Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The European press was naturally less interested in the matter of language and accent, and reacted on the whole warmly to it: ‘[It] grabs the audience by the throat,’ reported Il Tempo, ‘and does not let go of it until the very end.’17 The audience applauded four times during the showing, reported Il Tempo, declaring the film Welles’s best since Citizen Kane. Jean Cocteau, who had seen and reported on Welles’s 1936 Voodoo Macbeth with a sort of fascinated repulsion, immediately acclaimed this new version as a film maudit, a somewhat complex accolade, though he did not enter the movie for his festival of similarly cursed films held in Biarritz later that year. Cocteau later wrote his impressions of Welles’s film. ‘Coiffed with horns and crowns of cardboard, clad in animal skins like the first motorists, the heroes of the drama move in the corridors of a kind of dream underground, in devastated caves leaking water, in an abandoned coal-mine … at times we ask ourselves in what age this nightmare is taking place, and when we encounter Lady Macbeth for the first time before the camera moves back and places her, we almost see a lady in modern dress lying on a fur couch next to the telephone.’18 This engaging account suggests that the film is somehow Coctelian, which is misleading, to put it mildly. It is, if nothing else – for better or for worse – perfectly Wellesian, a notion that continental (especially French) cinéastes were beginning to embrace. Marcel Carné pronounced it superior to Olivier’s film from a cinematographic point of view; Bresson loved its ‘fake light and cardboard settings’.19

  These plaudits were of little use in selling the film to the American market. The home-grown preview reviews were generally tepid, and any tiny peep of praise contained in them seemed inaudibly faint beside the deafening fanfares that greeted Olivier’s Hamlet. Republic, expecting to be showered with praise for their bold foray into Shakespearean drama, were suddenly anxious. They were up against an unstoppable and ever-expanding tidal wave of praise for Hamlet. ‘It may come as something of a rude shock to the theatre’s traditionalists to discover that the tragedies of Shakespeare can be eloquently presented on the screen,’ wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times, ‘but now the matter is settled; the filmed Hamlet of Laurence Olivier gives absolute proof that these classics are magnificently suited to the screen.’20 This was exactly what Welles believed, of course, but his understanding of the word ‘film’ was quite different from Olivier’s. If Hamlet was what they wanted, then they were not going to like Macbeth. Crowther shrewdly notes that what Olivier does in his film is to bring the audience closer to the stage. ‘A quietly-moving camera which wanders intently around the vast and gloomy palace of Elsinore … gives the exciting impression of a silent observer of great events, aware that big things are impending and anxious not to miss any of them.’ By contrast, Welles’s camera is always highly active, almost assaulting and battering the viewer. Crowther says the acting in Olivier’s film is ‘beautiful’, the articulation ‘perfect’, the interpretations ‘inspired’, the cutting ‘judicious’, the music ‘intriguing’, the design ‘rich’; the dark and haunted palace is ‘the grim and majestic setting’ for ‘an uncommonly galvanic film’. The sort of aesthetic nobility implied in all these adjectives is the exact opposite of what Welles was striving for. If Hamlet was to be the yardstick – and it was, almost universally – then Macbeth could only fail.

  By a process first analysed by Theodor Adorno, Laurence Olivier had been informally elected the representative of theatrical culture, just as Toscanini had been appointed the greatest conductor in the world, beside whom all others were somehow inauthentic, while Jascha Heifetz had become the violinist. Now Olivier was acting, anointed and sanctified. To dare to criticise him was to reveal one’s ignorance. His recent knighthood had added a heraldic shine to his beatification, especially perhaps in America; even to those who would not naturally be drawn to his films, he was a byword for acting, the epitome of High Thespian Art. That this elevation bore little relation to the man or his approach to his work is neither here nor there; now there was a Gold Standard (somehow confirmed by the blond locks Olivier had acquired for Hamlet) by which all others must be judged. Life magazine, an important arbiter in these matters, was not slow to confirm his new status: a four-page spread sang the glories of the new film. But just as light is only light because of the existence of dark, so a Shakespearean failure was needed to endorse Olivier’s reign as monarch of culture. Here to hand, so very conveniently, was Orson Welles’s Macbeth.

