Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Charm’s Wound Up

  BEFORE HE LEFT for Europe, Welles had done a certain very limited amount of work on Macbeth. In fact, much of it was being done by Dick Wilson, with occasional visits from Welles to the editing suite. After one of these visits, he wrote to Wilson, apropos a particular sequence, an interesting note: ‘All of this stuff of lighting candles should occur either before Macbeth’s soliloquy or Lady M’s lines, or after my soliloquy and before Lady M starts to talk to me or both.1 Don’t let the fact that I have a candle in my hand after I have risen and don’t before I rise bother you one bit because by cutting away from the full shot I think I can get away with it.’ This is illuminating concerning Welles’s indifference to rules of continuity, and also betrays a certain general pragmatism. Unlike Hitchcock, he by no means had the precise sequence of the whole film in his mind as he shot; he was not the slave of the storyboard in the least. When he saw what he had filmed, he may have been surprised by the result. After the euphoria of shooting and the immediate excitement of the daily review of what has been shot (they don’t call them rushes for nothing), one is faced with the reality of the material one actually has, viewed in sequence. If only this shot had been different, if only that performance had been faster/slower/louder/quieter/better! Some sort of compromise is then arrived at, given the available material; sometimes one has a chance to reshoot certain sequences.

  At about this time Welles had written in the usual affectionate terms (‘My Beamish Beanie’) to Bernard Herrmann, who was going to write the score, that he had hoped the rough-cut would be ready sooner, but alas it would not be. ‘Good news is that picture looks wonderful,’ he added.2 Passing through London a couple of months later, however, he told Alexander Korda: ‘Some of the individual scenes are the best things I’ve done, but when they are stuck together, the picture may be a complete flop.’3 Any film-maker might have said the same about his work at the beginning of the post-production period. It is perfectly possible, though, that when Welles spoke to Korda he meant what he said: that he was genuinely disappointed with what he had, and that he had indeed lost conviction in the film. This would certainly explain his lack of drive in the matter of achieving a final cut, which had bewildered his colleagues at Republic, exhilarated as they were by what they had seen, both on the set and in rushes. The news that Welles was decamping to Rome and would continue to work on the film there was greeted at the studio with dumbfounded disbelief: their first, not unreasonable reaction was to want to charge him for the cost of transporting the rushes and an editor to Italy, a demand that Wilson was reluctantly obliged to accept.

  Welles meanwhile was established on location, lording it over Cagliostro, a troubled production. The usually shrewd producer Edward Small was experiencing difficulties with a film that, thanks to a lethal combination of logistical and temperamental factors, had run into innumerable problems. The delightfully incomprehensible Gregory Ratoff, who was directing, was under such huge pressure that he was genuinely grateful for a strike in the middle of filming: it meant that he could at last catch up on his sleep. To some of his colleagues, he seemed close to a nervous break-down. Welles was by far the most powerful personality on the set; his co-star Nancy Guild, already something of a film noir favourite, was at the beginning of a brief career whose subsequent high-light was Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man; for the rest he was surrounded by Russian actors from Ratoff’s stable, one of whom, Akim Tamiroff, thereafter became part of Welles’s stable. Language problems were one of the many difficulties facing the film. Welles was not shy of offering helpful input. ‘Being a director at heart,’ reported the studio apparatchik, Warren Doane, to his superiors, ‘he does bother Gregory by his suggestions.4 At the same time,’ Doane continued, ‘Gregory is the first to admit that many of his suggestions are good. They do result in delay, since Gregory likes to lay his work out and then follow through. All in all,’ he concluded, ‘the delays are not losses in all cases.’ Understandably, though, Welles’s ‘input’ – and he would not be the man to offer his suggestions modestly, in private, but in full view of the crew at top volume in that uniquely carrying voice – had not endeared him to his fellow-workers. ‘He is adequately cooperative, and friendly enough – at least to our faces,’ continued Doane. ‘He is, as you know, most unpredictable and thoroughly disliked by all and sundry.’ He had been ill: ‘we are having some trouble with colds but no one has been really sick abed but Welles. We don’t know how sick he actually was, but undoubtedly he was sick.’

