Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The courtroom scene is a classic piece of Wellesian staging and – apart from the strangely disorientating dropped-in single shots of Welles and Hayworth – works brilliantly. Here again, Welles complained bitterly about the elimination during editing of the raucousness of the public, the nearly permanent sense of hubbub present on the original soundtrack, and it is clear that the more grotesque the scene could have been, the better. The three scenes while the court is in recess are effective contrasts in stillness; but the plot device of swallowing the tablets – obviously not drawn from the novel, where Larry is found guilty and spends the rest of the book in jail – is a little desperate, and the subsequent getaway straight out of a Boy’s Own adventure book. Welles is not at his most convincing as a dashing escapee, and the undoubted virtuosity of the staging, with police and judiciary rushing about left and right, seems to belong to another film: it ceases to be a nightmare and briefly (and unconvincingly) becomes a caper movie. Once Michael hits Chinatown – we see him scurrying down the streets, through a series of shop windows painted with Chinese characters – the film regains its stylistic coherence; plunging into a performance of the Chinese Opera, O’Hara takes us with him into a deeply exotic world, wonderfully and evocatively filmed in wide-shot and close-up, from on stage and backstage and from the auditorium. For Michael, it is a sort of beautiful nightmare, at once incomprehensible and compelling. This sequence, like the scenes at Acapulco, transcends mere background. Welles had been in Shanghai with his father as a boy and had written a vivid account of Chinese theatre in his local newspaper; he had followed it knowledgeably ever since. His sense of its integrity gives the scene a depth and power it would lack in the hands of someone else: paradoxically, however theatrical, it is a wholly real world into which he has stumbled, not something devised for passing effect.

  Michael slips into a seat at the theatre, where Elsa soon joins him. We have seen her running down the same streets of Chinatown, asking passers-by – in Chinese – whether they’ve seen him, finding the theatre, going to the dressing room and finally (eyed by an actor about to put his wig on) making a phone call to Lee, an elderly Chinese man whom we saw earlier listening to reports of the trial on the radio. Infuriatingly, Viola Lawrence cut an exchange between Elsa and O’Hara, in which she recounts to him what she pretends is the story of the play: ‘I’ll tell you the plot. The lady loves a man … a poor sailor … the poor sailor’s accused of murder, but the lady’s jealous …’ O’Hara takes the story over, ending with the words: ‘With the partner dead, who is it gets the benefit of the insurance? Who stands to gain by killing him?’ To which Elsa replies: ‘One person – only one.’ In the film as released, she simply sits beside Mike as the police enter the auditorium; she whispers to him to sit still, and suddenly kisses him to make sure of it. The shot of the two of them is wittily fringed by an ancient Chinaman in the row in front, a half-smoked cigarette jutting out of his mouth, three inches of ash threatening to fall at any moment, which produces its own comic tension. The police prowl around the auditorium, the camera picking up eyes everywhere: Mike’s, Elsa’s, those of the police, above all the actors’, their huge and stylised orbs swivelling from side to side in terrified curiosity. Mike starts to free himself from Elsa, telling her that he knows who the murderer is: ‘You’re the killer.’ He finds her gun – the gun with which she must have killed Grisby – in her handbag, but even as he threatens her with it, the tablets take effect and he slumps to the floor. Elsa’s friend Lee has been standing by the light switch and now abruptly plunges the theatre into darkness. Out in the street, we see Lee and his friends taking O’Hara to a nearby out-of-season Crazy House, where he wakes up.