  According Welles’s film a three-page spread, Life came not to praise it but to bury it. ‘The scene opposite is not, as you might think, from a musical comedy skit set in an alcoholics’ ward,’ said the anonymous piece, with fine courage.21 ‘It is Orson Welles’s movie version of Act III, Sc i of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Mr Welles has had the idea that 11th century Scotsmen appearing in a 17th century play should express themselves in the accents of Sir Harry Lauder on the vaudeville stage of the 20th. Thus we have … Lady Macbeth sweeping down an endless stone staircase shrieking “Oot, damn’d spot, oot, I say.”’ The reporter condemns the reordering of the play – ‘scenes have been ruthlessly juggled, characters interchange their lines freely’ – and though he acknowledges that Olivier and his text editor, Alan Dent, did much the same, ‘Olivier did [it] to make a consistent and harmonious movie … Welles on the other hand has gone back to the senseless violence of all the hams who have hacked and gesticulated their way through Macbeth for out-of-town audiences.’ He or she seizes on Welles’s use of the witches’ line ‘The charm’s wound up’ to end the film – the line with which he had brought the curtain down on the Voodoo Macbeth – berating him for failing to understand its meaning: ‘despite what Mr Welles may think, not “over and done with” but “ready to work”’. But that is precisely what Welles intends: that we’re in for more of the same trouble – spuriously, perhaps, in terms of the play, but accurately in terms of the line. Pitying Welles, ‘who, a few sad years ago, was the Boy Wonder of Hollywood’, the piece ends: ‘confusion hath now made his masterpiece’. And Life was not alone. ‘If Welles has failed utterly to live up to the standard set by Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, he has at least failed honestly,’ said Newsweek.22 ‘In both acting and directing, Welles’s limitations are strongly, sometimes offensively, apparent.’ ‘There is no doubt,’ said Fortnight, ‘that Orson Welles is gifted with colossal ingenuity and resourcefulness.23 It would take colossal ingenuity to make so great a bore of Shakespeare as he has done in this outrageously poor production of Macbeth.’

  The edition of Life magazine in which its hatchet job appears was on sale in Boston at the time of the film’s premiere, which, much against Dick Wilson’s advice, had been arranged by Republic in conjunction with ANTA. Emerson University sponsored it, and in order to obliterate largely inaccurate reports of a fiasco in Venice, it was billed as a ‘world premiere’, which meant that the review from Il Tempo and others equally glowing could not be quoted. The film’s reputation as a stinker was growing; anyway, Boston’s critics, as Wilson pointed out, ‘had exhausted themselves with writing superlatives about Hamlet’, which had been running there for ten sold-out weeks.24 The audience that Macbeth got was largely a young one, ‘because they admire you for your courage and liberal attitudes’; the financially lucrative carriage trade was slow to build. Most woundingly, ANTA (whose idea it had been in the first place to translate a stage production of a classical play into a movie) had dissociated itself from the picture; board members who had seen it filed bleakly negative reports.

  Under the pressure of all this negative reaction to a film over which he had, in Welles’s absence, personally laboured for months and months, fighting his wayward boss’s corner in a studio where he was a barely tolerated outsider, Wilson allowed himself a rare outburst against Welles, a real cri de coeur. ‘Of course I think the whole thing cries out for a fight – a fight on the order of the one you waged for Around the World.25 I think it’s tragic that you’re not here personally to lead it because I’m absolutely and sincerely co
nvinced that if you were around for the next three or four openings to lecture, meet the critics, women’s clubs and all that, you could put this over the top and turn it into a controversy such as the industry has seldom seen.’ As far as he knew, there was no reason why Welles couldn’t be there; he wasn’t filming at the time of writing. As far as Wilson knew, Welles was doing nothing at all. He cannot bring himself to criticise Welles’s behaviour during post-production, but he does dare to raise the question of Welles’s ‘industry and general public relations’, which, he says, ‘are in a period and state of crisis’. He reveals that Newman of Republic has told him that he doesn’t think Welles will get a penny of bank financing for any picture he ever tries to produce again; Edward Small (Cagliostro’s producer, and their potential partner on Othello) has been quite explicit about Welles’s position in the industry, in Hollywood ‘and all over the country with exhibitors’.

