Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  He moves on from Mandl, a representative of international capital with a vested interest in waging war on ‘the Red Russians’, to approach his main theme: the German character and how dangerous it is. He describes a car journey in which he is driven by ‘a girl’ – a rather politically progressive girl, it seems – who has views about her fellow-countrymen: ‘Every German driver simply must on the road pass every other German driver,’ she tells Welles. He endows his Germans, even the ones he admires, with funny foreign locutions. He doesn’t imitate their accents, but he lets us know that they talk kinda funny. ‘He is eager his home to get back to, and there to be stuffing himself with noodle soup,’ continues ‘the girl’:

  ‘He wants to be the first. Every German wants to be the first. The German feels naked without a uniform. He needs to march with lots of other Germans or he gets sulky. Also he must have somebody to bully. And always – always – lots of noodle soup. There’s no cure for it. No cure at all for being German. Occupation, education – nothing does any good. This is a country of noodle-souper men.’

  This ‘girl’ is clearly the ventriloquial conduit for Welles’s own table-talk. When he speaks in his own voice, the view is pretty much the same, just without the funny locutions:

  As mystic, musician and militarist, the German has made himself deeply felt. He has physical courage, creative imagination and a tendency to burst into tears. We all know about his blood-lust, his death-wish and his marvellous sentimental capacity for keeping the festival of Christmas, and let’s be frank about it: we’re sick to death of him. Also he seems to be fairly sick of himself. What’s to be done? If the German doesn’t like himself, he can’t amount to anything in the world, and when he does manage to persuade himself that he’s somebody, doesn’t he then start persuading the rest of us – and in such a wise that we all wish he’d never been born? Answer: he does and we do.

  This is the tone familiar from Welles’s radio Commentaries: rising hysteria riding on a steady rhetorical build, delivered in a curiously personal tone, as if he himself had suffered directly from what he is describing. It was a tone first heard in his 1945 broadcast Officer X, championing the black veteran Isaac Woodard, who had been blinded by an unnamed policeman in the American Deep South. This was the broadcast that provided the matrix for Welles in this mode, with its closing threat: ‘Officer X, we know who you are. We’re coming to get you.’ In his ‘Thoughts on Germany’, as if having caught himself at it, Welles switches to another voice: a bluff Yankee businessman, who says of the German: ‘He never was any good. Honest, maybe, but nutty. Look at the Nazis and the nudists. All of them.’ Welles the commentator resumes: ‘The chief topic in Germany is the German. It’s very like patients in a sanatorium discussing their ailments. Germans do really seem to look upon their race as an affliction.’ He allows a modicum of reasonableness to another of his cast of voices, ‘a poet’: ‘Germans are all dreaming of a united Germany,’ he says. ‘But if there’s anything new about the dream it’s that our highest and most secret hope is that the worst of the battles which make that dream come true will be fought by others – and fought elsewhere.’ Having allowed this ‘poet’ a sensible opinion, Welles then slaps an off-the-peg racial tag onto him, too: ‘The poet turned to the waiter. “Bring me some noodle soup,” he said.’

