by Simon Callow
‘Now listen dear,’ she wrote, in an effort to get him to face the realities of his situation. ‘We are not advocating a star-spangled month of January just for the sake of spending money or making agents happy. We are doing it in a desperate attempt to save you and to save your show … who will you take? Who – of comparable box-office stature? I don’t give a god-damn whether they’re great actresses. We’re past the point where we can consider that. ARE THEY BOX OFFICE? Will the public – a large and sizeable proportion of the illiterate, tasteless proletariat that is the radio audience of America tune out Charlie McCarthy simply and solely because they NEVER miss ANYTHING their darling does? I don’t care who you choose. But tell me SOMEBODY. Don’t just waste time by telling me who you WON’T have. Tell me who you WILL. Who you WANT to HAVE?’ ‘Welles was famous, terribly famous and highly regarded,’ Paul Stewart told Francois Thomas. ‘So much so that the guests, and they were great stars, were more terrified of broadcasting than of anything else. They had no experience of it. One week, a great star came on the show, and he sacked her. It was unbelievable: we had to call the sponsor and they gave her an enormous sum for the period, $5,000, unheard of. He rehearsed her, and then sacked her. It was terrible. He did it decently, apologising, privately first and then in front of other people, saying that it was entirely his fault, that he’d made a mess of the casting, and had been misled by others. It was not funny at all.’ Compromised by celebrity casting and the increasingly recycled nature of the material (It Happened One Night, Broome Stages, Only Angels Have Wings, The Citadel and June Moon being typical fare), the programmes had fallen into an unremarkable routine level, half drama, half chat-show, reflecting Welles’s waning enthusiasm for the medium. Still, Welles wrote a defiant telegram to Diana Bourbon, stating his credo: ‘please remember that whatever gives our format individuality beyond regular interest attaching itself to our guest is my own extremely personal rather particular style which must needs express authentically my own enthusiasm and tastes’.9 Welles’s Playhouse ended in March of 1940, after prolonged squabbles throughout his first year in Hollywood; but that was the credo which alone kept him going through the dark months ahead.
His most pressing concern, of course, was to decide on a subject for his first film. He had been contracted to make two films, the first to be delivered ‘no later than January 1st, 1940’. One of RKO’s few remaining contractual rights was that of story approval; intensive consultations with Schaefer had produced a list of potential titles of which the favourites for Welles were Heart of Darkness (which he had included in a recent triple bill for the Mercury Theatre of the Air) and that old ignis fatuus of stage actors, Cyrano de Bergerac. Like Charles Laughton, Welles was convinced that the adventures in rhyming couplets of the nasally challenged Gascon would make a successful English-language film; Schaefer and his advisers were less convinced. Out of deference to Welles, to show very clearly that they were not interested in simply imposing their will on him, they decided to put it to the test. The Gallup organisation was commissioned to poll the relative popularity of various projects. Their results were unequivocal: to the question ‘Which would make best movie?’ Northwest Passage was chosen by 44 per cent, Rebecca 28 per cent, Grapes of Wrath 25 per cent; both Heart of Darkness and Cyrano were chosen by 3 per cent. (The services of Dr Gallup were further employed to discover what the public thought about Welles himself, and the results were gratifying: only 36 per cent of those questioned liked him; but – a sensational figure – 91 per cent knew who he was; and only 2 per cent, reassuringly, were against his beard.) Perhaps encouraged by these findings Schaefer backed Welles to do Heart of Darkness, despite the unequivocal verdict of the market researchers, because Welles had convinced him that it would be cinematically experimental and could be made political and controversial. Although Schaefer had no intention of losing money from whatever Welles finally came up with, he saw clearly that there was no point in trying to get a merely well-made film out of him. He needed something that would trade in on his notoriety – that would be distinctively Wellesian: flamboyant, ambitious, and controversial, without being too nakedly theatrical (as Cyrano could certainly have seemed). The RKO board, meanwhile, had other ideas: they were still pressing Welles to film The War of the Worlds, but Schaefer saw that as merely réchauffé. If, as Welles promised, Heart of Darkness would be innovative and provocative, as well as being Prestige Work, then he would back it. It would define the new RKO as nothing else could.
