Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The final, crucial character in the story is Petre Banat, the killer; even here, in his description of him, Ambler the radical is unable to resist a dig at capitalism: ‘His approach to the business of killing would be that of the lavatory attendant to the business of attending to his lavatories or of the stockbroker to taking his commission – purely practical.’ The physical description fits Moss admirably: ‘short, broad-shouldered and unkempt, with a heavy jowl and a fringe of scurfy grey hair round a bald pate’. Welles identified a certain sinister quality in his manager, which he was to exploit brilliantly. (‘He had a smile,’ continues Ambler, in a characteristic aside, ‘fixed like that of a ventriloquist’s doll: a standing apology for the iniquity of his existence.’) Moss had agreed to play the role on the condition that he would say nothing, a limitation that only increased his disturbing presence. In his hat, staring huge-eyed through his pebble spectacles, he is both disturbing and utterly commonplace. He almost steals the film. For the rest, there is a certain almost Expressionist character to Richard Bennett’s bunk-bound soused and roaring captain; Ruth Warrick’s glamorous Stephanie Graham is pleasingly scatty; Hans Conried brings real vaudevillian flair to the part of the conjuror; and Welles’s chum Bob Meltzer is drily witty as the steward. As a group, they cohere into the sort of exotic ensemble that Warner Brothers so effortlessly fielded, and perhaps had the slight advantage that they were for the most part unknown, and thus apparently not acting, simply being.

  Filming was more than usually chaotic, a striking contrast to the stately pace imposed by Stanley Cortez on The Magnificent Ambersons. The atmosphere was Welles’s favourite: one for all and all for one. When Bogdanovich asked Welles who was responsible for the penultimate scene in the film – Banat and Graham crawling round the highest ledge of a tall building in driving rain – he answered: ‘Whoever was nearest the camera.’16 Everyone involved, he remembered, had been up for twenty-four hours and was light-headed with exhaustion – ‘rocked’, he says. Welles’s own deadline to start work on It’s All True created huge pressure to finish the sequences in which he was involved – he had to be in Rio in advance of the start of Carnival, on 9 February. ‘It was very dangerous but we were feeling no pain, and we were all helping … it was a collaborative effort.’ Everyone involved in the creative team had strong opinions and they freely pooled their ideas; a film duly evolved that is full of flair and talent, but narratively uncertain and stylistically unfulfilled. (It was, however, certainly Welles’s idea to open the film with a long pre-credit sequence that features Banat, silent apart from the scratchy old gramophone churning out the tune that becomes the hired killer’s leitmotiv. Welles thought, he charmingly confessed, that he was making film history in so doing, until he found out, long afterwards, that Lewis Milestone had got there before him, in Of Mice and Men’s opening sequence two years earlier.) On the whole, though, apart from its set-pieces, the film lacks visual ambition. Politically neutered by wartime restrictions, manically pressured because of Welles’s need to get to South America, its narrative all but incomprehensible, Journey into Fear turned into a quickie done with intermittent flair, a mere shaving off the Wellesian woodblock.

  Principal photography on The Magnificent Ambersons ended on 20 January 1942; Cortez had been released from the film a day before. Neither he nor Welles ever commented on this petty slight. Indeed, Cortez only ever spoke well of his time working with Welles, whom he pronounced (along with Charles Laughton) the only director he had worked with who understood light. The whole visual gesture of the film is Cortez’s; the few additional shots scarcely amount to a major contribution to the cinematographic achievement. But Cortez had certainly riled Welles; the moment he could be dumped, he was. Robert Wise told Carringer that by the end of the shoot Cortez had been demoted to the second unit. There is some evidence that later sequences, including the death of Isobel, were at least in part shot by Harry J Wild, a staff cameraman, and some by Russell Metty; Wise’s memory of events, if not strictly accurate, is an indication of Cortez’s low standing within the team. Certainly when in the months ahead scenes were reshot, there was never any attempt to use him to execute them. After the completion of principal photography, there were pick-up shots over the remaining ten days; the cameraman for these was the solid RKO staffer, Harry Wild. The last shots of The Magnificent Ambersons that Welles himself directed were taken on 31 January, just two days before his departure for Brazil.