  The last section of this unnerving piece describes a pre-dawn visit by Welles to a bar in Frankfurt; he was evidently in need of sobering up – ‘I was drinking coffee.’ He describes the scene: ‘It was past dawn and it felt like it. The band had groaned out its last stale set of American hit-tunes when suddenly they began playing the Horst Wessel . . .’ Bashing out the official Nazi anthem has become common practice, he tells us, to get people up on their feet and off home. ‘But then people began singing the words and one character near me went so far as to accompany his vocalizing with the Nazi salute.’ He understands, he says, that after the Nazi era people are spiritually impoverished: millions of Germans are incurably Hitler-bent. ‘You can’t blame a night club crowd for wanting to hear something more German than Oklahoma. It’s just too bad that the only substitute they could think of was the Horst Wessel. Something had to be done about that Nazi salute, of course, but I couldn’t think just what.’ He describes himself sitting there, ‘a confessed premature anti-Fascist . . . pop-eyed, mouth agape and doing nothing while some great roaring boor poisoned the air with Nazi war chants and stuck his stiff arm in my face.’ Then a young woman proves herself ‘that rarest of German birds: an authentic anti-Nazi’, by pulling some flowers out of a vase which she then throws at the Nazi’s head. Whereupon, says Welles, ‘yelling like a crazy Indian, an immense female, a good executive type for a concentration camp, rushed from behind the door and seized the markswoman from behind. When she was quite safely pinioned and helpless, her outraged victim – a large man – stepped to her side and, whilst the crowd cheered, commenced striking her in the face.’ At this point, Our Hero shakes himself together and steps in. Kapow! ‘I must tell you that one Nazi is one tooth less pretty than he was. And, I’m happy to add, he kept standing again and again and asking for more. It was altogether satisfactory and remains one of the nicest memories of my German trip.’ When Welles leaves, having of course refused compensation of any kind, the Young Woman stands up and gives him the bunch of flowers that she removed from the vase before she hurled it – what is this? An out-take from Casablanca?

  Calming down a little, Welles notes that the only reason no one in the bar fought back was because he was ‘a member of an occupying power’. ‘But I couldn’t help nursing my loss of pride with the reflection that the Germans are forever making it impossible for us to avoid knocking them down, and – worse still – making us feel guilty for doing it.’ There is something deeply disturbing about all of this, the sense of personal animus, and it is worth remembering that until the Japanese bombs landed in Pearl Harbor, two years after the Second World War began, Welles had toed the Popular Front line of non-intervention in what was perceived to be a British imperialist war. Now his rabid anti-German stance out-Churchilled anything Churchill had said during the war. ‘His most recent set-back is popularly supposed to have taught Fritz to abhor the sight of uniforms and forever after loathe the sound of march music,’ Welles continues. ‘Tourists from the victorious democracies can’t seem to get over their astonishment at finding German instincts less damaged than German cities. The truth is that human nature in this forest land is neither an invention of Dr Goebbels nor an easy target for bombs.’

  What is noteworthy is Welles’s presumption of inbred – one might say genetic – patterns of behaviour, and the violence (verbal and physical) that this presumption brings forth from him. In 1945, having seen film from the newly liberated concentration camps, he had written in Free Press: ‘the newsreels testify to the fact of quite another sort of death, quite another level of decay. This is a putrefaction of the soul, a perfect spiritual garbage. For some years now we have been calling it Fascism. The stench is unendurable.’ Four years on, Welles was still raging inside, refusing to accept that anything fundamental had changed and determined to expose the uncured cancer at the heart of German life. Unquestionably there were Nazis who survived Germany’s defeat unscathed; some even thrived. Welles does not target them: it is the whole German people he has in his sights. The episode in the Frankfurt bar feels confected, a fabrication based on selected details he might have observed, or something heard at a dinner party and then elaborated – a perfectly reasonable procedure for an artist, though not necessarily for a political analyst. But he whips himself up to believe it, engineering emotion in himself to such a degree that, as in his Orson Welles Commentaries broadcasts a few years earlier, the actual subject – the outrage in question – is left behind and it becomes all about him. Who or what was it that he was purportedly punching again and again and again in that bar? An embodiment of something malign in humankind? In him?

  ‘Thoughts on Germany’ com
es to an end on a note of highly weighted ambiguity, with Welles hearing ‘the plaintive piping cries of young children at play in a bombed building’. Little boys – about four years old, he guesses – ‘dropped in Berlin after the last bomb. I may have imagined it, but did they really seem to be playing soldiers?’ Why is it, he asks, ‘that if you lose a war, you’re supposed to lose your faults with it? Can a people be expected to surrender up their personality?’

