Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  It is scarcely surprising that Welles should have been so engaged by Eric Ambler’s dark, laconic thriller. The genre was among his favourites – his more or less undiscriminating consumption of thrillers was remarked on by everyone who knew him – and would continue to fascinate him to the very end. Quite apart from his pleasure in forceful narrative, he was strongly drawn to the characteristic Ambler hero: the sophisticated innocent, a type to which Welles could warmly relate. In the case of Journey into Fear the hero was engineer Winston Graham, trying to ply his trade during the period of the phoney war, finding himself caught up in a disturbing web of largely incomprehensible intrigue. A sense of bewilderment, of the uselessness of intelligence and talent in a ruthlessly brutal universe, is common to many of Welles’s heroes; even Charles Foster Kane can scarcely comprehend how his life became what it did. The parallels with Welles’s own life hardly need to be underlined.

  His fascination with the genre led him to attempt to turn two other such novels into films during his time at RKO: before Kane, Nicholas Blake’s The Smiler with a Knife and, immediately after it, The Way to Santiago, by Arthur Calder-Marshall. This latter project, sometimes known as Mexican Melodrama, is one of the most remarkable and experimental of Welles’s unfilmed projects; the screenplay (radically transformed from the novel that is its source) expresses with startling vividness the sense of the central character’s Pirandellian dislocation. In the script he is simply identified as ME, explicitly underlining the overlap with Welles himself. ‘MY FACE FILLS THE FRAME,’ the script opens.13 And then ME says: ‘I don’t know who I am.’ Soon enough this central character is given – wrongly, of course – another identity, that of Lindsey Keller, a British profascist broadcaster known as ‘Mr England’. The script continues: ‘the camera pulls back to reveal ME seated in the middle of a big bare white-washed room, dressed only in a sheet. I am surrounded by a lot of men, representatives of nearly every race. With a sudden rush of sound, they begin firing questions at me. “Where did you come from? When did you arrive? Who attacked you? How did you get into the country?’” A reporter – in some versions of the screenplay a Mexican, Gonzales; in others an American, Johnson – takes the amnesiac ME/Keller/Mr England to a party given by the President. The President is killed, and ME is swept up in a sequence of events in which he discovers that he is not Mr England, after all, though he has just made an anti-fascist broadcast as Mr England in an attempt to expiate his past errors. Finally, at the climax of a dense farrago of events, he is reunited with his girl Elena, after this suggestive exchange:

  ME:

  Hello, Elena! – Hello! I’m not Mr England!

  ELENA:

  What? …

  ME:

  I’m somebody else!

  ELENA:

  I don’t understand!

  ME:

  I don’t either, but I’m somebody else! I’m somebody else!

  As soon as ME reaches her arms, ‘I am motionless. Elena turns to Roberto. A beautiful little smile on her face, “ROBERTO: What’s wrong with him? ELENA: He’s asleep.” CLOSE SHOT: Elena’s tender expression as she puts her face next to mine. FADE OUT.’ The problem of identity is resolved by sleep.

  Bret Wood has acutely observed that the question of identity is Welles’s great theme. Ambler’s Journey into Fear contains no such explicit ontological explorations, but its hero is certainly baffled, from first almost to last. The world in which he finds himself is exotically menacing, the political atmosphere poisoned by covert (and sometimes overt) fascism. Though the work of an Englishman, the novel falls precisely into the category of Popular Front art, as Michael Denning points out, quoting Ambler’s own words: ‘I took the right-wing and often downright fascist thriller and turned it upside down’ – turning the heroes into left-wing and often Popular Front figures.14 In the novel, the excitable socialist, Mathis, expresses himself unequivocally: obsessed with an incident in the First World War, in which an iron foundry was seized by the Germans but never bombed by the French because the owner would not allow it, he cries, ‘We were fighting for our lives, but our lives were less important than the property of Monsieur de Wendel … it is not for us to ask questions. And why? Because the only people who can give us the answers are the bankers and the politicians at the top, the boys with the shares in the big factories who make the war materials. They will not give us answers. Why? Because they know that if the soldiers of France and England knew those answers, they would not fight.’ Later he tells his wife: ‘Monsieur [Graham] and I have made a plot to blow up the Bank of France, seize the chamber of deputies, shoot the two hundred families and set up a communist government.’ ‘You should not say such things,’ she protests, ‘even for a joke.’ ‘A joke!’ He scowls malevolently. ‘You will see if it is a joke or not when we drag these capitalist reptiles from their great houses and cut them to pieces with machine guns.’ Even more tellingly, Josette, the dancer with whom Graham almost has an affair, defends the Turks: ‘Most armies commit what are called atrocities at some time or another. They usually call them reprisals.’ ‘Including the British army, perhaps?’ enquires Graham, stiffly. ‘You would have to ask an Indian or an Afrikaner about that. But every country has its madmen.’