  Earlier in the month, he had had his first production meeting for It’s All True, and it was a stormy affair; one catches a glimpse of quite how combative Welles could be in establishing his authority. It was a formidable group. Those present included representatives of the United States government (Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s right-hand man no less, creator of the Works Progress Administration and hence the Federal Theatre Project, there in his capacity as Special Advisor on Foreign Affairs), of RKO and of Technicolor. Welles immediately establishes that the film is to be an RKO production, facilitated by the government, and not the other way round. His prime anxiety is about the use of Technicolor. Hopkins insists that it is very important to the government that the carnival section should be in colour; clearly their expectation of the movie – which had so far only one idea, simply to catch the Carnival on film – is that it will celebrate, in the most vivid and attractive way possible, the famously flamboyant climax of a neighbour’s year. The purpose is to flatter. Welles reluctantly submits to their insistence on the use of colour in this sequence, but refuses to commit himself as to how much of the rest will be; he was to remain sceptical about colour until the mid-sixties, and even then only used it for a television film. The question of ‘the Color Technician’ is raised. ‘Who’s he?’ asks Welles.17 The Technicolor representative explains that he is ‘trained and knows interpretation’, but Welles will have none of it: he hates the idea of this man. ‘If you know anything about colour –’ he erupts. ‘I used to be a painter. I can crib now and then … I think we can do without this fellow.’ The last thing he wants is an expert telling him what he can and can’t do. In fact, Technicolor had just taken a leap forward with their new monopack system, using only one negative instead of three, which resulted in much lighter equipment altogether, but it was a new system and one that they were understandably keen to monitor. None of this impressed Welles in the least.

  The committee next considers the technical complications of an almost unprecedented operation, far from home – ‘It’s easier,’ says Welles, ‘to get to the Far East or London’ – and the problem of the amount of stock needed; film in South America is not up to Hollywood standards, so they have to bring it with them. Welles returns to the question of personnel: he will not, he insists, put up with organisation men. The one thing not discussed, inevitably, is the film itself. The meeting is adjourned with several major questions unanswered: the matter of the Technicolor technicians, the amount of stock needed, and finally, crucially, the nature of the film they are about to make. Harry Hopkins suggests that they should make an interesting, instructive, visually exciting travelogue, called Orson Welles Sees South America. No comment is recorded. Hopkins obviously hadn’t got the measure of Welles at all. That the Office of Inter-American Affairs, if not the government, wanted something more than a travelogue is indicated in a memo written to Jock Whitney by the Brazilian division a mere day after Welles had agreed to direct the film. Reporting the great excitement in Brazil at the idea of Welles coming to Rio, the writer suggests as a possible subject the heroic journey recently made by some fishermen (jangadeiros) from Fortaleza, in the far north of the country. They had travelled an astonishing 3,000 miles of rough coastal seas on a raft to deliver a petition to the President, Getúlio Vargas, in Rio de Janeiro, demanding the right to form unions and receive pensions. ‘These jangadeiros are almost legendary figures in Brazil … and a well-executed short subject of the type suggested should have an enthusiastic following both in Brazil and in the United States.’18 How this could fit into the Carni
val sequence was unclear, but the idea no doubt sowed a seed in Welles’s mind.

  In the weeks before his departure, Welles continued to shoot pick-ups on The Magnificent Ambersons and to act in and advise on Journey into Fear, while still producing and fronting The Lady Esther Show. One of these broadcasts featured an adaptation of a Carl Ewald story, My Little Boy, which had been one of the Mercury Theatre on the Air’s greatest triumphs. By some curious synchronicity, two days later Welles was reported in the Los Angeles Times as having adopted a seven-year-old Czech boy, Peter Neuschul. His paintings had been shown in Prague and London; both his parents were painters. Of this child, little more is ever heard; perhaps the adoption was a mere formality, involving a payment for subsistence (though Welles was notoriously dilatory in paying the legally binding sums prescribed by the divorce courts for the maintenance of his own daughter Christopher), Young Neuschul wrote to him on a regular basis for a year or so, then there was silence. Welles was an intermittent correspondent at best, but loving messages flooded in to him during this time in an unbroken stream – from Thornton Wilder, Alexander Woollcott, the Mexican composer Carlos Chavez. To reverse Oscar Wilde’s comment on Shaw, Orson Welles had many enemies, but his friends most certainly loved him.