  Pushing on fearlessly – ‘I know that this usually bores or infuriates you’ – Wilson brings up the question of ‘the unhealthy press we have right now’. Leonard Lyons of the Post manages the occasional warm (albeit pointless) anecdote, but the rest of the columnists ‘take nothing but digs at you’. He begs Welles ‘to get again directly before the people and directly to the people’. He would have ‘tremendous popular sympathy and understanding’ if he went on the road on Macbeth’s behalf. ‘The deterioration that has gone on since you left the air on the Commentary series can hardly be overestimated.’ He implores Welles at least to pen a fighting piece for the New York Times, and to write round to his chums on the various newspapers. Hedda Hopper, surely, could be co-opted, ‘if you would extend yourself personally to cope with the situation’. Welles behaves as if it is nothing to do with him. ‘Please write me a letter so that I know what the hell is going on with you and I really want, need and hope to get the material I’ve asked for in this letter. I promise to put it to good use because I intend to follow this as closely as Republic allows me – anyway, you know I’ll be in there punching. Much much love and affection.’ The whole letter is a mark of the force of Welles’s personality and the often exasperated loyalty that he inspired. But Dick Wilson had no power within Republic or within the industry in general. Welles himself, at the head of a massive charm offensive, might just have been able to swing things in his favour; in his absence, events would inevitably take their own course. Republic – above all Robert Newman, the chairman – had started to form an opinion that Macbeth needed radical reworking.

  This is perhaps the moment to look at the film as it stood in 1948, the film acclaimed in Venice, the one derided in Boston. This film disappeared from view shortly afterwards, presumed lost or destroyed. Then, in 1985, the film as originally issued – which was anyway thirty-five minutes shorter than the first rough-cut – was discovered in nearly pristine form, and reissued; for the first time it was possible for a general audience to see the film in which, as Welles himself said at the Venice Festival, ‘for the first time in my life I got what I aimed for’.26

  The opening credits proudly proclaim ‘A Mercury Production’ – not since The Magnificent Ambersons had a Welles film been able to claim as much – while Ibert’s rackety, hectic overture, filled with fanfares, plays; it ends with a sly quotation from Herrmann’s Xanadu theme from Citizen Kane. The first image of the film is swirling fog. It is striking that this is exactly how Olivier’s film of Hamlet begins, as does Kurosawa’s 1956 Macbeth film, Throne of Blood. As in those two films, fog remains the essential element: everything looms up out of it and dissolves back into it. In Welles’s film, the camera pushes deep in to reveal three hags toiling over a cauldron. In an arresting montage they seem to be brewing a constantly metamorphosing stew, which is now viscous, now fluid, now opaque, now mere mist. The witches – seemingly possessing many more than three voices, some male, others female, some young, others old – work on a doll made of clay. On cue – ‘something wicked this way comes’ – two warriors in seemingly Tartar garb appear, Macbeth and Banquo on horseback, galloping across the mist-obscured heath. They are immediately engaged by the witches, who make their predictions: as they tell Macbeth that he will be king hereafter, their voices rise to a chilling shriek. The rest of the army draws up, headed by a strange, rugged, unshaven figure, with plaits – apparently Anglo-Saxon, carrying a banner with a Celtic cross; this is the Holy Father, who, somewhat unexpectedly, doesn’t seem upset by the Weird Sisters. Macbeth steps aside for his first soliloquy, which is spoken – just as in the contemporaneously filmed Hamlet – in voice-over as we study the actor’s face. Welles’s make-up emphasises his huge eyes with great smudges of kohl; his nose is the one he was born with, small and retroussé, unencumbered with the habitual putty; he has a light, stubbly beard shaped into mustachios, which follows the line of the chin.