  Deeper and darker than these explicitly made political points, Ambler conveys an undercurrent of romantic pessimism about society. Josette quotes the philosophy of her brooding husband, José: ‘José would say that you are as much a murderer as Landru or Weidmann and that it is just that fortune has not made it necessary for you to murder anyone. Someone once told him that there was a German proverb that says that man is just an ape in velvet. He likes to repeat that.’ At a later juncture, Graham is studying the lifeboat instructions in his cabin. They start: In case of danger. ‘In case!’ he thinks:

  But you couldn’t get away from danger! It was all about you, all the time. You could live in ignorance of it for years. You might go to the end of your days believing that it couldn’t happen to you, that death could only come to you with the sweet reason of disease or ‘an act of God’, but it was there just the same, waiting to make nonsense of all your comfortable ideas about your relations with time and chance – ready to remind you – in case you had forgotten – that civilisation was a word and that you still lived in the jungle.

  From Bright Lucifer, written when he was seventeen, through the sensational Harlem Macbeth to the even more provocative War of the Worlds, Welles had sought to express the fragility of civilisation and the darkness within us all; he was no stranger to the universe of Journey into Fear. Welles had a taste for pulp fiction, but he was not indulging it in choosing to film this particular book: his aim was to combine the stylishness of the genre with his own anti-fascist agenda, creating a vehicle at once for actors and for ideas, for which Ambler’s novel was ideal.

  So it was very much a Mercury project, although at the beginning David Hempstead was still slated as producer and Michele Morgan was still wanted for the leading female role. The director was to be the distinguished former playwright and character actor, Thomas Mitchell (shortly to become immortal as Uncle Billy in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life). This erratic notion – Mitchell had never directed a film – came and went very quickly; Welles would, of course, direct. The great Karl Struss, fresh from shooting The Great Dictator for Chaplin, and laden with honour from his years with Griffith and DeMille, was appointed cinematographer. For the rest, it was to be the old team reunited, certainly as far as the acting company was concerned: veterans of Welles’s stage, screen and radio companies. Joseph Cotten was to play Graham, Ruth Warrick his wife, Welles himself would be the charming and sinister Colonel Haki. Everett Sloane, Eustace Wyatt, Edgar Barrier and other stalwarts were to take various more or less sinister parts, while the crucial role of the killer, Petre Banat, was to be played by the new business manager of Mercury Productions, Jack Moss. Moss was a sometime conjuror whose appointment as manager had been characteristically quixotic – Welles had once appeared on the same
variety bill as Moss and had been impressed, not only by his act, but also by his personal suavity and elegance. Who better than a magician, he must have thought, to deal with the tiresome and mundane facts of money and management? And who better to relieve Welles himself of the tedium of dealing with the studio apparatchiks? Welles would be able to perform his favourite trick – vanishing – under a smokescreen provided by his fellow-thaumaturge.

