Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  He disappears soon enough, as promised, but – like Harry Lime – effortlessly dominates the film. At the beginning of the story he is driving through the night when he comes across someone whose car has broken down; he offers the man a lift and they fall to chatting, which enables Welles to make a delicious meta-filmic joke. The man is having trouble with his distributor, he says. ‘I’m having trouble with my distributor, too,’ says Welles, with a sly grin. The man, Sean Merriman (Michael Laurence – Cassio in Welles’s film of Othello), tells the story of two women, mother and daughter, whom he picked up at this same spot a year ago. He dropped them off at their house, Glennascaul – ‘the glen of shadows’, Welles’s voice-over tells us, while the story plays out on the screen. The women invite him in. Everything about both the house and the women is strangely old-fashioned. Merriman shows them his cigarette case, which belonged to an uncle of his who died in China; it is inscribed to him from a certain Lucy. After having a drink, Merriman departs, remembering too late that he has left his cigarette case in Glennascaul. The following day he goes back, but finds the house boarded up and for sale. An estate agent tells him that the owners – a mother and her daughter – died some years before. He gets a key and, brushing aside the cobwebs, retrieves his cigarette case. The film cuts back to Welles and Merriman in the car, examining the case. The point of the story, Merriman tells him, is that the daughter’s name was Lucy. Welles, spooked, scoots off in the car, speeding past two elderly ladies hoping for a lift. ‘Did you see who that was?’ asks one, and the other replies, ‘Yes, but I don’t believe it.’

  The film, though modest in its scope, is quintessential Welles. The teasing prologue on the movie set plays, as Welles loved to play, with Pirandellian tropes – what is fiction, what is truth? – putting himself into the frame, literally and metaphorically; it is vintage Welles, as is the instant immediacy of the voice-over: swift, quizzical, wry, both confidential and unsettling. The story itself is exactly the sort of thing Welles adored. And the cinematography seems to bear Welles’s touch in every frame. The opening sequence purporting to have been shot on the Othello set bears a strong resemblance to the witty trailers Welles shot for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, even down to a sign on the wall that says: OTHELLO MERCURY FILMS, while the film proper, with its expressionist lighting and sharp definition of black and white, its leisurely camera moves and its rarefied performances, not unlike those in Ambersons, is quintessentially Wellesian.

  There appear to be no records of the filming, so it is impossible to determine how many days Welles spent shooting in Ireland; it is equally impossible to know how much of the script he was responsible for, if any. His voice-over is so utterly characteristic that it is hard not to feel his hand in it. But Edwards and MacLiammóir had known Welles and worked with him for over twenty years and were perfectly capable of writing Wellesian periods to order. As far as the cinematography is concerned, Edwards was steeped in the lighting that evolved in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s; and his cameraman, George Fleishmann (who had crash-landed in Ireland on a reconnaissance mission in 1942 and decided to stay), had been born in Austria and trained at the Berlin Film Academy, photographing documentaries in Germany before the Second World War, including – as a camera operator – Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1936). What is startling is how the film presages Welles’s later work – in particular the short television film The Fountain of Youth from 1958 and F For Fake; both of these (and Return to Glennascaul, whoever was responsible for it), with their playful narratorial interventions, are in essence filmic transpositions of Welles’s radio work of the 1930s. As so often with Welles, his innovations prove to have deep roots in the past.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Reason Not the Need