  Here the nightmare becomes explicit. Michael stumbles through horrors presumably devised to scare children, though some of them would be quite disturbing enough for adults. Stumbling past Caligarian abstract projections, he moves on through flapping hands and dangling arms, through elaborate webbing at the centre of which is a slogan telling him to STAND UP OR GIVE UP (which might have been Welles’s motto in life, but also of course recalls Michael’s drugged near-collapse in the courtroom), past skeletons and upturned mannequins. As he does so, in a great rush of enlightenment, he pieces together the baffling events of his recent life and finally understands them. ‘I was the fall-guy,’ he says, and duly tumbles down the vast twisting slide and into the jaws of the dragon, at the bottom of which he finds himself walking rubber-legged into a room of distorting mirrors. Once out of there, he finds himself in the Hall of Mirrors, where it is impossible to know what is real and what is merely reflected; there he discovers Elsa, endlessly replicated, and the final phase of the nightmare begins. This is the most celebrated sequence in the film, which alone would have earned Welles a place in the Hollywood pantheon; however, the Crazy House sequence that precedes it is less satisfying, spectacular but somehow perfunctory. The reason for this is predictable: Cohn and Lawrence cut a great deal of it. It was, according to Welles, the most interesting sequence in the film: ‘I was up every night from ten-thirty till five in the morning for a week painting that funhouse … this was THE big tour-de-force scene.’ Harry Cohn had neither liked nor understood it: ‘What’s all that about?’ he said and, in Welles’s phrase, ‘yanked it out’. There remain a few stills – all later withdrawn – from the sequence, and it is clear that the nightmare was much darker than the one we see in the commercially available version of the film, containing mutilated faces of clowns and mannequins, bisected women, ghoulishly contorted skeletons. There is an unmistakable element of violence, especially violence to women.

  If this is Michael’s nightmare, it is a strange one for him to be having, bearing little connection to the gentle dreamer and chivalrous champion we have seen throughout the picture. It is, rather, a curious but very direct emanation from Welles’s obviously frenzied imagination, and has led to some fairly feverish speculation about his possible involvement in a murder that took place in Hollywood in January of 1947, the notorious Black Dahlia case, in which a young woman, Elizabeth Short, was found cut up and mutilated in a very distinctive, highly skilled way. According to Mary Pacios,13 childhood friend of the murdered woman turned amateur sleuth, writing in 1998, the mutilations on the faces and torsos, the way in which the limbs on the mannequins are arranged and the skeletons severed at the waist in Welles’s scenery are all uncannily like those on Bette Short’s corpse. It seems that the production shut down on 15 January, the day of the murder, and the following day; that Welles took out a passport a few days later; and that, most bizarrely of all, a few days before he had made a formal written application to register as an assistant with the local mortuary (this application is to be found in the Mercury archive at the Lilly Library). In the way of these things, Miss Pacios kept on finding more clues: that Bette Short was seeing a man called George (Welles’s first name, used by certain of his intimates) and ate in a restaurant that Welles frequented, Brittingham’s near the Columbia studios; that the body was left, carefully arranged, on the former site of The Mercury Wonder Show on Cahuenga Boulevard – where, of course, Welles had so famously sawn a woman in half; and a collage message from the murderer sent to the police with the girl’s address book and birth certificate, which heavily features the letters O and W. Miss Pacios rather overplays her hand by triumphantly revealing that the next play Welles did was Macbeth, in which … More appositely, she cites an oration given by Welles at the funeral of Darryl F. Zanuck in 1976, in which Welles said, ‘If I did something really outrageous, that if I committed some abominable crime, which I believe it is in most of us to do, that if I were guilty of something unspeakable, and if all the police in the world were after me, there was one man, and only one man I could come to, and that was Darryl. He would not have made me a speech about the good of the industry, the good of the studio. He would not have been mealy-mouthed or put me aside. He would have hid me under the bed. Very simply he was a friend.’ The speech has a curious resonance in that when Welles l
eft America at the end of 1947, not to return for ten years, it was to play a part hastily rustled up for him by Darryl Zanuck.

  As it happens, a book appeared in 2002 (Black Dahlia Avenger) which definitively and beyond reasonable doubt identified the Black Dahlia murderer – it turned out to be the father of the book’s author – so Welles is off the hook; it is irresistible to reflect how he would have loved the story. It had all the elements of a perfect Wellesian film, à la A Touch of Evil, with crooked cops, seedy club-owners, girls on the brink of prostitution, and an innocent who, determined to prove that her murdered friend was not a whore, finds herself blocked at every turn, finally stumbling on a terrible truth, to which everything points but which it is now impossible to prove. Miss Pacios is right, however, to suggest that during the making of The Lady from Shanghai Welles was in a dangerously driven state, physically and mentally – those night-long painting sessions, followed by even longer days of shooting both behind and in front of the camera, can scarcely have created a calm state of mind, and no doubt when he let his fantasy run, the images that swam into his consciousness were not especially wholesome; they were clearly too much for Harry Cohn. Perhaps they expressed something of the self-disgust that Welles so often felt; without question they reveal some complexity in his dealings with women, as does The Lady from Shanghai in general.

