Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  After Grisby has slithered out of the frame, the scene changes to the following day, at the Hiring Hall, where Bannister comes to look for Michael. Everett Sloane brilliantly and audaciously characterises what Sherwood King calls the crippled lawyer’s ‘comic, jerky walk’, swaying backwards and forwards on his two cane sticks like some curious bird, an impression enhanced by the beakiness of his nose – a nose the actor so hated, having operation after operation to have it reduced, until finally (according to Welles) he knew there was no further he could go and he killed himself. Although the nose does indeed limit the amount of physical transformation possible, Sloane’s Bannister – sharp, demanding, anguished – is a far cry from the actor’s kindly, pixie-like Mr Bernstein in Citizen Kane. Welles contrives a good atmosphere for the Hiring Hall, with a monkey for exotic effect, and the scene in which Bannister gets drunk, or appears to get drunk, is a classic piece of Wellesian overlapping and repeated phrases, the faces crammed tight into the frame as they huddle round the table and a barely audible Frank Sinatra croons on the juke-box.

  When O’Hara brings the drunken Bannister back to the yacht, he meets Elsa for the second time and is forgivably smitten by her all over again. Hayworth wears the shortest of skirts, a captain’s blue jacket and a nautical cap at the most provocative angle. Everyone, including the black maid, begs him to come to work for the Bannisters; he succumbs, and over the following deftly shot sequence of yacht life, the sense of sexual tension between Michael and Elsa grows, in its strange way: Hayworth provocative but withdrawn, Welles looking mournful, his great panda’s eyes filled with doomed yearning. Finally they are in each other’s arms, only to be interrupted by Grisby who has rowed up on a boat, leering and cackling and rather queeny. Elsa goes off to swim, and Grisby follows her with his telescope, as eventually so do we, witnessing her dive to the accompaniment of poor Heinz Roemheld’s misplaced orchestral orgasm.

  The song sequence, dropped in to please Harry Cohn, suggests that perhaps the old monster knew a bit about film after all. As shot by Welles, it has extraordinary tension, and is clear proof (if any were needed) of his exceptional sensitivity to music. Michael is in the cabin with other crew members as Elsa starts to sing; one of the guys picks up the tune on his guitar and Michael is drawn upwards, the music leading him forward like a snake charm, up, up onto the deck where Elsa, exquisitely passive in her swimsuit, purrs her anti-love song, holding three rapt men in thrall: Michael moonstruck, Bannister watching like a hawk, Grisby entertaining who knows what dark designs. The next scene, the following day, takes us away from this tense triangle of admirers into a sunlit world, with Michael joined at the wheel by Elsa, in her cheeky captain’s uniform: a radio commercial creeps up. It is advertising Glosso Lusto, a shampoo that restores natural sheen – an ironic comment, perhaps, on Elsa’s impossible perfection. Against the sparkling freshness of the sky and sea, she and Michael flirt ever more intensely, and Elsa delivers herself of two highly characteristic Wellesian proverbs (Chinese, emphasising her unfathomable background in fact from him: Yutang’s The Wisdom of China): ‘It is difficult for love to last long. Therefore one who loves passionately is cured of love, in the end.’ The second, even more typical and if anything more fatalistic, says: ‘Human nature is eternal. Therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.’ Michael is understandably baffled and frustrated by these cryptic injunctions to action, but is increasingly ensnared by Elsa.