  HIS SOJOURN in the British Isles over, Welles returned to Italy, to Rome, the nearest thing he knew to home. From there, at the end of January 1952, he announced his next film, Mr Arkadin, which he had been germinating all through the previous year, while he was editing Othello and playing in the West End. His first attempt at the screenplay was written in Casablanca in March 1951, and seems to have been directly inspired by his relationship with Michael Olian, an international financier of extreme dubiousness. Welles, according to a detailed exposé of Olian by the star investigative journalist Michael Stern in True magazine,1 had visited Olian’s Roman residence, the Villa Madama – designed by Raphael, no less – for dinner one night and stayed for a year. Olian was Welles’s kind of guy: having had a heart attack, he was instructed by his doctor to give up smoking, drinking and the more vigorous kind of female companionship. ‘You know what I did when he told me that? I went out and smoked five packs of cigarettes a day and drank three bottles of champagne at a sitting.’ His hospitality was on a stupendous scale, catering with scientific precision to the needs and desires of his guests. Olian and Welles were seen everywhere together in the less salubrious Roman watering-holes, but pleasure, though always welcome, was not Welles’s sole reason for cultivating Olian, who had lately become a commanding figure in the Italian film industry. Welles needed $35,000 to complete the last few days of shooting in Mogador for Othello; Olian, for whom this sort of money was peanuts, gave him $200,000 in exchange for first recoupment rights in England and the United States, plus 50 per cent general ownership. The Othello cake was being sliced into too many pieces. The figures scarcely seem to add up, but in a sense it was all theoretical: the film never recouped, so no one was due anything. Welles’s friendship with Olian came to an inevitable end ‘because’, says Stern, ‘the chief facet in Welles’s genius is his ability to run through a bankroll, his own included’. Stern overheard a blazing if somewhat one-sided row between the two men, in which Olian accused Welles of being a fool, ‘while the embarrassed actor-director tried desperately to mollify him with “Tu as raison, Michel”’.

  Welles was of course deeply fascinated by Olian, a Lithuanian by birth, who, as Michael Stern put it, ‘changed his nationality as lightly as some people change a suit of clothes’. At one point or another he had passports from Italy, Russia, Latvia and the League of Nations and nationality status resulting from residence in France, Germany and Switzerland. He started as a petty criminal in Riga, functioned as a money-changer in Berlin in the Twenties and had established himself in France as a financier by the Thirties. ‘His attitude to the law’, Stern drily remarks, ‘is highly individual . . . and he is noted for his highly original approach to government matters,’ bribing his way out of any inconvenient situation. During the war he was in Switzerland, earning the gratitude of his friends Himmler and Goering by personally supervising their Swiss bank accounts. Olian’s name, says Stern, is totally unknown in America, but

  it is entirely likely that it will compare favourably in fame with such professional mystery men as George Dawson, Basil Zaharoff and Aristotle Socrates Onassis, for at this writing, the military attachés of several friendly governments, the French Sûreté, the Swiss government, our own Central Intelligence Agency and the congressional investigating committee . . . are scrutinising his present activities.

  Welles became intrigued by the dramatic potential of all of these mystery men, to whom he seemed so easily to relate. The film he was going to make would be drawn, he said, from an ‘unpublished crime novel’ of his and would deal with the misadventures of an arms dealer ‘along the lines of Basil Zaharoff’. For obvious reasons there was no mention of Michael Olian.

  1952 was, by Wellesian standards, uneventful. He turned down an offer from La Scala to direct two Verdi operas (Macbeth and Othello, inevitably) and another from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to direct Porgy and Bess; the latter offer was presumably a belated response to the Harlem Macbeth, or even Native Son, the electrifying adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel he had staged in New York in 1941. It is a curious fact that Welles, so often (and not entirely inaccurately) described as operatic in his approach, never attempted to work in that medium. Only a year later, as we s
hall see, he staged a ballet, but he seems almost pointedly to have avoided directing opera, despite his precocious exposure to and appreciation of it as the seven-year-old correspondent of the Ravinia Chronicle. The matchless sequence in Citizen Kane in which Susan Alexander Kane attempts to sing an aria from Bernard Herrmann’s glorious Massenet pastiche, Salâmmbo, embodies the whole gesture of French Romantic opera in a few short minutes and should have had every intendant in the world reaching for their phones. But it never happened.

  Othello, the most consciously operatic of Welles’s films, was entered for the Cannes Festival in May of 1952 and, to the outrage of the Italians present, won the Palme d’Or, which it shared with Renato Castellani’s winsome Due soldi di Speranza (Two Penn’orth of Hope). As he went to the platform to pick up his award, to the strains of a band bashing out a march from a forgotten French operetta in lieu of the Moroccan national anthem (Morocco being the nominal country of origin of the film but possessed of no known anthem), he was roundly booed and jeered at, and not just by the Italians: the French national press pronounced the film ‘more old hat than L’Arroseur Arosé’. Welles, with his love of slapstick and his passion for early cinema, may have been wryly amused by the reference to Louis Lumière’s one-minute one-reeler, the very first film comedy, but it scarcely helped to promote the film’s fortunes. Not even a coveted Palme d’Or (or half of one) was enough to secure distribution in America.

