Lady from Shanghai
was a complex but slightly more comprehensible narrative, articulating the motives of the characters and the convolutions of the murder plot in greater detail. Like all of Welles's Hollywood films, it had an impressively atmospheric, somewhat enigmatic opening development. But here again, as in the case of
The Stranger
, the opening was largely eliminated, apparently because Welles did not follow the straightforward logic of classic studio cinema. One of the scripts in the archive—a cutting continuity labeled “Scenes as Shot,” dated early January 1947—enables us to partly reconstruct his design. He had intended to begin with a sinister network of actions, structured by crosscutting and a series of intersecting movements of camera and players. First we would have seen a brief montage of New York spires and tenements suffering under the heat of an August night. Cut to a tracking shot of a man following a woman down the streets until she enters Central Park. Cut to El Morocco, where George Grisby, described in the script as a “sweaty, aging playboy,” is scribbling doodles on a tablecloth as “hot
rumba music” fills the room. A waiter enters the frame, leans down to Grisby's apprehensive ear, and whispers, “She hasn't called.” Dissolve to a radio, with the El Morocco music coming tinnily through its speaker. A telephone beside the radio rings, and Arthur Bannister picks it up. “Yes?” he says, and reaches for a bottle of pills. (These pills were supposed to function as a motif; later, in another scene that was cut, Elsa Bannister tells Michael O'Hara that she would like to take enough of her husband's pain pills to end her own life—a remark that becomes ironic in light of the courtroom sequence toward the end, when O'Hara himself takes them.) “What do you mean—
you lost her?
” Bannister shouts angrily into the telephone. Cut to Sidney Broom, speaking from a phone booth in a garage; he tells Bannister that he has followed Elsa into Central Park, where she hired a horse and buggy. Cut to Central Park, where Michael O'Hara is strolling along and singing a tune as Elsa's carriage trots past him.

Welles had initiated the chance encounter between Michael and Elsa with a lengthy tracking shot—quite similar to the one he would use later in
Touch of Evil
—showing Elsa in the carriage, Michael on foot, and a police car cruising past as the couple ultimately meet at a stoplight and exchange words. Shortly afterward, Michael comes across Elsa at another place in the park and rescues her from a mugging. As he drives her hackney cab back to the city, we were supposed to see a longer conversation between the two, in which their characters were developed. At one point in these missing scenes, Michael compares the horse to Rocinante and himself to Don Quixote. “I remember,” Elsa says, “Rocinante was the old nag Don Quixote rode when he went out after those windmills. . . . You'd better be careful. Things have changed.” This remark was intended to function as another of the film's motifs; for example, in a later scene Elsa would accuse Michael of trying to “act like books,” and he would disagree, insisting that people could actually be “better than books.” But in a memo to the studio cutters, Harry Cohn ordered virtually all such references cut from the release print.