  The next sequence thrusts us out of the enclosed world of the yacht with its games-playing passengers and into a teeming, swarming world of celebratory life. Bannister has impulsively decided to have a picnic at Acapulco Bay, and his party is borne along by the waves of energy created by the Mexican populace, canoeing, dancing, singing, and later floating by with flaming torches. It is a sequence of outstanding bravura, the sudden irruption of a whole culture, absorbed in its own rituals, moving to its own exhilarating rhythm. A few bearers and porters struggle through the jungle and guide the party up to their clearing, while all around them, below them, above them, the great celebration goes on into the night. Welles’s feeling for South American life and music pre-dated his trip to Brazil with It’s All True, and continued beyond it; but a great part of the spirit of what he saw and filmed in Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza informs this section of The Lady from Shanghai, framing and highlighting the emotional dance of death of a small and over-privileged group of another, decidedly less healthy culture. ‘When you give a picnic, it’s a picnic. Time for another?’ squeals Grisby, his tiny eyes glistening with malice and greed, oblivious to the joyful splendour all around him. For him, it’s just background to the fascinating drama being played out in what he takes to be the foreground, and in which he is of course a principal figure. But the film contradicts him, and the shooting style evolved by Welles and Lawton – in which the sweating, savage, smirking figures of Grisby and Bannister, the anguished figure of O’Hara, and Elsa’s cool, unperspiring beauty are held within a frame that also includes the constantly moving, rhythmically chanting, torch-bearing Mexicans – results in an epic canvas that seems to owe something to Welles’s deep encounter with the paintings of Rivera and Siqueiros. And then no sooner is the power of this established than the dreary taste of Viola Lawrence and Harry Cohn dully thrusts itself into our faces, and the scene resolves itself into a series of conventional set-ups, including, most damagingly, Welles in a particularly puddingy medium close-shot, backed by some blurred and generalised process footage, for his chilling story about the sharks and their feeding frenzy. As if in homage to his great doomed dream, It’s All True, he has O’Hara tell us that the story took place in Fortaleza, ‘on the hump of Brazil’, where Welles shot Four Men on a Raft. ‘They eat themselves,’ O’Hara tells the Bannisters and Grisby. ‘There wasn’t one of them crazy sharks that survived.’

  The following day they travel further up the Acapulco coast, and in the dazzling sunshine – ‘which can’t hide the hunger and the guilt: it’s a bright, guilty world,’ as Michael says – Grisby makes his proposition. Higher and higher they climb, for Michael’s temptation on the mount, as Grisby speaks of the impending end of the world. The camera rises vertiginously over them as Anders, white-faced and almost deranged, barks out his challenge: ‘I want you to kill me.’ Over the shoulder of the appalled Michael we see, a thousand feet below, the sea and the rocks. The same sea twinkles benevolently beyond the balcony of the hotel where, that night, Bannister is sitting tensely with Elsa, who abruptly gets up and leaves him and the dancing couples and runs down the side of the hill – another shot demanded by Cohn, but in fact rather beautiful – to join Michael in the street. They walk along, speaking of life and death and Grisby. She, looking especially perfect in white, talks of the pain of her life; they become more and more intimate, until they are interrupted by Broome, who insolently wonders whether Bannister knows where they are, a line of thought cut short by Michael’s fist. The punch sends Elsa flying down the street from which they’ve just come; the camera races ahead on the dolly and the soundtrack suddenly erupts into vigorous Mexican music – ‘Hey-ho, hey-ho!’ – exactly as Welles intended it to. Bret Wood quotes the appropriate direction from the screenplay, and it is revealing to see how closely detailed his requirements are, and, when they are left untampered with, how effective:

  The Whorehouse piano plays through until Mike has punched Broome in the nose and Rita starts to run away. On the first cut of her crossing the street, there is a strong backlight on this. There is a cross-fade on this in which we hear Fading OUT the sound of the Whorehouse piano and Fading in over this Shot a very fast rumba which is probably going to be the one from the Astaire picture. It isn’t important – a lot of drums and action … this goes through from the Quick travelling shot of Rita running and just as we come to the shot of the band as she runs: a quick QUICK cross-fade which takes us into ‘Palabras du Mohair’ which plays through until we cut outside and the line ‘What’s the name for a drunken bum’ i
s repeated.

  (It is striking that in this version of the screenplay, Welles refers to all the other characters by their story names, but Elsa is only ever ‘Rita’.)

  At the end of the chase, Michael and Rita find themselves in a secluded room. He asks her to dance, and immediately the music police (having let Welles get away with a whole sequence as he wanted it to be) assert themselves by imposing a backing that is both rhythmically and atmospherically meaningless. It is in this scene – all shadows and shafts of illumination – that Elsa scoffs at Michael’s dreams for their life together, telling him that he must come to terms with all-pervading badness. ‘You don’t know how to take care of yourself,’ she tells him, ‘so how could you take care of me?’ Here it is distinctly moot as to whether it is ‘Elsa’ or Rita talking. The next scene at the jetty brings more doubts on Elsa’s part: how will they live? Will she take in washing? As she parts from him, that wretched pop song, which has wound its way into every scene like ivy, wells up into a ghastly mutated Irish rhapsody for viola and strings; in his memo to Cohn, Welles says, ‘I think that damn tune is in every scene!’ It very early is.