  As James Naremore has remarked, even among Wellesians, Othello is a film more admired than loved.2 The fact that it exists at all, and has a clear artistic coherence, is a miracle, given the circumstances of its creation, but something crucial is absent from it. The staging is brilliant, from the famous opening shots on the coffins of Othello and Desdemona, as the Rachmaninovian chords pound away, then the intersecting planes of the cortège itself, with another procession on the horizon and the soldiers with their halberds and flags on the upper level of the ramparts at yet another angle, creating a frame of visceral dynamism all achieved, as we know, by astonishing ingenuities of perspective, a triumph of trompe l’oeil. Dissolves show us the dead bodies being veiled, with soldiers in close-up in the foreground. Iago is suddenly dragged across the frame in apparently bright daylight where everything before has been darkling, to be thrown into a cage. There is a disorientating and disturbing extreme close-up of his inscrutable eye, then his point of view of the funeral procession, at which the cage yanks him upward, twisting and revolving until we see only his silhouette. The singing on the soundtrack turns to the chanting of a requiem mass. All this functions as an overture, exactly, in fact, as overtures often work in the opera house, giving you a glimpse of the whole piece, starting, as does the prelude to Act One of Carmen, for example, at the end. Then a title card on parchment tells us that we’re about to see The Tragedy of Othello then another proclaims A Motion Picture adaptation of the play by William Shakespeare, under which Welles in voiceover, backed by twiddling mandolins, describes the elopement of Desdemona in the works of the tale by Cinzio on which Shakespeare based his play. He introduces Iago, who is first heard off screen, his distorted, echoing voice urgently whispering: ‘I have told thee again and again and again: I hate the Moor’; what we see on the screen is a chapel. This is all brilliant, wholly cinematic, a startling translation of the plot and the world of Othello into cinema.

  What it is not is dramatic. It is a response to themes and characters of the play, but it does not engage us with the story; it has no actuality. It is like a great visual tone-poem, the sort of thing Tchaikovsky or indeed Dvorˇák (who wrote a splendid Othello overture) so effectively created in music; it is decidedly not operatic, in the way that Verdi’s treatment of the same story is. This is compounded by the performances. MacLiammóir, despite all his and Welles’s best intentions, is villainy incarnate. The whole feel of his performance is oddly Victorian: with the oily, silky, insinuating quality, more subdued than one would expect, that for the Victorians denoted villainy. This, you feel, is how Sir Henry Irving might have played Iago – which is hardly surprising, since MacLiammóir’s Shakespearean career started in 1912, when he appeared in Macbeth not with Irving (who was by then dead) but with his great rival, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. It is in many ways a fascinating performance, superbly spoken, but there is no surprise in it, no possibility that anyone could be taken in by him. He presents a constant, undeveloping image, as does Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona. And above all, Welles, despite his magnificent presence, his strength, his clarity and his intelligence, fails to engage us. From as early as the speech to the senate – ‘most potent, grave and reverend signors’ – when Othello cleverly and wittily wins them over with the story of his courtship of Desdemona, Welles adopts the curious narcoleptic manner that reviewers of his stage performance so regularly commented on, the great general tranced, led on by he knows not what, both bewildered and innocent. ‘This is an Othello who is obviously “perplexed in the extreme”,’ the Manchester Guardian had written: ‘one fancies that there is the phrase from which Mr Welles drew most of his reading for the part.’ Perhaps he did; but it is unhelpful to the story, and fatally diminishes the range and intensity of what Othello feels. In addition, there is a curiously misplaced boyishness about Welles’s Othello; it sometimes looks as if he might burst into childish tears.