So Welles set to work on making a screenplay out of Conrad’s dense, mysterious, endlessly resonant story of Charlie Marlow’s search up river in quest of Mr Kurtz, the trader turned God. It was a challenge that few experienced writers would have dreamt of taking on. Welles asked Houseman to do a treatment for him, but he gave up almost immediately, finding the undertaking both impossible and pointless. ‘Orson, who was beginning to have his own doubts about the project,’10 wrote Houseman, ‘had the satisfaction of feeling that he had, once again, been betrayed.’ Houseman returned, sulkily, to New York to run the radio show; their only contact was when Welles made his weekly journey east. In his work on the screenplay, Welles proceeded slowly and methodically, pasting the pages of the novel into large scrapbooks, making drawings and notes on every phase of the story. He had Richard Baer conduct a study of tribal anthropology which ran to 3,000 pages, meanwhile conducting a self-education in film-making wherever he could get it. Amalia Kent, an experienced and quick-witted continuity supervisor, was seconded to brief him on screenplay form, while Miriam Geiger taught him the essential grammar of film-making; her hand-made lexicon of lenses and shots is, even today, a model of simplicity and clarity. Thus instructed by these two ladies, he put their lessons into practical effect in his script, as well as everything that he learned from the RKO technical departments. Wide-eyed, he toured the mediaeval manor that was a Hollywood studio in 1939 – like Todd School writ large – meeting the craftsmen, taking note of the capacity of the workshops, examining the contents of the wardrobe and property departments. It was now that he made his justly famous remark about a studio being the best electric train set a boy ever had: he was powerfully struck by the comparison with the bloody-minded willpower and dogged ingenuity that he, Houseman and Jeannie Rosenthal had needed to make anything happen in the theatre at all. His passionate technical curiosity was answered to his total satisfaction; he had films run for him night after night, returning again and again to the recently completed Stagecoach to study its narrative mastery. He would ask a different technician each time to watch it with him, asking ‘How was this done? And why?’ It was, he said, like going to school. No one could have been a better student. For once, he prepared everything as thoroughly as could be.
He intended, it is almost superfluous to say, to seize both Conrad and the cinema by the scruffs of their respective necks, and to leave both transformed out of recognition. As far as Conrad is concerned, the initial pull of the story on Welles is clear to see. It had great personal resonance for him; many of its themes continued to fascinate him for the rest of his life. His work on the story, moreover, fed in various subtle and subliminal ways into his first complete film. The central figure of Kurtz is an epitome of the ambiguity of greatness, or, more precisely, of greatness gone wrong; this was an obsession of Welles’s from the first, starting with the brilliantly wicked hero of his teenage play Bright Lucifer and the charismatically inspired but wrong-headed John Brown of Marching Song. It is, in essence, the figure of Faust, the over-reaching genius, willing to trade for passing pleasure – mere material gratification – what it is that truly makes him great. ‘Both the diabolic love,’ says Marlow of Kurtz, ‘and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.’11 And again ‘I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.’ It is abo
ve all his emptiness that defines Kurtz: ‘there was something wanting in him – some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency, I can’t say.’ He is a hollow man (the announcement of his death being the celebrated epigraph, of course, of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men): ‘the wilderness echoed loud with him because he was hollow at the core.’ This hollowness, this absent centre, is common to many American heroes (Gatsby a noted instance); it seems to have rung a bell with Welles himself, as, of course, did the ‘magnificent eloquence’ of Kurtz.
