Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  In the novel Arkadin is described by Van Stratten as massive, ‘overtopping me by a good head and a half’; in a suggestive phrase with interesting reverberations for Welles himself, he is described as possessing a ‘deliberate’ massiveness. Arkadin’s voice, says Van Stratten, was ‘almost inhumanly soft. Thus I imagined did savage priests chant their spells when carrying out some bloody rite. Neither spite nor pity. Complete attention combined with a curious detachment’ – which recalls Welles’s vision of Mr Kurtz in the film of Heart of Darkness that he never made: the dangerous voice, the voice that must not be listened to, the voice of the hollow man. Arkadin’s face is ‘as immobile as granite’, his eyes ‘of a subtlety and a depth which were truly disconcerting’. All of which perfectly expresses Welles’s performance and tells us that it was a conscious choice. Again and again, the novel compares Arkadin to mythic figures: ‘he reminded me of that bearded and lecherous centaur caressing a young girl . . . at Berne,’ says Van Stratten. Raina says that he deliberately tried to look like God, like Jupiter, like Bluebeard; as in the film, a young assistant compares him to Neptune.

  None of this is in the radio play, or in Masquerade. It seems to have been at least partially provoked by Welles’s decision to use the magnificent castle of Alcázar in Segovia as Arkadin’s castle. ‘A real fairy-tale castle,’ says Van Stratten in the book, ‘with turrets and a winding road and ramparts draped in ivy. A fairy tale, but not the one in which the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. This was the castle of the magician or the wicked ogre.’ In his shooting style, and especially perhaps in his own make-up, Welles seems to have chosen to emphasise this fairy-tale aspect of the story, consciously embodying the fabulous: the limitlessly rich and powerful father guarding his beautiful daughter from the dangerously attractive commoner. To this end Welles – as he had done in Othello on stage and King Lear on television – increases his already towering height with the use of platform soles, shoots himself from low angles, and adorns his face with hair and a beard that almost covers it, lending it a curious resemblance to Jean Marais’s lion-face as la Bête in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, but which – unlike Marais’s beard – simply seems stuck on. ‘The first time I saw Mr Arkadin,’ writes Gary Giddins, one of the film’s most astute commentators, ‘I assumed that Welles’s wig and beard, the kind of thing you expect to see in a high school production of Faust, were part of Arkadin’s masquerade costume, and was thus stymied by his wearing them throughout.’8 Curiously enough, in the novel, Raina says of her father, ‘My father wears his power as he wears his beard; it’s all a trick, to make him seem like God.’ It is, to put it mildly, highly theatrical.

  This stylised approach sits very oddly with the modern-day thriller that surrounds it, and the rackety assortment of ex-criminals that Van Stratten discovers in their respective dens. Here the idiom is, as Welles himself said, Dickensian, and Welles had made sure that he commanded the services, for a day or two at a time, of some of the ripest performers on the face of the earth: the Russians Akim Tamiroff and Mischa Auer; Grégoire Aslan and Suzanne Flon from France; the great Greek actress Katina Paxinou, aquiline and heavy-lidded; and one of the greatest of all British actors, Michael Redgrave. Welles had hoped for Michel Simon, Alida Valli, Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, but the cast he actually got for these parts is eye-wateringly wonderful.