  Since childhood, Welles had been described as looking slightly oriental, or sometimes even Mongolian, and his physiognomy here seems to have something of the steppes of Central Asia about it. Almost from the moment we see him, this Macbeth appears haunted and dismayed; with one striking exception, we never see the seductive charm that is such a large part of Welles’s appeal as an actor. His conception of the role seems to be of a man tranced, somnambulistically obeying a destiny over which he has no sway. This is very much how he had played Franz Kindler in The Stranger. The danger of such an interpretation, which Welles does not entirely avoid, is that it will rob the part of any dramatic progression and will fall into an unchanging rhythm. But, like Olivier in his Hamlet (with which Macbeth has very much more in common than either its detractors or admirers would like to admit), Welles wants to take us into his leading character’s head: harking all the way back to his early radio work and his planned film of The Heart of Darkness, he seeks to explore the subjective viewpoint. ‘What I am trying to do,’ he told Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘is to see the outside, real world through the same eyes as the inside, fabricated one.27 To create a kind of unity.’ His Macbeth has an oneiric quality throughout, and – which is perhaps to say the same thing from a different viewpoint – the quality of a particularly harsh and frightening fairy tale. This aspect of the film is manifest in the constant metamorphoses of elements – the Macbeths’ castle, for example, seems to be made of the same clay as the witches’ voodoo doll – but also in a certain pictorial naivety and occasional oddly anachronistic touches; the condensation of the action, telescoping and eliding events, enhances this sense of temporal and geographical unreality. Macbeth himself, shot from on high or from far below, often appears as an ogre, while Lady Macbeth is played and filmed like a wicked stepmother. (Welles was much exercised by the idea of kingship – he told Kenneth Tynan that as an actor he fell into the category of ‘he that plays the king’ and lamented to Peter Bogdanovich that ‘we can’t have a great Shakespearean theatre in America anymore because it’s impossible for today’s American actors to comprehend what Shakespeare meant by “king”:28 they think a king is just a gentleman who finds himself wearing a crown and sitting on a throne’; but, despite his physical stature and vocal refulgence, he chose to present both the monarchs he impersonated – the other is King Lear – as unstable and lacking in natural authority.)

  Welles’s purported approach to Macbeth, his attempt to evoke a time poised between the pagan and the Christian – where pagan is equated with evil – is more in the nature of a design concept than of an examination of the play. From his stated intentions, it seems that what he had in mind was the creation of an early medieval world in the manner of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, but the text scarcely gives him the opportunities to achieve this; nor could he possibly have done so on his schedule and with his budget. From a theological or a social-anthropological point of view, there is a certain incoherence to the idea. Perhaps, as André Bazin, with his habitual elegance, suggested, Welles had created ‘a prehistoric universe – not that of our ancestors, the Gauls or the Celts, but a pre-history of the conscience at the birth of time and sin, when sky and earth, wat
er and fire, good and evil, still aren’t distinctly separate’.29 Whether this is remotely what Shakespeare had in mind is neither here nor there. But some of the uses to which Welles puts the Holy Father – the key figure in the working out of his idea – are a little perplexing. He displays surprising equanimity when he sees Macbeth and Banquo talking to the Weird Sisters, surely the enemy incarnate. He is next found taking dictation from Macbeth; quietly and efficiently he writes down a very nearly seditious letter to Lady Macbeth. Banquo comes in, and he and Macbeth amiably jest about the witches’ prophecies – prophecies that, in the case of Macbeth, can only mean the death of King Duncan and his immediate heirs. Yet the Holy Father, who seems at the very least to be Duncan’s chaplain, goes on diligently practising his stenography in the background.