The Magic World
of Orson Welles
The Magic World
of Orson Welles
Centennial Anniversary Edition
JAMES NAREMORE
© 1978 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
© 1989, 2015 by James Naremore
Reprinted by arrangement with the author.
All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Photo credits: RKO, Columbia Pictures, Wisconsin Center for
Film and Theater Research, Universal Pictures.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Naremore, James.
The magic world of Orson Welles / James Naremore. —
Centennial anniversary edition.
pages cm
Includes filmography.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-03977-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-252-08131-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)—
ISBN 978-0-252-09787-4 (e-book)
1. Welles, Orson, 1915–1985 — Criticism and interpretation. I.
Title.
PN1998.3.w45N37 2015
791.4302'33092—dc23 2015006093
[B]
For my son, Jay, as usual,
and in memory of Rosa Hart, my favorite director
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Orson Welles at 100
1 The Prodigy
2 The Magician
3 Citizen Kane
4 The Magnificent Ambersons
5 The Radicalization of Style
6 Touch of Evil
7 The Gypsy
8 The Trial
9 Chimes at Midnight
10 Art about Art (and Sex)
11 Between Works and Texts
Bibliographic Notes
Filmography
Index
Acknowledgments
My work on the first edition of this book, published in 1978, was supported by many institutions and individuals. The office of Research and Graduate Development at Indiana University provided me with a summer grant in 1976, and the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a summer fellowship the following year. In addition to these agencies, I was assisted by Charles Silver and the staff at the Museum of Modern Art, and by librarians at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Wisconsin Center for Theater Research. Among the individuals, I must first of all thank film director Richard Wilson, an old friend of Welles, who answered my questions, allowed me to glance at the Mercury Theatre files, and gave me a memorable day in Hollywood. Ronald Gottesman, Robert Carringer, and Joseph McBride also helped with their knowledge about Welles. Claudia Gorbman and the late Charles Eckert, my colleagues at Indiana, read early parts of the manuscript and gave important criticisms. Joanne Eustis made a crucially important gift of her extensive library research on Welles, and Bill Kelly, Mark Kemmerle, Robert Ray, and Dennis Turner all read individual chapters and offered comments on the films.
The scope and shape of the book were influenced strongly by my editor at Oxford University Press, James Raimes, who also made a number of important incidental suggestions; for his faith in the project and for his intelligent, sympathetic ear, I owe him gratitude. I want also to thank Ellen Posner for her editorial assistance, and William Stott of the University of Texas, who recommended my work to Oxford at an early stage.
The book never would have been written at all without the enthusiasm of students in Comparative Literature C491 at Indiana, who inspired me and contributed many ideas about Welles’s films. And for moral support when the going was roughest, I owe thanks to Ken Gros Louis, Harry and Carolyn Geduld, Lee Chelminiak, and Melinda Giles. Parts of chapter 5, in a different form, appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly and Focus on Orson Welles, and I am grateful to the editors, Thomas Erskine and Ronald Gottesman, for their encouragement.
For making the second edition of the book possible in 1989, I thank Suzanne Comer, Bill May, and the staff of Southern Methodist University Press. Special thanks to Martha Farlow for her handsome design, and to Elli Puffe and Kathy Lewis, who repaired my terrible spelling and helped to correct the multitude of mangled names and printing errors that had found their way into the original version. A few others also deserve mention: Jonathan Rosenbaum generously shared his ideas about Welles and helped me to see some of the late films. William G. Simon and the faculty of the Cinema Studies program at New York University honored me with an invitation to speak on Welles at a symposium they organized in May 1988; my talk on that occasion, subsequently published in the journal Persistence of Vision, provided the basis for the concluding chapter.
For this third edition, my thanks to Daniel Nasset and the staff of the University of Illinois Press. Special thanks to Jill Hughes for her expert copy-editing (who knew there was so much left to be done?), Tad Ringo for his supervision of production, and Lisa Connery for her design. And to Darlene Sadlier, who gave me her advice, support, and love.