‘Of all his gifts, the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.’ The uncanny power of the voice, the diabolical seduction of words, was a magical attribute with which Welles was entirely familiar. Formally speaking, too, there are aspects of Conrad’s tale which intrigued Welles: Marlow is an ‘unreliable narrator’ – we are never entirely sure whether what he tells us is absolutely true. One of the many reflections that Heart of Darkness provokes is on the nature of story telling: an enormous story within a story, it casts a peculiar and bewitching spell. Story telling, its power and its dangerous seduction, profoundly fascinated Welles. And one of the most compelling aspects of the story Marlow tells is that its hero dies with a mysterious phrase on his lips.
So much for Conrad. Welles determined to make explicit what he found buried in the story. He would bring it up to date, relocate it (to South America) and identify Kurtz for what so obviously he was: a fascist. Possessed by perverted eloquence, fathomlessly corrupt yet worshipped as a god, threatening with his primitive emotionalism the very basis of civilisation, what else could he be? Conrad offers a hint of Kurtz’s political activity (‘He had been writing for the papers and he meant to do so again “for the furthering of my ideas. It’s a duty”’); Welles made the hint a fact. ‘The picture is, frankly,’ he wrote in a memo to Herb Drake, ‘an attack on the Nazi system.’12 He felt a need to give Marlow a character, lacking, he believed, in the book: ‘He is willing to tell you how he murdered his wife but seldom volunteers his name. Being lonely, he protects himself from the spirit of loneliness, by candour. You are immediately in his confidence but he never gives you intimacy.’ Further, he decided that Kurtz and his fiancée (whom he named Elsa; she is known only as the Intended in Conrad’s text) should be gripped by overwhelming lust for each other. At a certain point during the evolution of the script, Herb Drake issued a synopsis of Welles’s treatment to the publicity department of RKO. It gives some indication of Welles’s eagerness to be all things to all men.
‘The story,’ says the memo, ‘is of a man and a girl in love. They are separated by his career at the moment and the girl is coming to find him. The man is exploiting the river as a trader and as an explorer and is the head man of a whole company that is doing this in the name of a non-named foreign government. Girl goes to help rescue him, since he has gone beyond the point reached by any of his assistants and has been missing for some months. There is a hell of an adventure going up the river. The action takes place largely on board a rusty steamwheel paddle steamer and at the stations of the trading Co. along the shore. There is an unhappy ending which we won’t need to mention, man dies and the girl goes away unfulfilled. There are cannibals, shootings, petty bickering among the bureaucrats, native dances, fascinating light-colored native girl who has some connection with our hero. There is a jungle in flames and heavy storms of a spectacular nature … it all builds to a terrific climax …’13 Worried, perhaps, that someone at the publicity department may actually have read the original story, he adds: ‘While he is changing the locale … and adding characters and moving the girl from Europe to the river, Welles is in no way violating Conrad. His feeling is that his treatment of Heart of Darkness is completely in the Conrad spirit and represents what the author would desire done in a film if he were alive today,’ which is what they all say.
Having allayed the anxieties of students of English literature, he next addresses those concerned with the box office: ‘Story appeal: Welles and the girl … Mr Welles is a handsome young man as you know, and we feel that it is important in advertising that he is a broad, muscular, tanned, and handsome leading man … we feel once we get them in the theatre they will go away completely thrilled and satisfied by the film even though it is not exactly in the boy-meets-girl tradition.’ In a description that would certainly have surprised Conrad, Drake avers that the ‘Theory of the story is two moderns who have a hell of an adventure in the dark places of the earth. The idea is more or less that this is the God-damnedest relation between a man and a woman ever put on the screen. It is definitely not “Love in the Tropics”. Everyone and everything is just a little bit off normal, just a little bit oblique – all this being the result of the strange nature of their work – that is, operating as exploiters in surroundings not healthy for a white man.’
They were feeling their way; the script as finally realised abandoned a great deal of this, and added sequences of great visual audacity. The one thing that didn’t change was the thing Drake held to the last – and even then he hesitated to come right out with it. ‘An important selling angle – not only the stars and the story but the audience play a part in this film … it will be a definite experience, a completely unprecedented experience for the audience since it will see a story told in an entirely different way … as Welles develops his method, we will be able to talk about it, but it is still somewhat in the experimental stage so he doesn’t wish to mention it until we can find a convenient formula to express its meaning.’ The secret innovation was that much discussed, almost never deployed technique of the Subjective Camera: the camera is an I. Welles became deeply intrigued by its possibilities, convinced that it was an essentially cinematic notion. This would show them! His final script is perhaps the most thorough-going attempt to realise the technique ever made.