  These are dark, disturbing, unforgiving thoughts, very much part of Welles’s Weltanschauung (as he presumably would not have put it). He was brought up a Lutheran, but often claimed to have been raised a Catholic: his sense of Original Sin and unassuageable guilt are certainly highly developed (as, of course, was his belief in the immutability of character, famously expressed by him in Mr Arkadin in the fable of the scorpion and the frog. ‘Why did you poison me?’ cries the frog to the scorpion as they both sink into the river, across which he was carrying them. ‘It’s in my character,’ replies the scorpion). All of this adds up to a degree of fatalism in Welles’s outlook, a sense that we cannot change, that we are doomed by our destiny to behave in a certain way, and that nothing short of divine intervention can prevent it. He detested psychoanalysis, whose purpose he saw as the elimination of guilt. Guilt, he insisted, must be lived with, not resolved. This, of course, accounts for his fascination with the Christian notion of Grace, with which he toyed so very lightly in The Unthinking Lobster – Grace, the divine antidote to Original Sin, ‘the love and mercy given to us by God because God desires us to have it,’ as defined by the Wesleyans, ‘not because of anything we have done to earn it’. Guilt and grace (in many different manifestations) are central to this thinking, and underpin Welles’s ‘Thoughts on Germany’. There is, too, more than a dash of the character Welles played on radio in the 1930s, Lamont Cranston, otherwise known as The Shadow: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of man? The Shadow knows.’

  Not that the readers of his France Dimanche articles – entitled ‘The Noodle-soupermen’ – would have been aware of any of that; but they were suitably shocked and alarmed, as they no doubt hoped they would be, by this report from the creator of the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast. News of the articles soon filtered through to Germany and, when it did, all hell broke loose, to the extent that in November 1950, 20th Century Fox were obliged to withdraw Prince of Foxes from exhibition in the Rhineland-Palatinate, a sizeable territory representing substantial earnings. ‘Our company’, read the official statement accompanying the film’s withdrawal, ‘is astonished at how Welles has frivolously and superficially passed judgement on an entire people – we repeat, Welles has no permanent contract with us.’ ‘Our company’, it is worth noting, was the very company that had just advanced Welles 200 million lire to enable him to complete Othello. As ever, Welles was deeply indifferent to his own best interests.

  The storm over the France-Dimanche continued to rage, causing Welles to issue a less than fulsome démenti. He didn’t want his name, he said, to be involved in ‘terrible misunderstandings’ due to misquotations. It was not true, he protested, that he hated Germany; on the contrary, a large part of the German press was engaged in spreading the rumour that he was hated in Germany.’ Anything he might have said, he insisted, was entirely based on what Germans themselves had told him about Germany. ‘If a German tells me that all Germans are incurable due to certain dangerous tendencies, then I must object to this point in the same way I object to those racial theories by which the Germans once tried to overwhelm us.’ At which unworthy point, he beat a retreat. He was impatient to get back to Rome and Othello. ‘These lowering skies,’ he said to MacLiammóir in Brussels, ‘this soft sugary food, these earnest tearful people, this great Northern gloom, after such a lot of it all, dearest Micheál, don’t you feel that Italy perhaps . . . ?’5 He and Hilton felt that deeply, but they needed with some urgency to return to the lowering skies of Dublin, which they duly did – the money due to them for Othello still unpaid. Edwards wrote to Welles from Ireland to inform him that they were on the brink of collapse: ‘the bank has stopped all payments of course and a writ of attachment on our personal belongings is to be issued in fourteen days . . .’6 Welles responded by sending £800, but, as Edwards remarked in his acknowledgement of the sum, it did no more than ‘stave off the more voracious of the wolves’.7 Welles also agreed to narrate, and make a token appearance in, a short film that Edwards would direct, but this generous offer scarcely affected their financial position.