  Welles was clearly not wholly engaged by his work on Cagliostro, whether as actor or backseat driver. He had already been studying the Macbeth footage and sent his responses to Dick Wilson via a Dictaphone-like device called a SoundScriber (sales pitch: ‘Winston Churchill used it’); both he and Dick were rather boyishly excited to be among the first to have one. ‘There is too much footage of Banquo in the opening scene unrelieved by shots of me,’ says Welles.5 ‘I think the feeling of moving in will help it … and I also think I will look better moving down there without my gut sticking out. Go to closer shot. That doesn’t mean going to closer shot we made. It wasn’t very good, was it?’ He offers detailed suggestions as to how Herrmann’s music will function in specific scenes. The dubbing of certain performances displeases him. ‘Doctor too theatrical, much too theatrical. Much too theatrical. I begged, begged you not to let him get that way and he is. Much too theatrical! It should be clinical. He is trying to get like the third witch, he’s, you know, bitchy.’ There was much more of the same.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Wilson was dealing with a very angry front office (as well as with Welles’s domestic requirements, such as buying sweaters for Dr Bernstein). ‘Several sections of Republic Pix expressed a certain unhappiness that there remains more to do on the picture.6 I might even say that questions were raised in the strongest language, and displeasure might be spoken of as the common denominator in the entire production organisation.’ Wilson was doing some pick-up shots, and had been hoping to get the sound looping done before the return of Herbert J. Yates. He was trying to get it finished ‘before I’m presented with some hideous fait accompli’. He was taking the brunt of Republic’s anxiety. ‘Yesterday I had a two-hour meeting (or inquiry) in Chairman Newman’s office. I felt like the 19 hostile witnesses rolled into one.’ The tone was ugly. Bob Newman said that if Louis Lindsay, the editor, didn’t have it done in a couple of days, ‘then Lindsay will be fired and a cutter will replace him who will!’ Wilson reports an explosive conversation with an apoplectic Bernard Herrmann (the phrase is no doubt tautological) who would not consider doing the picture until it was completed. ‘A series of irrational statements were made. Bernard, on this occasion, blew his top,’ saying that he’d been lured to Hollywood under false pretences, and refusing to be involved unless Welles was there ‘to back him up on every argument’. In this he showed a shrewd knowledge both of Welles and of the studio system. Citizen Kane, his first film as a composer, set a standard for his contribution to the process of film-making, which he refused to compromise. He had told Robert Newman that he simply would not be involved ‘if Welles runs out on the picture, which,’ Wilson reminded Welles, ‘demands that you be there while he scores and dubs’. And that was impossible. Newman had no patience with Herrmann, saying that Ernst Toch should score it. (It is worth noting that Republic had a certain class: Toch was no hack like Roy Webb or Heinz Roemheld, but a hugely distinguished teacher and composer of excellent scores for Catherine the Great and The Cat and the Canary; they could have done worse.) The upshot was that Herrmann, who had come to Hollywood on the. understanding that he would be shown a completed cut, and broke his holiday to do so, had taken the first flight back to New York. Even the ever-optimistic Wilson realised that Herrmann perhaps meant it this time and would not be returning, so they started to think of alternatives. The name of Marc Blitzstein was brought up and summarily dismissed, while Newman raged about the need
to meet deadlines for trailers, main titles, and so forth. Wilson was in an impossible position; he had no answer to any of these perfectly sensible objections to Welles’s behaviour. There had been some talk of Wilson going over to Italy, but he was of the firm opinion that ‘somebody from our side should be here practically all the time until you return, if only to watch and to reason over unwise action’.

