The Magic World of Orson Welles (53 page)

I could go on at length, noting various deletions and changes, but two further examples should be sufficient to show how the studio's revisions affected some of the film's most ingeniously planned episodes. First, consider the scenes at “Morning Beach” in Acapulco, where Grisby tempts O'Hara, taking him up to a mountaintop and offering him money to participate in a fake murder. In the final shooting script this sequence is much more explicitly satiric. As Grisby and O'Hara stroll up the hillside from the beach, Grisby's remarks are systematically played off against American tourists in the background, whose conversations about money become obsessive and
nightmarish. We see a little girl attempting to get her mother to buy her a fancy drink. “But mommy,” she says, “it ain't even one dollar!” Then a honeymoon couple walks past. “Sure it's our honeymoon,” the young man says, “but that's a two-million-dollar account.” An older lady and her husband cross in front of the camera, arguing about taxi fare. “I practically had to pay him by the mile,” the lady complains. A gigolo speaks to a girl seated on a rock. “Fulco made it for her,” he announces. “Diamonds and emeralds—must've cost a couple of oil wells. And she only wears it on her bathing suit.” Another young couple walks up the steps from the beach, the man rubbing his nose with zinc oxide as he mutters, “But listen, Edna, you've got to realize pesos is real money.” Two girls enter the scene, one of them saying, “Heneral—that means General—in the army like. Only this one's rich.” Meanwhile, through all of this, Grisby babbles about the atomic bomb and the end of the world, ultimately turning and asking O'Hara, “How would you like to make five thousand dollars, fella?”

As I indicate in
chapter 5
, some of this material remains in the released film, but the sound mix and the retakes—most of them involving reaction shots of Welles against a process screen—deprive the sequence of its rhythm, its counterpointed dialogue, and its hallucinatory intensity. In similar fashion, the spectacular concluding sequences, when Elsa, Bannister, and O'Hara confront one another in an amusement park Crazy House, have been condensed significantly. For example, we have lost a scene where O'Hara talks with Bessie, Elsa's black maid, just outside the hall of mirrors. (Nearly every sequence involving Bessie, played by Evelyn Ellis and described in the script as “no Aunt Jemima,” was cut or reduced by the film's editors.) Also lost are various practical jokes that O'Hara encounters as he makes his way through what Welles called the “Caligari” room of the fun house—including a moment when a skeletal figure looms out at him, garbed in a blonde wig and clothing similar to Elsa's.

According to the script, the initial version of the film contained a slightly longer exchange between the three principal characters in the mirror maze. This condensation must have been especially troubling for Welles, not only because the sequence as it now stands is among the most admired set pieces in his career but also because it is the culmination of an idea he had nursed from the time he first came to Hollywood. Near the end of
Citizen Kane
he had shown the protagonist walking along a mirrored corridor that cast his reflection into infinity. In August 1941, not long after the release of
Kane
, he had hoped to elaborate the mirror effect in
Love Story
—a script written by John Fante about the relationship between a working-class Italian couple
living in the North Beach area of San Francisco in 1909. (This short film would have been an episode in a longer project called
It's All True
—a North American precursor to the movie Welles later tried to make in Brazil.) The opening of
Love Story
would have shown the couple meeting and carrying on a courtship against the background of a series of “attractions” in a North Beach amusement park. They would have looked into a penny picture machine showing a movie called
Sins of Paris
; boarded a “Scenic Railway” that traveled to exotic places; entered a “Foolish House” that frightened people with spooky practical jokes; and walked through the “Crystal Maze,” carrying on a conversation while “faced by a thousand reflections.”

Welles never made
Love Story
, but in 1944, soon after leaving RKO, he tried to use the mirror idea once again in a project called
Don't Catch Me
, based on a book by Richard Powell, written with Bud Pearson and Les White. Trade papers of that year announced he would direct the picture, which never obtained backing. A genial comic thriller described as a “farce melodrama,”
Don't Catch Me
told the story of a sophisticated honeymoon couple named Arab and Andy who, rather like Nick and Nora Charles, uncover a ring of Nazi spies working on Long Island. In terms of sexual politics the script was considerably more advanced than the MGM
Thin Man
series, and it might have made Welles seem a slightly less misogynistic director. Equally important to my argument, it would have given him an opportunity to stage the amusement park scene he had long imagined. He wanted to end the story with a chase through a deserted fun house; Arab, Andy, and the Nazi spies would find themselves lost in a gothic “Tunnel of Love” and end up in a mirror maze, where their reflections would be multiplied endlessly.