  Now it is imperative for Mike to earn the $5,000 for appearing to murder Grisby, and he agrees to Grisby’s plan. Through the window of the bar in which they’re drinking, they see Bannister and converse with him; again and again in The Lady from Shanghai people are glimpsed through glass, sometimes shattered, often at an odd angle. The intention is, naturally, to create visual variety (to take the curse off the cliché, in Welles’s own words), but it also seems increasingly to predict the film’s penultimate sequence in the Hall of Mirrors, where it is impossible to tell what is real, what merely reflected. O’Hara, though apparently living in the real world, is already being swept along by events and people that seem to change every minute. After being given secret instructions by the Chinese chauffeur to meet Elsa at the aquarium, Mike goes to meet Grisby, who gives him the money and dictates a statement for him, confessing to the murder. This section of the plot is not, it must be said, an improvement on the relative simplicity of Sherwood King’s narrative, but it is a scene superbly played by Anders and Welles; the latter is seated throughout, as Anders (shot from below) circles him, prattling about his new life in the South Seas. None of it makes sense to O’Hara, who is starkly lit to emphasise his panic and confusion, as if caught in headlights; he becomes curiously boyish, staring up at Grisby in terror.

  Welles had asked for the corniest Hawaiian music imaginable in this sequénce, to be played at a high level; as it is, it is a vaguely Polynesian, virtually inaudible murmur behind the scene, thus depriving it of a level of edginess that is central to Welles’s technique, both in the theatre and on radio. Citizen Kane is inconceivable without those heightened moments, in which sound – including, of course, dialogue – creates a hectic intensity, ratcheting up the nervous tension, inducing instability and thus unpredictability. Where another director creates energy by the linear pursuit of action, or by focusing on the psychology of the characters, Welles seeks to shock, alarm, almost to ambush the audience with dynamic contrasts and skewed perspectives. The desired effect is, so to speak, in-your-face, a super-realism in acting, in image and above all in sound. Remove any of these elements and the result is less impressive. Harry Cohn and his team worked hard and long to eliminate as many of them as they could, especially visually and sonically. The fact that a scene like the one between Grisby and O’Hara succeeds as well as it does, deprived of a critical factor in the scene – the intensified sound score – is a tribute to the force of Welles’s imagination and the actors’ flair, but is not quite what he intended.

  Michael is next seen in the aquarium, where Elsa comes to him, dressed in black. Against a background of monstrously magnified fish, he tells her what he’s agreed to; reading the statement he’s signed, she is troubled. They kiss; some schoolchildren (a slightly clumsy touch) giggle at them; she tells him he must be careful. As the scene progresses, the lighting on their two figures becomes more and more stylised: it picks out her perfect profile as he speaks of his passion; then they become pure silhouettes, with the shadowy, watery shapes pulsing gently behind them.

  The reality of what he has agreed to hits Michael in the next scene. He drives Grisby back to the Bannisters’ house; Grisby goes through the garden but is intercepted by Broome, who lewdly suggests that he knows about Grisby and Elsa. The scene is shot in a heightened way to show the battle for domination between the two men. Crossed, Grisby shoots the insolent butler and returns to the car. When questioned by Michael as to the gunshot he replies, his leering sweaty face filling the frame, ‘It was taarget practice, just as you were suppoosed to have been doing when you threw my coorpse into the bay!’ These extreme exaggerations are brilliantly handled by Anders, the perfect Wellesian actor, making huge shapes and filling them with wit and danger. Grisby can barely suppress snickering as he contemplates his own feigned demise, almost whimpering with suppressed delight and anticipation. The effect is not melodramatic or hammy, because it is so precise and so convincing. In a nutshell, it is brilliant acting. Grisby’s bubbling excitement continues through the subsequent car ride to the beach; suddenly another vehicle looms up and they smash into the back of it – Michael confused and worried; Grisby blithely accepting the card of the other man, hardly waiting till he has gone to tell O’Hara that this will confirm their story; both of them are bleeding. This whole plot mechanism is derived more or less without alteration from If I Die Before I Wake; and Welles’s O’Hara, like King’s Larry Planter, is by now in a positively trance-like state. The heavy shadows from the smashed windscreen – which Welles shoots head-on at the time of the crash, giving us the passengers’ point of view – sit across their faces in parallel bars, a strange and dream-like vision.