  A couple of days later Herbert Yates, now back from his travels, stopped Wilson on the lot, and had a nice, moderate conversation with him. He was anxious about Bernard Herrmann, but seemed satisfied with the work in progress, although, says Wilson, ‘the whole lot – executives and artisans – are buzzing and making with the jokes about any little thing that has to be done’.7 Yates’s biggest problem, he told Wilson, was promoting the film. ‘His most ominous sentence was in this section of the conversation, in which he said, “Anything that we might be doing to the picture now, really isn’t going to make a big difference. It’s either there or it isn’t.”’ Yates added, mildly, that he thought Welles was making a big mistake by not completing it swiftly, and what a shame the whole thing was. Wilson’s letters over the next month continue in the same vein, explaining the situation at Republic, charting the resentment and the rage of the studio, the despair and confusion of their collaborators, his own loyalty and attempted good cheer, and Welles’s non-communication – ‘for Christ’s sake write!’ Meanwhile, at the end of November, Louis Lindsay had flown out to Rome with the sound-effects and the footage, and Welles worked directly on the material.8 Slowly. He had started to think about Cyrano again, talking to Alexandre Trauner, Carné’s great art director, about possible designs; he fitted in Macbeth between shooting Cagliostro and the infinitely more agreeable sessions with Trauner. He had discovered that the distinguished French composer Jacques Ibert was in Rome as director of the Académie de France, and accordingly – to the considerable pique of Republic – hired him to write the score for Macbeth. It was, he felt, a bit of luck that such a distinguished and experienced composer was there: Ibert had written a great deal of incidental music for the Paris stage (Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream among them) and a number of film scores, including two particularly fine ones, for Pabst’s Don Quixote starring Chaliapin and for Julien Duvivier’s Golgotha, as well as a score for a radio production of Dr Faustus, which must have delighted Welles. They spent four very pleasant hours together, watching the film together, discussing it after every two reels, after which Welles disappeared and Ibert, under the guidelines they had established, worked alone.

  Welles remained in Rome with Lou Lindsay after shooting on Cagliostro was over in the spring of 1948; as they worked on Macbeth, they discussed Cyrano (of which Korda had now finally washed his hands) and Welles’s production of Othello for the Edinburgh Festival, which he planned to film. Cagliostro’s producer, Edward Small, was keen for him to do it in Hollywood, with the same speed with which he shot Macbeth, and in Technicolor. Small’s principal anxiety was that Welles wanted to play Othello as a black man: Joseph Breen of the Hays Office had advised him that they would refuse to pass any such picture. How deeply that must have confirmed Welles’s resolve to remain out of his native country. Wilson, meanwhile, was in financial trouble. He had not been paid himself, and it was increasingly difficult to fund the office. Yet his affection for Welles never falters. ‘Dearest Chuck,’ he calls him in Macbeth’s own words, and signs off ‘With much, much, much love’.9

  By early March, Lou Lindsay was back with the picture, more or less finished. Wilson, had been ‘low and generally confused’; he was much cheered by what he saw.10 ‘I love what you did. It has a simplicity and a beauty unexcelled in the motion picture cinema.’ But it was still unfinished. Now not only Republic but Charles Feldman (Welles’s chum and partner in Literary Classics) was beginning to urge that the film be completed, with or without Welles. Soon afterwards, with various changes proposed by Welles, the film was run or Feldman and Robert Newman. ‘When I talked to Feldman,’ wrote Wilson, ‘he said that he had always liked the picture, and that he liked it even better on seeing it last night.’11 At this stage, there was no score; it had not yet been recorded. Ibert refused to work until he was paid. Republic, ever eager to get things moving, proposed that work on the sound should be abandoned because music would cover it – a shocking proposition on a Welles movie; Dick Wilson successfully resisted it. In the fullness of time, serious contractual quibbles having finally been resolved, Ibert duly wrote the score and, because of the limitations of international travel in 1948 and Ibert’s refusal to travel by air, it was recorded not in Hollywood but in Rome, under the skilful baton of the Russian-American conductor Efrem Kurtz. Having received a copy of the recording, Welles advised on how best it should be used, asking for some ancillary bagpipes, which Ibert had neglected to include in his instrumentation. The composer was professional, intelligent and imaginative, and his score is everything that any similarly endowed musician might have hoped to produce in the time. But it bears no comparison with the texturally detailed and profoundly subtle work of Bernard Herrmann. It is, in fact, incidental music of very high quality, playing while the film runs, but not an integral part of it. How could it have been otherwise? Losing Herrmann was a disaster for Macbeth, but no one seems to have felt it at the time. No composer, at any point in Welles’s career, ever worked with him the way Herrmann did. And the films are accordingly diminished.