INTRODUCTION
Orson Welles at 100
When the first edition of The Magic World of Orson Welles was published by Oxford University Press in 1978, I was a young college professor trained in literature and new to writing about film, without access to the trove of archival and biographical material on Welles that has since become available. Welles was alive and active, but when I wrote to him in the wild hope of seeing Don Quixote and some of his other unfinished work, he never replied. This was perhaps just as well. I was able to remain an independent observer, concentrating on the public record and aiming at a close study of the released films, most of which, in that pre-digital age, were available in 16mm prints.
When a second, revised edition of my book, containing a new concluding chapter, was published by Southern Methodist University Press in 1989, I noted in the preface the melancholy fact that it was now possible to begin a book about Welles in the same fashion as some of his films: with the death of the protagonist. Welles had died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1985, at the age of seventy. He was found with his typewriter in his lap, working until the very end. A day before, he had taped an appearance on Merv Griffin’s television show, where he performed a charming card trick and wryly described old age as a “shipwreck.” Although his health had not been good, he was quite busy. (An extended discussion of his crowded late years can be found in Joseph McBride’s Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?) Jonathan Rosenbaum has estimated conservatively that during the first half of the 1980s alone, Welles was working on at least a dozen films or scripts for films, among them The Magic Show (documenting his magic act, without camera tricks); Don Quixote (begun in the 1950s); The Assassin (about Sirhan Sirhan); The Other Man (based on Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul); Dead Giveaway (based on Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman); The Dreamers (derived from two Isak Dinesen stories); King Lear (a sort of video closet drama to be shot mostly in black-and-white close-ups); and Mercedes (from a short story by his late-life partner, Oja Kodar).
This prodigious quantity of work was not unusual for Welles. Throughout his life he was involved in multiple activities and at times seemed to operate in a whirlwind. In the single year of 1940, for example, he produced, directed, acted in, and supervised scripts for a dozen radio dramas; appeared as a guest on a couple of other radio programs; oversaw the production of a recorded version of Macbeth by the Mercury players; toured thirteen cities with a lecture titled “The New Actor”; wrote a screenplay for Dolores del Rio; completed the screenplays for Smiler with a Knife and
Mexican Melodrama (discussed in chapter 2); completed the screenplay and principal photography of Citizen Kane; sought Richard Wright’s approval for the forthcoming Mercury stage production of Native Son; and consulted with a dozen US ministers of various faiths regarding his idea for a film about the life of Jesus Christ, in which Christ’s face would never be shown and all the dialogue and narration would come directly from the Bible.
Fragments of Welles’s prolific output keep appearing, and it seems likely that many years will pass before there can be a full discussion of them. Meanwhile, he still makes news. In 2012 there were headlines around the world announcing that Citizen Kane, which since 1962 had been named the best film of all time in the prestigious Sight and Sound poll of filmmakers and critics, had fallen to the number two spot, displaced by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I had the privilege of voting that year and I confess that I did not vote for Kane (nor did I vote for Vertigo). In my opinion, no film is more emblematic of the cinema than Kane, but after decades of showing it to students I feel its canonicity has become a burden. It has acquired an aura of respectability and seriousness, and in schools (maybe because of people like me) it is often treated as something to be studied rather than thoughtfully enjoyed. My students like it, but from everything they have heard before viewing it, they expect it to be life-changing. Nobody should see any film for the first time expecting that result. As a voter in the Sight and Sound poll, I wanted to divest Kane of the weight of first prize and call attention to other films by Welles. I could have named The Magnificent Ambersons or Chimes at Midnight, but I chose Touch of Evil. If I have the opportunity to vote again, I will choose something else. But a film by Welles will always be in my top ten.