  Back at the Bannisters’, we see the dying Broome telling Elsa that Bannister is to be shot. O’Hara and Grisby arrive at the jetty; after snatching Michael’s cap, Grisby makes off in the speedboat and O’Hara nervously lets off his three shots. Immediately people throng out to see what’s happened; in a brilliantly organised sequence, he stumbles off, waving his gun, saying that he’s been doing ‘taarget practice’ as the crowd pushes around him. We cut to shadowy shot of Grisby at the San Francisco landing jetty, cocking his gun. O’Hara gets away from the crowd and makes a phone call to the Bannisters’ house: Broome answers, telling him that he’s been framed and that he must get to the office in Montgomery Street, which he does, arriving to find a throng of policemen, into whose arms Michael runs just as Bannister sways into view, shortly followed by Grisby’s corpse and then Elsa. Bret Wood reports a cut scene (whether actually filmed or deleted from the script is unclear) in which Grisby is seen from the partners’ office, high above the street; a bullet rings out and he is dead. Whether this would have added a great deal is also unclear.

  Elsa has promised Mike that Bannister will defend him, and she and Bannister are, sitting on a bench in the judge’s chambers discussing how they will proceed; Elsa lights up under a very prominent ‘No Smoking’ sign. They are in shadow, and now the shadow of the judge looms over them; Bannister exchanges knowing banter with him: we only ever see the judge’s shadow. Bannister tensely conveys to Elsa how hopeless Michael’s case is: his story about Grisby makes no sense, and he has been found with $5,000 on him. He tries to touch her; she recoils. Later, she visits Michael in jail: he is behind a metal mesh. He knows how bad his case is. The scene is highly striking visually: the narrowness of the room Elsa is in is underlined; Michael’s face is only ever seen with the metal mesh in front of it, at the end squaring him up like graph paper. She tells him she loves him, but can offer little hope. Welles had intended them to be barely audible; here they boom away with, needless to say, ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’ chundering mournfully away on solo cello.

  The following trial scene is presented as circus or something out of Alice in Wonderland – or perhaps Kafka – with red-faced Erskine Sandford battily presiding
over the strutting attorneys while the public chatters, eats, sneezes, snoozes, ‘oohs’, ‘aahs’ and gasps on cue; two young women discuss the case in Chinese; ‘You’re not kidding,’ the first says at the end of the conversation. At one point the prosecution suddenly calls defence counsel – Bannister – as a witness; Bannister gets into the box, but harangues the judge from it, then insists on his right to cross-examine himself (both of these developments, surprisingly, suggested by the novel, which conveys an equally farcical aspect to the proceedings). The camera keeps changing its position restlessly, now at the back of the courtroom, now at the side, now above, now in the judge’s lap. Welles’s own cutaways, shot much later than the main scene, belong to a wholly different world visually, and indeed seem – in technical jargon – to cross the line: that is, he appears to be looking in the opposite direction from the one he should be. Elsa Bannister is suddenly called to the witness box; she cannot deny that she kissed him. The judge adjourns the case while the jury deliberates; we cut to a Chinese family, high up, looking over San Francisco and listening to reports of it; we see the judge, reflected in the window, looking over another part of San Francisco, playing chess with himself; we see Bannister, Elsa and O’Hara in the empty courtroom, waiting. Bannister tells O’Hara with vicious relish that he’ll go to the electric chair. Outside, the judge, summoned to return to court, sprays his throat and starts to make his entrance; as the court files back, O’Hara eyes the tablets that Bannister is taking and suddenly swallows a few. There are screams; he must be kept moving, someone shouts, or he’s done for, and so he is escorted upright out of the courtroom into an adjacent room, where he suddenly slugs the young policeman who has been helping him on the jaw, knocks over furniture and book-cases, empties cabinets and hurls a statuette at the camera, narrowly missing it and smashing a sheet of glass, just where you would expect the camera’s lens to have been. He then makes a run for it, using as decoy a jury deliberating another case, and slips away into Chinatown.