  As well as Moss, in casting the film, the Mercury office was plundered for the press officer Herb Drake (former drama critic of the New York Herald Tribune), who appears as a steward, as does Robert Meltzer, writer and researcher. This habit of casting anybody who happened to be around was typical of Welles, and became more and more common in his movies. It indicates an interestingly cavalier attitude to acting on film. If the face fitted and the quality was right, then he saw no objection. This is wholly consonant with his fascination with texture; a particular face or voice or silhouette is simply another strand in that texture. It does not conduce to depth of expression or complex interchanges, but it can lead to strikingly vivid and effective results. As if to contribute to the gleeful sense of free-for-all, Jo Cotten, with no experience whatever of writing, except for a few youthful drama reviews (good training, no doubt, for playing Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane), was now appointed screenwriter, the attached writers having walked out because ‘an unnamed picture has taken precedence’.15

  CHAPTER TWO

  Pampered Youth

  THE UNNAMED PICTURE for which Journey into Fear was put on hold was The Magnificent Ambersons, a project that had suddenly materialised out of thin air – almost literally: Welles’s 1939 radio version of Booth Tarkington’s novel (transmitted when he was already under contract to RKO) had been one of the most striking of his Campbell Playhouse productions, and it was a recording of that performance that he played to George Schaefer, who duly gave him the go-ahead for the project. It may perhaps have been The Magnificent Ambersons to which Breen was making veiled reference in his press conference, when he spoke of a film that would not follow the pattern of shocking Hollywood – and indeed, there was nothing remotely contentious in Tarkington’s epic of the decline of a Mid-Western family, unless its elegy for a vanished world and its criticism of the values promulgated by the rise of the automobile could be taken for anti-capitalist subversion. (The RKO lawyers did shudder at the possibility that the car-manufacturing Morgans might be taken as a version of the Fords or the Chryslers, but they were overruled.)1 What is more surprising is, firstly, that the adrenalin-crazed young Welles should have wanted to engage with so sober and sombre a subject, and secondly, that he and Schaefer – or anyone else at RKO – should have thought it a suitable film to make at a time when half the world was at war, with America poised between ardent isolationism and fervent anti-fascism. It did, however, perfectly fit into Welles’s over-arching fascination with what it is to be an American, a question given some urgency by the war. America’s values would have to be defended, either by isolation or by taking up arms.

  The novel, written in 1918, had been an immediate bestseller on publication, confirming the Indiana-born Tarkington (already famous for Monsieur Beaucaire and Seventeen) as the Hoosier laureate, a serious analyst of American mores. It forms part of Growth, a non-continuous trilogy of chronicles of Midland family life. The book, a sort of Mid-Western Forsyte Saga, is a pessimistic elegy, depicting the destruction by industrialisation of the intricate fabric of the life of the upper middle classes, tracing through the decline of one family, the eponymous Ambersons, the growth of the unnamed Midland town in which the action takes place as it ‘spreads and darkens into a city’. Like Lampedusa’s The Leopard, it is a record of a doomed class, but in this case it is a class that has scarcely flourished at all. The novel has a curiously short sense of history, a deep nostalgia for a very recent past, and the saga of the Ambersons is largely passive. Major Amberson makes his fortune after the Civil War – we never learn how – but none of his offspring knows what to do with it; he himself makes a series of disastrous investments. His daughter Isabel quite casually, it seems, decides against marrying the spirited Eugene Morgan because he has drunkenly fallen into his bass viol while serenading her, and instead pledges herself to the unremarkable Wilbur Minafer: this is the mainspring of the plot. Having no passion for her husband, she idolises her son George; their only child, he is monstrously indulged and grows up loathed by the entire terrorised community, which ardently desires his comeuppance. He is given no boundaries to his behaviour, but equally has no sense of identity outside the rigid notions of the class that his family has so recently joined.

  When, some years after his rejection by Isabel, the widowed Eugene turns up again, filled with plans for the development of his new automobile, George is dimly aware of the fact that he represents an entrepreneurial spirit that is inherently inimical to the caste interests of the Ambersons, but also that there is some unfinished emotional business with his mother. Meanwhile George himself has fallen blindly, hopelessly in love with Eugene’s daughter, Lucy, who – though she never reveals it – has fallen equally deeply in love with him. Lucy knows at a profound level that George would not make a good husband for her, unequipped as he is to survive in the modern world; she constantly puts off his offer of marriage. When Wilbur, the father George has scarcely been aware of, dies, Eugene – now a highly successful industrialist – declares his love for Isabel and asks for her hand, which reduces George to incoherent rage; he forces her to refuse, taking her away from her only hope of happiness (to say nothing of his own, in the shape of Lucy), and embarking with her on unending pointless travels rather than submit to his rival. In effect George kills his mother by refusing to acknowledge that she is ill; ever after, he is racked by guilt. All this is paralleled by the desperate passion of Wilbur’s sister Fanny for Eugene, which, denied expression, turns to mischief.