The most exciting discovery for Wellesians in 2014, while I was preparing this new edition, was the film footage intended to accompany Too Much Johnson, Welles’s 1938 Mercury Theatre adaptation of a stage farce by William Gillette. This footage (photographed by New York cameramen Harry Dunham and Paul Dunbar) was Welles’s first professional attempt at moviemaking. Intended as an introductory exposition for each act of the fast-paced play, it was shot in the style of silent comedy, but the Connecticut summer theater where Too Much Johnson had its out-of-town tryout was inadequately equipped to project film. The footage was never screened with the play and was thought to have been destroyed by a fire at Welles’s home in Madrid in 1970. Its reemergence in pristine condition, albeit incompletely edited and full of retakes, is something of a miracle. A witty, often thrilling pastiche of silent pictures (an “interior” set lit by daylight, a daredevil chase across rooftops à la Harold Lloyd, and a couple of montages reminiscent of René Clair and the European avant-garde), it is also a distinctively Wellesian creation, with extreme wide-angle, deep-focus compositions that prefigure Kane (as when we see Joseph Cotten’s very large head in the foreground and a tiny figure in the distance pursuing him), and an impressively unorthodox blocking of the actors (as when the camera looks down from a great height at a group of men who move rapidly in unison from one point to another like a big, swift worm). The second half of the film, which is supposed to take place in Cuba, is not as good as the city chase scenes, chiefly because Welles had to fake a Cuban landscape somewhere in New York, but it includes a wonderfully surreal shot looking up from the ground at a mountainous ridge where two barely visible men flail away in a sword fight, with Joseph Cotten and his umbrella caught between them.
In the late 1980s I saw parts of three other unfinished or un-exhibited films by Welles: Don Quixote, The Merchant of Venice, and The Dreamers. I’ve subsequently also seen bits of The Deep, discussed in chapter 10, and some other films discussed below. Even when shots or sounds are missing or when optical transitions are marked with wax pencil, all of these films provide evidence of his undiminished intelligence and artistry. Quixote is especially impressive for its black-and-white, wide-angle perspectives of Spanish landscape and for the performances of two exceptional actors, Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff, who play Quixote and Sancho Panza. Welles narrates and frequently dubs his narrator’s voice in place of the actors’ so that nearly everything remains at the level of discourse rather than pure representation—a technique motivated by Welles’s plan to frame the film with scenes of him reading the story to a young girl (originally played by Patty McCormack). Sometimes the actors directly address the camera/narrator in a style similar to the opening scenes of The Magnificent Ambersons, and they play scenes in contemporary settings; at one point, for example, Sancho Panza gives Quixote a bath outdoors on a rooftop, and in the distance we see a neon sign advertising “Don Quixote Cerveza.” Throughout, Welles’s identification with the aging knight and love for the beauty of preindustrial Spain is palpable. Probably he wants us to see the film and his entire career as a quixotic adventure. Unfortunately, his Quixote will always remain incomplete. In 1992 Spanish director Jesus Franco assembled a feature-length version of the film by mixing Welles’s footage with completely different material from a 1961 documentary Welles had shot in Spain. Franco’s film is currently available on YouTube but is an unattractive and unreliable guide to Welles’s intentions.
Also from the last years of Welles’s life were two screenplays that were posthumously published. The first of these, The Big Brass Ring, cowritten by Welles and his late-life companion, Oja Kodar, concerns Democratic senator and presidential candidate Blake Pellarin, who tracks down his aging, disgraced Harvard mentor and arranges a secret meeting with him in Spain. Described by Welles as a “terrible love story between two men,” The Big Brass Ring is also a hallucinated political allegory with echoes of Heart of Darkness and Citizen Kane, climaxing with revelations of the senator’s conflicted sexuality and murderous instincts. (In 1997 George Hickenlooper and F. X. Feeney freely adapted The Big Brass Ring for a Showtime TV movie directed by Hickenlooper, but the locale was changed from Spain to St. Louis, and the senator’s mistress was transformed into his long-lost brother.)