  None of this makes any interpretive sense, so one can only conclude that it is due to the limitations of Welles’s acting. The result is that one believes in nothing about the man – his love for Desdemona, his dread of losing her, his murderous jealousy. None of it rings true. So one is compelled to wonder why Welles chose to tell this story, if the emotions in it were not ones he could engage with, or ones he was equipped to portray. It is as if he felt the need to damp himself down in order to be truthful. Which is odd, coming from the man who told Peter Bogdanovich that ‘there simply isn’t such a thing as movie acting . . . all this talk about the special technique required for acting to the camera is sheer bollocks. Stage actors are supposed to be too big. Well, Cagney was a stage actor and nobody was ever bigger than that. He came on in the movies as though he were playing to the gallery in an opera house . . . he played right at the top of his bent, but he was always true.’3 The acerbic Anglo-American critic Eric Bentley, reviewing the film on its American release, put the case with characteristic trenchancy: Welles ‘never acts, he is photographed – from near, from far, from above, from below, right side up, upside down, against battlements, through gratings, and the difference of angle and background only emphasises the flatness of that profile, the rigidity of those lips, the dullness of those eyes, the utter inexpressiveness and anti-theatricality of a man who, God save the mark! was born a theatrical genius.’4 It is a harsh fact that whether due to a conception of the great tragic figures (because the same is true of his Macbeth), or whether it is simply because of the circumstances of the film’s creation and his preoccupation with all the thousand things that directors have to worry about, Welles gives an inert, almost cataleptic performance of Othello which deeply undermines the audacity, originality and swagger of his film.

  Despite the French newspapers’ rejection of Othello, there was a growing body of writing and thinking about Welles among the film-making community in France which marked the beginnings of a fascination with his work that would before long burgeon into a full-blown love affair. As early as 1946, the third edition of Revue de Cinéma prominently featured Welles, offering illustrated extracts from the screenplays of The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane, whose apparently diffracted narrative is proved to have an iron logic, as well as a digest in translation of Roy Alexander Fowler’s useful pioneering pamphlet Orson Welles: A First Biography, which had just appeared in Britain. Two years later, along with Pabst, Castellani and Alberto Lattuada, Welles was interviewed by Jean Desternes at the Venice Film Festival; the theme was, inevitably, realism, with Welles expansively expounding the argument against. Clearly his French interviewer relishes his epigrammatic ma
nner, his taste for paradox, his pleasure in arguing from first principles, his willingness to cause offence. ‘We must distinguish between realism and reality,’ he says, ex cathedra. ‘People who talk about the neo-realism of my films must be joking . . . Eisenstein and I are children of the same father – Griffith. But we’ve taken different paths and are no longer related – except insofar as we’ve both turned our backs on realism. Realism has no existence for me, it doesn’t interest me at all.’5 There would be a great deal more in this vein over the years.

  Even in (then) much less theoretically based Britain, there was interest in Welles’s ideas as opposed to his persona; in an interview with Francis Koval in 1950 in Sight and Sound, after proffering a somewhat disingenuous endorsement of neo-realism, Welles declares that critics have absurdly overrated the importance of the image in films: words, he says, are the crucial element, story the supreme imperative – not for its anecdotal value: ‘it is more a combination of human factors and basic ideas that makes a subject worth putting on the screen.’ Koval is one of the few interviewers then or since to acknowledge Welles’s interlocutory mischievousness, quoting André Bazin, one of Welles’s earliest admirers, and a prime proponent of the idea that a film must belong entirely to its director, on the subject: ‘Among his many qualities, Welles possesses a genius for bluffing, which he regards as one of the fine arts, in the same league as conjuring, theatre or cinema.’ As if to prove it, the interview ends with Welles announcing his next script, Lovelife, a picture about sexual obsession: ‘despite the subject, it will not be endangered by any censorship. It will be so respectable that families will take their children to see it without the slightest hesitation. But if I succeed – the picture will shock every adult with human feelings and social conscience.’ He solemnly assured another interviewer that he rose at 6.30 every morning to write a book on the history of international organisations and their growth. It deals, he says, with the question of the nation versus the international idea. ‘The complete human being, with his highly developed curiosity and his orneriness, is in peril all over the world. That’s the great thing that’s going on. A man should be allowed to be crazy if he wants to be, to stay in bed one morning if he feels it good, or thumb his nose at a sacred image. Conformism to certain stencils of thought – that’s what worries me.’6 The book if it ever existed never saw the light of day. But Welles’s anticipation of anti-globalisation is striking.