  Before flying to Brazil via Washington, he arranged to meet Robert Wise in Miami with the footage of The Magnificent Ambersons. He stayed up all night to record the narration for the film and to shoot the penultimate scene of Journey into Fear, and on the following evening, 1 February, he introduced the final Lady Esther Show of the season, Between Americans. It ended with a rather solemn farewell speech: ‘Tomorrow night the Mercury Theatre starts for South America.’ He reports that he’s been asked to do a motion picture ‘especially for Americans in all the Americas, a movie which in its particular way might strengthen the good relations now binding the continents of the Western Hemisphere’. Increasingly preoccupied with the question of what it was to be an American, he was moving towards a more inclusive notion, which would dominate much of his thinking over the next few years. The people of these ‘United Nations of America’, he says in this farewell broadcast, now stand together. ‘We’re going to have to know each other better than we do. My job – the Mercury’s – job is to help with the introductions … and now it’s time for goodbyes. As always, we remain obediently yours.’ The plan was to release The Magnificent Ambersons in time for Easter, which in 1942 was at the beginning of April, in eight weeks’ time; there was no possibility of the filming on It’s All True taking less than that, and thus no possibility of Welles being involved in detailed post-production.

  In effect, Welles was handing the film over to his associates at the most delicate stage in its life. A rough-cut is like a suit at a final fitting: the raw materials are in place, the shape is essentially there, but all kinds of vital alterations can still be made, while perhaps the most striking aspect of the garment – its finish – is, as the word implies, the very last stage of the process. Nearly 30 per cent of Citizen Kane was made after the end of principal photography; many of the most famous sequences in that film were achieved by the use of special effects, all contrived in post-production. During that period of the process, Welles had made radical use in particular of sound (including music); his minutely detailed work with Bernard Herrmann was one of the most striking elements in the film, but much of this work – and the work with special effects – had been done, slowly and painstakingly, after the end of shooting.

  In leaving the country (no matter how complex and specific the instructions he left behind), Welles was forgoing these possibilities. Only by watching the film take shape at the Movieola could Welles discover what he needed, and make arrangements for its urgent implementation. Vern Walker, who had created so many of the effects in Citizen Kane, prepared a final list of outstanding trick and matte shots for The Magnificent Ambersons on 4 February – two days after Welles had left Hollywood for Brazil. Most unusually, the bulk of Herrmann’s musical score had been recorded by the end of principal photography, but Welles now had no opportunity to work on the critical process of mixing the music and sound. Herrmann had written an immensely sophisticated score, mirroring and counter-pointing the grand themes of the film, the courtly elegance of the world of the Ambersons versus the growing power of the machine, the whole made organic by its use throughout (as in the radio broadcast) of a motif from the Waldteufel waltz Toujours ou jamais – initially gracious, later boisterous, until it finally disintegrates altogether. As he had shown both in his radio work and in Citizen Kane, Herrmann conceived of music not as a duplication or an underlining of the mood of the images and the text, but as an additional element, making its own comment, creating space by its absence as much as by its presence. Every bar, every orchestral colour, every rhythmic transformation was closely linked to the frame for which it was composed. This being the case, the closest collaboration between director and composer was indispensable. But Welles would be thousands of miles away, with all the complications of wartime communication. So what? He had already directed Bonito at long distance; why not post-produce The Magnificent Ambersons by telegram and telephone? The answer to that question would soon be given, and in no uncertain terms.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Carnival