It is doubtful that either of these films would have shown us a hall of mirrors to equal the one in
The Lady from Shanghai
. I mention them chiefly because they illustrate how one of Welles's ideas went through a process of rewriting and revision, ultimately finding a context in which it was executed brilliantly. When it finally reached the screen, however, the mirror sequence was a fragment, with no clear point of origin and no definitive conclusion. (Welles continued to experiment with the same idea as late as
The Other Side of the Wind
, where, in a bewildering movie-within-the-movie, he shows the reflections of Oja Kodar and Bob Random reflected in a maze of window glass on a building in Los Angeles.) By the same token, many of the films Welles directed after
Kane
never became “works.” Even if we could recover every frame of film he shot we would not be able to restore his career to an imagined fullness, nor could we transform his various projects into a neatly catalogued set of objects, like volumes on a shelf. At best we could only point
to a web of performing situations or texts through which he tried to assert what, in his AFI acceptance speech, he called his “contrariety.”

The scholarly attempt to define or restore Welles's works is therefore rather like Thompson's search for Rosebud: it leaves us confronted with an inventory, feeling that a missing piece might complete a puzzle, yet knowing that even when the piece is found, it cannot sum up the story. As Thompson recognizes, however, the meaning of an inquiry lies not in a goal we arrive at but in a process we go through. In this sense there are no endings anywhere, and no completed works. During the mid-forties, when he was plagued by debts and Hollywood producers, Orson Welles must have adopted a roughly similar attitude, viewing his art with a good deal of irony. If I had to choose one piece of evidence as proof, it would be a line that was cut from
The Lady from Shanghai
. Variations of the line were supposed to occur at several junctures, becoming another of the film's motifs. Michael O'Hara speaks it first during his conversation with Elsa Bannister in Central Park, and I appropriate his words here, for the sake of my own qualified summing up: “Sure, you can't decide about anything till it's all over and done, and even then you can't be certain, because who knows when anything's done with—for good and all.”

In place of footnotes or a formal bibliography, I am providing an account of my chief sources for each chapter, plus additional bibliographic listings for the later editions of the book. Certain items have been used often enough to warrant a separate listing. These are:

Bazin, André.
Orson Welles
. Preface by Jean Cocteau. Paris: Editions Chavane, 1950.

Bessy, Maurice.
Orson Welles. Cinéma d'Aujourd'hui
, series no. 6. Paris: Editions Seghers, 1970.

Cowie, Peter.
A Ribbon of Dreams: The Cinema of Orson Welles
. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1973.

Gottesman, Ronald, ed.
Focus on “Citizen Kane.”
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

———.
Focus on Orson Welles
. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976.

Higham, Charles.
The Films of Orson Welles
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

Kael, Pauline.
The Citizen Kane Book
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

McBride, Joseph.
Orson Welles
. New York: Viking Press, 1972. Rev. and exp. ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996.

I have also made extensive use of the
New York Times, Newsweek, Time, Variety
, the
Hollywood Reporter
, and
Motion Picture Herald
.