  Curiously enough, only weeks after the Black Dahlia murders, Rita Hayworth was sent a disturbing letter: ‘The Scar never fails. This I assure you sis is no crank letter, unless $2,000 in cash is sent to me by the 10th of this month, then I assure you that your baby will be snatched from your home, and that your beautiful face will be ruined by having lye thrown into those beautiful eyes of yours.’14 The sender tells her to mail the money in $5, $10 and $20 bills. ‘Rest assured, the Scar gets what he wants you don’t want to look like the Blue Dahlia do you, nor do you want your child to be disturbed from your arms, this is your final warning RITA, ORSON WELLS cannot help you nor the FBI, for they have been wanting me for some time no one can help you only the money can talk.’ In fact, the Scar was apprehended before Hayworth ever saw the letter, but The Lady from Shanghai is informed throughout with the violence that seems to have surrounded its making like a sinister force-field.

  The climactic sequence in the Hall of Mirrors is a triumph of organisation, a brilliant embodiment of the multiphrenia of the central characters: who are they, really? Michael has never known. Idle rich? Homicidal monsters? Romantics in the grip of obsessive passion? It is a brilliantly achieved coup de théâtre, a piece of high romantic stagecraft that would many years later be echoed by Roger Planchon in his masterful production of Racine’s Britannicus at the Théâtre National Populaire, where, as in Welles’s cinematic mise-en-scène, the mirrors’ revelation of the heightened isolation and duplication of the obsessed characters reveals the fundamental narcissism of their fragmented selves. The sequence in the Hall of Mirrors is rightly held to be one of Welles’s most remarkable achievements, a passage of uncommon filmic bravura. It is no diminution of that achievement to trace its antecedents – both in other films (most notably Chaplin’s The Circus, in which the chase climaxes brilliantly in a Hall of Mirrors, though there of course the intention is purely comic), but also in two other screenplays on which Welles had worked. The first was John Fante’s Love Story – intended as part of It’s All True – which contained a Crystal Maze sequence that Fante’s biographer Stephen Cooper, quoting the Welles scholar Catherine Benamou, claimed Welles had ‘cannibalised’ for the Hall of Mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai. Equally, Brett Wood has drawn attention to a sequence in the unfilmed screenplay Don’t Catch Me – the project Welles had worked on with Bud Pearson and Les White a couple of years earlier. As always, it is necessary to point out that in film, ideas for scenes are mere starting points; the realisation is all. Moreover, Welles worked actively with Pearson and White on the screenplay, and no doubt encouraged the development of a sequence with such obvious visual potential. The point is not about plagiarism, but about Welles’s remarkable ability – an ability he shared with the greatest artists in every medium – to remember and recycle material from one project to another, and to perceive potential in a notion, a technical concept.

  It is hard to imagine the idea of a shoot-out in a Hall of Mirrors being more perfectly adapted to its context than this scene in this film. It had found its perfect place. Looming lopsidedly into view with his cane, Sloane’s Arthur Bannister (multiplied by five) flourishes his gun at Hayworth’s Elsa, crying, ‘Killing you is killing myself.’ But which self? There are so many. Welles’s O’Hara, trapped in this ontological nightmare, has the appearance of a rabbit caught in headlights. As the guns start to speak and the mirrors shatter, first Bannister and then Elsa collapse to the floor; he is dead, she is quickly dying. Welles’s camera films her, wincing and straining on the floor, in extremely unflattering close-up – an even more shocking destruction of her image, perhaps, than the one wrought by the coiffeurs’ peroxide. From her semi-supine position, she rasps out her philosophy, so richly justified by the turn of events: ‘the world’s bad but we can’t run away from the badness … we can’t fight it. We must deal with the badness … make its own terms. We can’t win.’

  This is a world-view not dissimilar from that of Welles the artist, though Welles the political writer – another of the many fragments that made up the multi-faceted creature that was Orson Welles – continued to espouse his belief in the perfectibility of man and the triumph of the forces of light over those of darkness. ‘Give my love to the sunrise,’ she gasps, before a sudden access of terror at the thought of death. ‘Come back here. Please. I don’t want to die.’ But O’Hara is all through with her, as we understand from the shot of him standing at the wicket of the Hall of Mirrors, its slatted shadow falling on Michael, and behind him the sign with its unnegotiable message: CLOSED. In voice-over, Michael tells us that he went to call the cops. He broods on the word ‘innocent’ – ‘a big word’, he says. ‘Stupid’s more like it. Everybody’s somebody’s fool.’