  After Isabel’s death, the flimsy financial foundations of the Ambersons give way completely and George is finally forced to become a realist; he and Fanny take rooms in a boarding house while he works as an explosives supervisor. The town, meanwhile, has changed beyond recognition:

  the town was growing and changing as it had never grown and changed before. It was heaving up in the middle incredibly; it was spreading incredibly; and as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its sky. Its boundary was mere shapelessness on the run … a new Midlander – in fact a new American – was dimly beginning to emerge … they were optimists – optimists to the point of belligerence – their motto being ‘Boost! Don’t knock.’ And they were hustlers, believing in hustling and in honesty because both paid. They loved their city and they worked for it with a plutonic energy which was always ardently vocal …

  The book takes off into overt symbolism when George is knocked down in the street by the very thing that has blighted his life: an automobile hits him, running over him as he stands idly dreaming of Lucy in a carriage. In his hospital bed, he is obliged by circumstances to think for the first time about life; he finally understands that his determination to preserve the rigid patterns of his class is pointless, coming to the conclusion – ‘somehow … vaguely but truly’ – that ‘nothing stays or holds where there is growth’. His generosity and sense of responsibility towards his aunt, which have never faltered, only become stronger. The book’s final resolution is effected by a somewhat unsatisfactory contrivance, a gauche mystical intervention, deus ex machina, wherein Eugene, who has sworn never to speak to George again, visits a clairvoyant, whose spirit guide, Lopa, tells him that Isabel wants him to visit the boy; he does, and finds Lucy at the bedside. Reconciliation all round.

  This was the wide-ranging novel that Welles had squeezed into sixty minutes of radio in 1939, and it was a recording of this that he played to George Schaefer in the spring of 1941, when they were urgently looking for Welles Project Two. Welles later claimed that Schaefer fell asleep while listening to the discs of the radio transmission and, hearing
the show today, his slumber is pardonable. Not that the show, and particularly Welles’s performance as George, is anything less than deeply felt; on the contrary, it is the barely contained emotionalism that becomes monotonous, especially in the context of the dying fall of the Ambersons’ inexorably dwindling fortunes. In his introduction to the programme, Welles calls the novel ‘the truest, cruellest picture of the growth of the Middle West and the liveliest portrait of the people who made it grow’, but the cruelty and the liveliness are both subdued in this radio version, with distinctly stagy and rather stiff performances. An elderly, quavery Walter Huston plays Eugene; his wife Nan Sunderland plays Isabel on a single note of gracious pathos. For Welles’s own performance as George he uses his uncomfortable upper register, and seems constantly on the brink of hysteria. It is not good acting, but it seems to be strongly felt; the scene with his mother is distinctly overwrought, unlike anything Welles ever did, on film or on radio – almost out of control. The result is alienating rather than affecting. It is as if the actor’s identification with the brattish, arrogant boy whose comeuppance forms the narrative spine of the novel is too strong; he is unable to present the character. Welles’s great skills as an actor lay in the realm of the rhetorical, in which the actor is absolutely in command of himself and his material; when he touches the personal, which he does rarely, he seems to lose his judgement, and so it is here. His narration, except for the opening, is uncharacteristically leaden, too, intending to be elegiac, but instead becoming simply morbid; the adaptation omits the character of Aunt Fanny, which might have varied the emotional palette a little. The great success of the production is, as so often with Welles, in the texture, the virtuoso use of evocative sounds, the integration with the music, in which Bernard Herrmann uses some of Welles’s favourite waltzes by Waldteufel with impeccable timing and ingenuity. The sudden bustle of group scenes is exhilarating; the opening narrated sequence (using almost exactly the same text as subsequently appears in the film) is immensely engaging and elegant. But, in the end, even these elements are overcome by the sickly, turgid tone, as of a grief imperfectly discharged.