  IT’S ALL TRUE, Welles’s great new venture, was informed by a characteristic mixture of political idealism, artistic excitement and calculating self-promotion. Alongside his loftier ambitions, Welles never lost sight of his public profile. Shortly after his departure, Herb Drake wrote to his associate Tom Pettey, who was already in Brazil as part of the advance guard, to tell him that Welles had called him from Pittsburgh en route to Washington. ‘He has left the country furious with yours truly because he has exaggerated expectation of newspaper response.’1 The Brazil story had made little impact on columnists and trade papers; Welles had been over-sold. ‘Newspapers are a little tired of Welles activity, we need a lull.’ Another problem was that Drake knew next to nothing about the venture. ‘He left me with only limited notion of what he is doing. Please get from him as much theory as possible. He tells me he wants to plug the expedition rather than the picture.’ Drake was a particularly shrewd observer of his volatile boss, and in their exchanges over the Brazilian episode he and Pettey offer sharp, sometimes acid analyses of his behaviour. ‘OW has certain unpleasant habits such as reading your mail so be circumspect,’ advises Drake. ‘Don’t mind him any if he is rude, he regards this as a time-saving expedient. You will find it difficult getting a logical answer from him about what he is going to do. He trusts always his genius or his charm to get him out of any situation. Sometimes irresistible force meets the immovable object. At such times, go into bomb shelter.’ How to handle Orson is their daily study. Clearly the whole organisation is similarly preoccupied: Drake recommends that Pettey should show Dick Wilson ‘this letter and all others I send you’.

  The advance guard of which Pettey was part had left for Brazil in high spirits, ten days before Welles. In his first letter back to Drake, Pettey describes the perils of travelling during war without papers and with the bare minimum of comforts: in the plane, on the way to Puerto Rico, it is, he says, ‘colder than a producer’s heart’.2 Their arrival in Rio was timed to enable Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who had been negotiating with the Brazilian government, to return to Washington on one of their two planes, a Clipper, which had carried the crew and the bulk of the equipment – eighty-six cases and 4,500 pounds of Technicolor equipment, including two cameras and 50,000 feet of film. Later equipment went by army bomber, with the passengers sitting on the floor and hanging on through the curves. The rest went by freighter: a boom, a dolly, black-and-white cameras, two portable generators mounted on truck-trailers and arc lamps. They were in effect moving a small studio to Brazil.

  But if travelling was strange, arriving was even stranger. Nothing in the past experience of any of the team prepared them for the startling novelty of life in Rio de Janeiro. ‘The fir
st thing on arrival everyone went out and bought white linen suits and we all look like a bunch of broken-down Ambassadors,’ wrote Lynn Shores, the hard-bitten RKO production manager, who filed regular reports to his bosses at the studio.3 ‘It is practically impossible to get tight here as it comes out under your arms as fast as you pour it in,’ adding a comment that set the tone for his subsequent dealings with the local population: ‘We can expect nothing from down here as the countries are virtually as far apart in relations as can be.’ The team had nearly two weeks to fill before Welles’s arrival. During that time they had a sort of crash course in Brazilian life, under the guidance of Raymundo Magalhaes, a local newspaper magnate: they were shown motion pictures of the previous year’s Carnival, of life in the interior, and of the customs and lives of the jangadeiros. The government, Pettey’s first press release concluded, ‘would like for Orson Welles to film some of the daring exploits of these hardy fisherfolks’.4 It’s All True was already beginning to look rather more complex than anything Harry Hopkins or RKO had in mind.

  Meanwhile the various departments of this somewhat uneasily mixed group – the Mercurians, the Technicolor cameramen, the regular camera crew and sound people, and the RKO production functionaries – staked out their own territories as they waited for Welles to arrive. No one had any experience of making documentaries, which is a vastly different undertaking from making a film in a studio, with its controlled environment, its pre-existent screenplay and its trained actors; no one knew much about Brazil, or even Rio; few of them really understood why they were there; and there was no clear chain of command. ‘We already have 22 generals here now,’ wrote Lynn Shores to William Daniels of the RKO front office. Shores was a cynical old pro with no illusions about art, endowed with the full complement of prejudices – racial, sexual and political – of his breed. He just wanted to be able to get on with the job and get the hell out of there, and was already restless, as was Ned Scott, the stills photographer. ‘I’ll go nuts with another inactive week ahead of me,’ he wrote.5 But the temporary lull was congenial enough to some members of the crew, who were charmed by the country and its people and delighted to be away from the conventions of North American life. Some of the crew started shooting at random: ‘We were on our own,’ recalled the second cameraman, Joe Biroc.6 ‘We photographed what we wanted, where we wanted. Worked 24 hours for 4 days – then took a week off. One crew member shacked up with a red-headed girl. At the end of the shoot he went back to his wife, but he couldn’t stay away. He left the wife, and came back to Brazil.’