  Dick Wilson held Republic’s music department at bay while the question of where and by whom the score would be recorded was being thrashed out. It is impossible not to feel pity for the man as he wrestles with problems not of his making, endlessly prodding Welles (who was still swanning around in Rome) to provide photographic stills, this or that loop for the dialogue track, and a dozen decisions about crucial matters; Italy’s forthcoming elections were rendering the country increasingly unstable. Not only was Wilson attempting to get Macbeth into releasable form, he was trying to keep Welles’s American operation afloat, as well as set up Othello, which was to play a two-week season in Edinburgh a mere three months hence and then go straight into shooting – but when? Where? How? The Salzburg Festival was eager to have Othello, too, a testament to Welles’s growing European reputation. ‘Please send some generalisations at least about the script version, cast, etc, etc of Othello,’ Wilson wrote.12 ‘The most general and the roughest sort of lira budget would also be very helpful, and I’m sure you know how valuable it would be to have the script as soon as possible. I once sent you word of some of the equipment needed for the sound system (here is another copy). I’m still anxious to find out whether they can be procured in Italy. As you know, this can save a tremendous shipping expense and trouble. Love.’ Throughout the exchange, he maintains his good humour and his affection for Welles. ‘Dear Old Hank Cinq:13 it was quite a boost to hear your voice and to find that you really hadn’t dissolved into air or got lost behind the “Iron Curtain” or any of the other imaginary alternatives.’ But Welles simply would not make the decisions. ‘For Christ’s sake let me know!’

  As must inevitably happen in a vacuum of leadership, Republic started to make decisions themselves. Wilson felt entirely unsupported. ‘For your information, Charles K. Feldman is a shit! And not one bit of help in anything … Newman quotes Charles K. Feldman as the strongest proponent of finishing the picture immediately with or without you. I must say that Feldman to me on this latter point is still interested in your finishing it.’14 Uncertain of its own judgement, Republic had asked Welles’s distinguished radio colleague, Norman Corwin, for his advice, which he gave with characteristic incisiveness: ‘There’s no reason why the witches who open the film should sound as if they come from Li’l Abner.’ His suggestions were extensive, affecting not just the now universally acknowledged problem of the accents, but matters of tone and dynamics; he even suggested cutting Lady Macbeth’s death-leap, one of Welles’s most audacious interpolations.15 The extent to which others were dabbling in his w
ork behind his back is extraordinary, but hardly surprising – except perhaps to Welles himself, whose innocence or ignorance of the world’s way is sometimes baffling. It is almost incomprehensible that Welles would have let things come to this pass, had he cared in the least for the integrity of his film. Instead he moved on to his next European film, while Wilson was left to deal with everything, not least the break-up of Welles’s personal entourage: Shorty Chirello was cutting up rough about certain sums owed to him, and was hanging on to the money raised from the sale of Welles’s car.

  Eventually a version of Macbeth was ready to be shown to a preview audience: Wilson reports great restlessness at various points. He suggests remedies, but doubts whether he has the shots to implement them. Perhaps revoicing would help? If only they had asked for music for the exile scene … sound might help. Or maybe not. There was more tinkering. Then, in a curious and still-murky episode, in September 1948 the film was entered for and then withdrawn from competition in the Venice Festival, because, it is said, Welles felt that Laurence Olivier’s newly released film of Hamlet was bound to win. This was the first hint of the eventually all-engulfing shadow that Olivier’s movie would cast over Macbeth. Though hors concours, Macbeth was widely reviewed. The London Daily Telegraph’s man Campbell Dixon, who had seen both films, was in Venice to report: ‘[Welles’s] own opinion of his work is no secret.16 He considers it infinitely superior to Olivier’s Hamlet which for some reason strikes him as “Wagnerian”. An odd adjective, you might think for a production of so much taste and disciplined beauty but one not wholly inapplicable to Mr Welles’s Macbeth.’ Dixon’s comments on the film adumbrate the derisive tone of virtually every review of the film in the English-speaking world thereafter. ‘The problem of creating a Scottish castle in Hollywood was solved by making the Macbeths a tribe of troglodytes inhabiting caves … surely a queer background for characters pouring out the rich and subtle poetry of the English Renaissance. For past delights one can forgive Mr Welles a good deal, and if faults were only in the setting – but alas the whole conception of the play seems to me mistaken to a degree I should have supposed impossible to a man of so much talent.’ Here, too, the criticisms of the Scottish accents appear for the first time. ‘The three witches become Glasgow washerwomen clacking round the tub, Lady Macbeth is a wee body sair set in her opinions.’ Dixon was generally contemptuous, too, of the use of the verse. ‘Lady Macbeth says “Gentle! My lord”, rather than “Gentle my lord”. I suggest that if Shakespeare had meant “Wait a minute, honey”, or “Hold your horses, hand-some”, he would have said so.’ And this was to become a common theme in subsequent responses to the film.