  Each of them creates a credible world of his or her own, each blessed with the experience and richly matured expressive gifts to bring the Higher Hokum to life, each adding an individual fantasy to their creations: Aslan, dying with his face to the ground; cadaverous Auer and his monstrously magnified eye in the flea circus; Redgrave, sleazy in hairnet, flirting with his cats and teasing Van Stratten with possible purchases (among them a ‘teleoscope’, as he irresistibly pronounces it); Flon, who had also played the part in ‘Man of Mystery’, beguiling and world-weary as Baroness Nagel; Paxinou superbly commanding and entirely credible in her love of the young Arkadin – or Akim Athabadze, as she knew him; Tamiroff, kvetchy and wheedling as Jacob Zouk, funny and utterly credible, a clown-tramp, a Jewish Beckett with overtones of Zero Mostel; Peter van Eyck (who had once been a production manager for Welles at the Mercury Theatre), elegant and filled with bitter melancholy as Thaddeus; even Frédéric O’Brady (the original radio Arkadian), his scene cruelly truncated in the editing suite, but entirely credibly in the grip of cold turkey as he gibbers on board the ship – all brilliantly shot by Welles, in each case creating a visual gesture that crystallises the character and the situation. It is a superb suite of scenes, as are the action shots at the dock and the street scenes in Munich, especially the climax at Christmas. (In the attic in which Van Stratten finds Zouk, an upended canvas of Hitler sits on top of a pile of rubbish, put there by the Welles of ‘Thoughts on Germany’.) Earlier the real-life actor/cabaret artist Gordon Heath makes a charming appearance as himself, in the manner of Hoagy Carmichael in To Have and Have Not; even Dolivet appears on screen for thirty seconds. In all of this one feels that Welles is having fun – not least, no doubt, because he himself is in none of these scenes. Here are many of the ingredients of a very classy, somewhat Carol Reedish/Graham Greeneish entertainment; and the vivacious and ever-inventive score by Jean Renoir’s regular composer, Paul Misraki, one of the great figures of French post-war film, points in the same direction, with its swirling glissandi and international flavour.

  And then there are the three central performances. Paola Mori, neatly revoiced by the British actress Billie Whitelaw, is perfectly pleasant as Arkadin’s daughter Raina, though nothing more. It’s a wonder the performance is as good as it is, given what she was up against – firstly, an incoherent storyline for her character; secondly, being directed by her boyfriend (who happened to be Orson Welles); and finally, Robert Arden. Arden was a charming man and became a skilful actor, but, as he said himself, he was not ready for the role of Guy Van Stratten, where he had to tread a tricky line between hard-bitten brashness and animal attractiveness, neither of which qualities were his by nature. It’s a part for Humphrey Bogart or Frank Sinatra. In Masquerade Guy Dusmenil is described as ‘charming and attractive’; in the novel Van Stratten is given a detailed and credible background – a freeloading mother; a father conned into paying for his education, despite dubious evidence of paternity; a youth spent bumming around the watering-holes of Europe; a war in which he served with distinction; a career in petty crime. It’s a part predicated on easy charm and heartless calculation, and the plot entirely hinges on him convincing us, first, of his ability to make Raina fall in love with him – which is, on the showing of the film, incomprehensible – and, second, of a deep underlying resemblance between himself and Arkadin, who was, he says, ‘once something like me’; this is profoundly unconvincing in any version of the film, but is dealt a death-blow by the photograph of the young Arkadin/Athabadze that Sophie shows Van Stratten – Welles photoshopped to look irresistibly powerful and gorgeous, elegantly tailored and sporting a splendid moustache. This photograph, incidentally, deals another death-blow to a different branch of the narrative – why would Arkadin not want his daughter to know that he was once that dashing, sexy young man? Paxinou’s unerring acting at this point evokes him and the deep love they had with absolute conviction. All we are left with by way of Van Stratten’s supposed resemblance to Arkadin is the fact that at some point they both changed their names.

  The essential problem with Arden’s acting is simply that he had no confidence, unlike his seniors: he is clearly hanging on by his teeth, concentrating fiercely and barking out his lines. Perhaps that had worked for him as Rusty Charlie in Guys and Dolls, or perhaps Welles found the one thing he could do with any conviction and got him to do it over and over again. Even when Van Stratten discovers that his girlfriend has been murdered by Arkadin, all Arden can do is bark. The surviving footage of Welles directing him off camera is profoundly discouraging: Welles gives Arden his inflections, which he imitate
s, but never fills with life. It is painful to witness. During the all-important scene where Arkadin commissions Van Stratten to investigate him, softening him up with booze, Welles insisted on using real alcohol, with predictably lamentable results. No doubt Arden was not helped by the fact that frequently it was not Welles he was acting with: as often as not, a Spanish assistant director was off camera, reading the lines with minimal comprehension, and so even just engaging with his fellow-actor, which in itself can sometimes make a scene work, was denied him.