What it is, in fact, is a literal translation of the First Person Singular technique of the radio programmes; so Houseman’s assertion to Ward Wheelock that they would be translating the formula intact into film terms (‘Orson’s function as actor, director, master of ceremonies and narrator in this picture identical to his function on radio show’) was nothing but the truth. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Orson Welles’14 is the first line of the script, over a black screen. ‘Don’t worry, there’s just nothing to look at for a while. You can close your eyes if you want to, but – please open them when I tell you to.’ This magician’s patter leads the audience, their eyes now open, into the notion of the subjective camera: they become a canary in a cage. On the screen is Welles’s mouth, enormously magnified, seen through the bars of the cage. An enormous gun appears, is pointed directly at the camera and is fired; the screen goes to black again. ‘Everything you see on the screen is going to be seen through your eyes and you’re somebody else,’ Welles’s voice explains. The first somebody else is a prisoner being taken to the electric chair and executed. The screen goes into a blinding red stain; the camera blurs, there is a fade to black. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm. This is only a motion picture. Of course you haven’t committed murder and believe me, I wouldn’t electrocute you for the world. Give yourself your right name, please. It might help. All right, now, I think you see what I mean. You’re not going to see this picture – this picture is going to see you.’ Frank Brady describes the rest of this introductory section: ‘a human eye, Magritte-like, with clouds reflected in it, filling the entire scene and then transposing into the view of a golfer who hits a ball; an interior of a motion picture theatre seen from Welles’s perspective on the screen, so that all the members of the audience are cameras.’ Welles says: ‘I hope you get the idea.’ A human eye appears on the left of the screen
, an equals sign appears next to it, followed by a capital I. ‘Finally, the eye winks and we … Dissolve.’ Then, and only then, does Heart of Darkness itself actually take to the screen.
The subjective eye is Marlow’s, and a dozen amusing tricks are played as he lights cigarettes, gets down onto the floor, and is even, at a certain crucial point, glimpsed in a mirror. Marlow, was, of course, to be played by Welles, as was Kurtz; add to that the whimsically didactic introduction, and you are never out of Welles’s presence, whether vocal or physical. ‘One-man picture’ indeed. Welles was simultaneously trying to reinvent the camera, do justice to a great story, make a film that was highly entertaining and politically provocative, and provide himself with several very interesting roles. So much artistic ambition is astonishing. Certainly no one else in Hollywood was capable of a tenth as much. His ability to fulfil all these ambitions is in some question: the screenplay itself, while full of extraordinarily stimulating directions, has newly written dialogue of numbing dreadfulness, replacing Conrad’s mystery with melodrama. Kurtz finally confronts Marlow in these words: ‘Understand this much – Everything I’ve done up here has been done according to the method of my government – Everything. There’s a man now in Europe trying to do what I’ve done in the jungle. He will fail. In his madness he thinks he can’t fail – but he will. A brute can only rule brutes. Remember the meek. I’m a great man, Marlow, really great – greater than great men before me – I know the strength of the enemy its terrible weakness –’ and so on, for some pages. This could come from the weaker passages of The Green Goddess. The introduction to the subjective camera, though absolutely charming in itself, is a curious way in which to start a film as complex and sombre as Heart of Darkness. It is almost impossible to see how that story could follow that wink of Welles’s. As for the subjective camera technique in general, though it is developed, as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, with some complexity and carefully planned not to draw attention to itself (though the introduction of course does just that), it is anyone’s guess as to whether it could have actually been made to work. None the less, the screenplay was a fearless, provocative and immensely talented achievement. It was also, of course, very expensive, which proved to be its undoing.