  Welles, meanwhile, embarked on what he stated categorically would be the final shooting on Othello, in Rome, in Venice and in Pavia; MacLiammóir was suddenly summoned from Dublin, Cloutier from Paris. Welles had been picking up shots on and off throughout the year, some of them considerably more than pick-ups in fact: he now reshot some crucial sections of the film’s bravura opening sequence behind the Scalera Studios, near the Appian Way, conjuring up astonishing images from the most modest of elements. ‘It was almost a bare set, with scattered platforms, vertical props spaced 10 and 50 feet away from each other, and dry-stone walls,’ according to the composer Francesco Lavagnino, by then working with Welles on the score. ‘A little further away, there was a small house, and, close to a basin of water, what looked like a hanging laundry. At the right moment, the sun hit the water and suddenly there was the port of Cyprus. Soldiers on the platforms gave the perspective, the reflection of the water on the walls showed the sheet as a sail, the walls themselves as a pier and the basin as the Mediterranean.’8

  Welles had begun the process of distilling the thousands of feet of film he had shot into a coherent entity; for him, music was always a crucial part of that process. Lavagnino, intrigued by photographs he had seen of Welles directing Othello on location, secured a meeting with him – at 2 a.m., at Welles’s insistence. Inevitably, Welles failed to show up. When they did finally meet, Lavagnino played for him and ‘he sat there, all ears, he looked like a child’. Lavagnino discovered that, with Welles, the music might lead the film just as easily as the film led the music. He had written something for the murder of Roderigo in the hammam: ‘It was real melodrama. As Orson and I sat there thinking about it, we each had an idea which, we confessed, we didn’t dare to propose. We counted to three, then we blurted out at the same time: “Mandolins!”’ Building on this, Welles had another idea: he wanted the music to build to a crescendo and then break up, leaving just the dissonant sound of all the instruments untuning. ‘He kept waving to me to go on and on with the music.’ He needed it because he had had an idea of inserting a shot of lute-players into the scene and suddenly seen how to do it. This is how he and Bernard Herrmann had worked together on Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons: making the piece on the hoof, all the elements interacting with each other in a chemical – almost an alchemical – process.

  This sequence, the murder of Roderigo, is of course one of the great triumphs of the film, musically, dramatically, cinematically. With Lavagnino, Welles had found a true collaborator and co-creator, someone who responded to his essentially musical instincts – a rare event on his films. Welles was musically literate: he had grown up around music. His mother was a distinguished pianist; he himself had played the piano as a boy; his guardian, Dr Bernstein, had a long and passionate relationship with the great soprano Edith Mason; and Welles had attended the summer operas in Highland Park (and written alarmingly precocious reviews of them). So when he spoke of music, he knew what he was taking about. More importantly, he saw music as the essential art – everything in film and theatre, he insisted, should have musical form, a musical shape, and his work was governed at a deep level by that idea. It was Welles who had the very effective idea, that at the murderous climax of the film each of the instruments accompanying the theme associated with Desdemona should one by one fall silent, until only the flute would be left playing it. Not that the work was easy: Lavagnino described their time together as ‘delightful hell’. He had to compose musi
c to mere snippets of film, bits and pieces that had been edited ‘by two or three different people at different times’. Welles would listen over and over again, until suddenly something – often the most unlikely thing – would inspire him. He was, he told Lavagnino, ‘like one of those whores who was indifferent to some Herculean client and then gets turned on by a simple nobody who comes around at the right time’.

  Welles and Lavagnino were sufficiently in tune with each other that the moment they stood in front of the large orchestra and chorus of 200 they had assembled, they knew it was all wrong – ‘like touristic Tchaikovsky,’ said Lavagnino – and that they must start all over again. Lavagnino hunted down ‘the only harpsichord in Rome’ (surely not?), then recast the grandiloquent funeral music in the opening sequence for just sixteen instruments and twelve voices, strategically placing three microphones in specific spots to create aural perspective. Tragically, this exquisite detail can no longer be heard in currently available copies: in the 1990s, in an act of misguided filial piety, the soundtrack was re-recorded with a live orchestra and chorus – the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, no less – without reference either to the original score or the way it had been recorded.