Biographical information is drawn chiefly from Russell Maloney, “Orson Welles,”
New Yorker
(Oct. 5, 1938); Alva Johnson and Fred Smith, “How to Raise a Child,”
Saturday Evening Post
(Jan. 20–27, Feb. 3, 1940); Roy Alexander
Fowler,
Orson Welles: A First Biography
(London: Pendulum Publications, 1946); Peter Noble,
The Fabulous Orson Welles
(London: Hutchinson, 1956); John Houseman,
Run-Through: A Memoir
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972); Micheál MacLiammóir,
All for Hecuba
(London: Methuen, 1950). Quotations from
Bright Lucifer
are courtesy of the Center for Theater Research, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. Useful background information on theater and radio in the thirties is contained in Gerald Rabkin's
Drama and Commitment
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), and in
Radio Drama in Action
, edited by Erik Barnouw (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1945). See also Hadley Cantril's
Invasion from Mars
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966). A brief history of RKO may be found in “RKO Radio: An Overview” by Tim Onosko in
Velvet Light Trap
, no. 10 (Fall 1973). See also John Davis's “Studio Chronology” in the same issue. Jonathan Rosenbaum's discussion of
Heart of Darkness
, together with excerpts from Welles's script, appeared in
Film Comment
(Nov.-Dec. 1972). Information on
Smiler with a Knife
and
The Way to Santiago
was obtained courtesy of Richard Wilson and the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

My arguments on deep-focus photography and motion picture soundtracks were influenced by Noel Burch's
Theory of Film Practice
(New York: Praeger, 1973). Burch is also important to my understanding of “self-reflexive” cinema. Gregg Toland's essay on his photography for
Citizen Kane
appeared first in
American Cinematographer
but is conveniently reprinted in Gottesman's
Focus on “Citizen Kane.”
See also André Bazin's “The Evolution of Film Language” in
What Is Cinema
, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); and Brian Henderson's “The Long Take” in
Film Comment
(Summer 1971). A useful reference on optical printing and other techniques of motion picture photography is
Practical Motion Picture Photography
, edited by Russell Campbell (Cranbury, NJ: A. S. Barnes, 1970). For an “orthodox” view of how lenses should be used in the classic Hollywood movie, see Jay Donohue, “Focal Length and Creative Perspective,”
American Cinematographer
(July 1966). David Bordwell's essay “
Citizen Kane
” appeared first in
Film Comment
(Summer 1971), and is reprinted in Gottesman's
Focus on Orson Welles
. Hiram Sherman is quoted from Richard France's “
The Shoemaker's Holiday
at the Mercury Theatre,” in
Theatre Survey
(Nov. 1975). George Coulouris's remarks appear in an interview with Ted Gilling in
Sight and Sound
(Summer 1973).
François Truffaut's comments on Welles's acting are taken from the official program of the AFI “Life Achievement Award” ceremony honoring Welles.

See David Bordwell's essay on
Kane
, mentioned in my notes to chapter 2. See also Robert L. Carringer's “Rosebud, Dead or Alive,”
PMLA
(March 1976), “
Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby
, and Some Conventions of American Narrative,”
Critical Inquiry
(Winter 1975), and “The Scripts of
Citizen Kane
,”
Critical Inquiry
5 (1978). For a useful discussion of self-reflexive narrative in
Kane
, I recommend Kenneth Hope's unpublished thesis, “Film and Meta-Narrative” (Bloomington, Indiana University, 1975). The various biographies of W. R. Hearst include Mrs. Freemont Older,
William Randolph Hearst, American
(New York: Appleton-Century, 1936); Ferdinand Lundberg,
Imperial Hearst
(New York: Modern Library, 1937); and W. A. Swanberg,
Citizen Hearst
(New York: Scribner, 1961). For comments on the politics of
Kane
, see Charles Eckert, “Anatomy of a Proletarian Film,”
Film Quarterly
(Spring 1975): 65–76. See also Harry Wasserman, “Ideological Gunfight at the RKO Corral,”
Velvet Light Trap
, no. 11 (1974): 7–11.

I am grateful to Richard Wilson, who allowed me to glance at the Mercury files on the production of
Ambersons
, including the last pages of the cutting continuity. I also consulted two scripts of the film at the Museum of Modern Art and the RKO press book at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. For a discussion of the theme of pastoral in English literature, see Raymond Williams,
The Country and the City
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). See also Michael Wood, “Parade's End,”
American Film
(March 1976). Bernard Herrmann's remarks on the original conclusion of the film are quoted from an interview at England's National Film Theatre, published in the
Miklos Roja Society Newsletter
(Summer 1974). For information about “The Two Black Crows,” I am indebted to the Archive of Contemporary Music at Indiana University.