Like most of Welles’s films, The Big Brass Ring contains a number of autobiographical references, but the second of the published screenplays, The Cradle Will Rock, is completely autobiographical, recounting the events leading up to the twenty-two-year-old Welles’s 1937 staging of a famous WPA-sponsored “labor opera” by Marc Blitzstein. On its opening day this production was locked out of its scheduled theater by federal agents and given an improvised performance by the cast and crew, who took the audience with them as they marched down the street to another venue. Ring Lardner Jr. had been the initial writer for the film, which was originally titled Rocking the Cradle. When Welles was offered the chance to direct, he completely rewrote Lardner’s script, making himself a central rather than minor character. But his screenplay never found financing. In 1999 Tim Robbins wrote and directed a quite different film version of The Cradle Will Rock that is not only historically inaccurate but also turns Welles into a minor, unsympathetic figure concerned chiefly with his star reputation.
In addition to Welles’s late projects, I should mention in passing some of the growing body of critical and biographical literature that has appeared since the last edition of this book. Of particular importance are Michael Anderegg’s volume on Welles, Shakespeare, and popular culture; Alberto Anile’s discussion of Welles’s years in Italy; Catherine Benamou’s study of It’s All True; Jean-Pierre Berthome and François Thomas’s two books, Citizen Kane and Orson Welles at Work; the two volumes of Simon Callow’s projected three-volume biography of Welles; Youssef Ishaghpour’s three-volume critical study; Joseph McBride’s commentary on Welles’s late career; Patrick McGilligan’s biography of young Welles; Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book of essays on Welles; and the Welles-Bogdanovich interviews in This Is Orson Welles, edited by Rosenbaum and appended with his invaluable data on Welles’s career. Full information about these and other important works can be found in the bibliography to this edition. We may never discover everything Welles did as an artist, but scholarship in the last two decades has brought us much closer to
a full appreciation of his work.
At his death, Welles had long been considered “un-bankable” by Hollywood, but, as I have indicated, he never ceased to write and direct. A good deal of his miscellaneous film and TV production, in various stages of completion, has been discussed and nicely illustrated in The Unknown Orson Welles, a monograph edited by Stefan Drössler of the Munich Film Museum. (See also Orson Welles: One-Man Band, an 88-minute documentary on the unfinished films, which is included as an extra on the Criterion edition of F for Fake.) For three decades Welles financed his work in the haphazard but heroic manner of Othello, the brilliant Shakespeare adaptation he produced and directed in Italy and North Africa in the early 1950s. Often he used earnings from his acting jobs to subsidize his films, or he found backers whose support was fleeting. This method resulted in one of his masterworks, Chimes at Midnight, but it delayed Don Quixote far beyond hope of finishing and had frustrating or absurdist consequences for several other films, including his color production of The Merchant of Venice, which was completed but never exhibited. His last major film, The Other Side of the Wind (discussed in chapter 10), occupied fifteen years of his life and remained incompletely edited when he died, largely because his French-based Iranian producer, Astrophore Films, kept him waiting interminably for “end money.” In 1977 Welles wrote an eleven-page letter to Medhi Bouscheri, the president of Astrophore, lamenting the fact that a few clips from The Other Side of the Wind had been shown for the AFI Life Award TV broadcast honoring Welles. The completed film was “‘eagerly looked forward to’” by the film community but had failed to appear. “‘And for me, personally,’” he wrote, “‘that failure has been mortal. As a director, my reputation by now appears to have been blackened beyond reparation’” (quoted by James Pepper, introduction to The Cradle Will Rock, 8). After the Iranian revolution and Welles’s death, The Other Side of the Wind was subject to protracted legal negotiations between the Iranians, Oja Kodar, and Welles’s daughter Beatrice, who, although he had three children, claimed to be his sole heir. Then on October 29, 2014, very close to Halloween (often a lucky day for Welles), a front-page story in the New York Times announced that a Los Angeles production company, Royal Road Films, had cleared the legal hurdles and liberated the 1,083 feet of the film from a Paris warehouse. The producers, aided by Peter Bogdanovich, who acted in The Other Side of the Wind, intend to release the film in 2015, the centennial year of Welles’s birth.
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