  Michael walks away from the Hall of Mirrors, back towards the sea he so foolishly renounced for the love of a woman. On the soundtrack, the strains of ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’, which have been murmuring away under this on a fairly tight leash, now abandon any attempt at self-control and burst out in a sentimental ecstasy as Welles speaks the last lines of the film, which have so often (on no evidence whatsoever) been assumed to refer to his own relationship with Rita Hayworth: ‘Maybe I’ll live so long that I forget her – maybe I’ll die trying.’ In fact, the end of the film was the end of their relationship, although from time to time in the next years she attempted, according to Welles, to revive it. No, if the film allegorised any relationship in Welles’s life, it was the one with Hollywood, the treacherous beauty whose intentions could never be fathomed and whom it was impossible to know on an equal basis. Michael’s walk away from Elsa and the Crazy House towards the ocean and its implied lands beyond symbolised an exile that Welles was shortly to embrace. But before that, there was one last stab at creating a new sort of structure by which to make films, a fusion of his worlds of art, a possible matrix for a way in which he might function effectively in a universe whose workings he either did not, or would not, understand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Forces of Darkness

  IT WAS IN the midst of filming The Lady from Shanghai, in late January 1947, when Harry Cohn and Viola Lawrence were starting to tamper with his footage, when both he and Rita Hayworth were ill, and when lunatics were sending them threatening letters, that Welles received a telegram from Vinton Freedley of the American National Theatre and Academy: RE POSSIBILITY OF YOUR APPEARING IN KING LEAR OR A NEW PLAY FOR ONE WEEK IN SALT LAKE CITY.1 The lure of the great roles was one that persisted with Welles to the end of his life, as was his determination to bring them to the screen; he died with his plans for a film of King Lear at an advanced stage. He seems immediately to have seen the possib
ilities in ANTA’s suggestion of using the brief week in Salt Lake City as a cheap and efficient way of preparing for a film version of a classical play; he correctly calculated that if the subsequent film was shot very quickly and on a relatively low budget, he would have more control over the production. Now all he needed was a studio to take up the challenge. Almost immediately, one fortuitously presented itself.

  When shooting on The Lady from Shanghai came to an end, he and Rita Hayworth – no longer held together by work – parted again, this time for good. Welles moved into a large house, which he shared with Charles K. Feldman. The former agent, whose Famous Artists agency had managed some of the biggest Hollywood names, had been active since the early nineteen-forties as a producer of some class. He and Welles had worked together on Follow the Boys; his subsequent body of work included To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and in the years to come he would produce such elegant fare as Walk on the Wild Side, The Group and The Honey Pot. Feldman was witty, shrewd and literate, and in 1947 he had a five-picture deal with Herbert J. Yates, head of Republic Studios. He and Welles took Yates the idea of filming a Shakespeare play that had previously been done on stage. The small studio was principally noted for its cowboy quickies, many of them starring Roy Rogers, but Yates, a hard-headed businessman (whose precociously developed business instincts had led him to become an executive in a tobacco company at the age of nineteen), was at the same time quietly pursuing a more artistically enterprising line of work. There is a certain pleasing congruousness in the fact that the reason Republic was interested in making quality films at all was due to Yates’s infatuation with his lovely wife, the ex-skating champion Vera Hruba Ralston, who had artistic ambitions, and for whom he created many unsuccessful vehicles to which the public stubbornly refused to flock – a relationship strangely echoing that of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst; moreover, most of Miss Ralston’s films were directed by a man named Kane. Not all the art films starred Miss Ralston, though. The year before Yates signed the deal with Feldman, he had released the exotic Specter of the Rose, Ben Hecht’s ambitious and slightly bizarre fantasy about a murderous schizophrenic ballet dancer; the visionary director Frank Borzage had signed a three-picture deal with them, which would result in the film widely considered to be his masterpiece, Moonrise; and in years to come Republic would produce two major John Ford movies, Rio Grande and The Quiet Man.