  Arden wasn’t wrong about one thing: Van Stratten is the leading character in the film. The potential of the part, as revealed in the book, is startling; as Robert Polito says in his masterly introduction to a recent reissue: ‘the enhancement of Guy Van Stratten is the artful wonder of the novel’.9 Had Arden been a better actor, or better able to cope, he might have been able to import some of that into the script; and had he done so, it might have helped Welles’s own performance, which, as well as being highly stylised, is apparently hermetically sealed, consisting of a series of fixed grimaces and stares, devoid of any credible impulse or emotion. The mainspring of the plot, Arkadin’s love for his daughter, is entirely unbelievable, nor do we see any hint of the vulnerability of which Van Stratten speaks in the novelisation: ‘this absurd but keen feeling of pity which had affected me, too, several times when I was with Arkadin’. Perhaps if Welles had read the novel – something he denied ever having done – it might have improved his performance. It is full of acting notes: after Arkadin says, ‘Raina is very important to me,’ Van Stratten observes: ‘There was something on which I could not quite put my fingers in the way he said that. I felt somehow he had nearly revealed to me the one chink in his armour of money, the one crack in the granite of his power. “More important than anything else on earth.” Yes, a note of sadness, even of fear.’ The equivalent moment in the film never happens. The words are said, but the feeling is absent.

  No doubt, given time and a sufficient number of retakes, Welles might have made something more coherent and indeed cohesive of the material; perhaps if he had even longer to edit it, he might have found a unity of style, though it is hard to know what he could have done with the three central performances. The film has a unique atmosphere and is full of curious autobiographical echoes, which makes it feel highly personal in its rather stylised way. The parallels with Citizen Kane are so obvious as to make them seem intended: both films begin at the end of the story, both are investigations into the life of a magnate, both have flashback structures. Arkadin’s castle is Xanadu by another means: ‘Arkadin had bought it, restored it, decorated it,’ says Van Stratten as the novel’s narrator. ‘All in the best of taste and no detail wrong. And yet it was all wrong. Maybe one was too conscious of the vast amount of money which had been spent on it.’ And in the last reel of the film it is scarcely possible to hear Welles bellow, ‘I am Gregory Arkadin!’ in the airport at Barcelona and not hear Kane roaring at Boss Jim W. Geddys, ‘I’m Charles Foster Kane. I’m no cheap, crooked politician, trying to save himself from the consequences of his crimes.’

  Though there is scarcely a direct comparison to be made between Welles and Arkadin, since at least as early as 1962 Arkadin’s Aesopian fable has been seen (first by the independent film distributor Daniel Talbot) as an allegory of Welles’s career. Parker Tyler, in a highly influential essay, further interpreted it as a parable for his life as ‘a Big Experimental Cult hero’:

  The scorpion must cross a stream (i.e., Welles must make a film) but to do so he must enlist the help of a frog (it is easy to imagine a producer or a backer as a frog). But ‘Ah,’ says the frog to the scorpion, ‘your sting brings death! So why should I carry you across?’ – that is, why should a producer listen to Welles’s blandishments when notoriously he is a maker of expensive films that ‘sink’ their backers? The scorpion then reasons: ‘Now, look. If I sting you, you will die, that’s true, but if you die, I will drown – so why should I sting you?’ The frog-producer (once again!) is convinced by this wily argument, swims across with the scorpion on his back (‘Camera!’) and duly gets stung. Before he sinks to his death, he has time, however, to ask the scorpion: ‘Why?’ The scorpion-director makes this answer, the only one he can make: ‘Because it is my character.’ Thus, adapted to the present theme, it is Welles’s character to make films, even if he must perish with his backers.10

  Certainly in the case of Mr Arkadin Welles’s relationship with the backers – or, more precisely, with the producer – very quickly started to go badly wrong. It is possible that Dolivet’s inexperience in film was partly to blame. Certainly he was unable to cope with Welles’s erratic schedules, his prolonged absences and constant changes of mind. As far as Welles was concerned, he was frustrated by the crew, increasingly nostalgic for the efficiency and diligence of American technicians, and deeply exasperated by working with his two over-parted leading actors. Moreover he was shooting a Spanish version of the film simultaneously, using Spanish actresses for the roles of Sophie and Baroness Nagel. The pressure was immense. Patricia Medina, the Anglo-American actress playing Mily, who (moonlighting from her contract with Columbia) filmed for a heady ten days, reported looking blankly at a bare set that was intended to be a suite on Arkadin’s yacht; the following morning when they shot the scene, Welles had personally furnished the set with items from his hotel, transforming it into the acme of luxury.11 He liked improvising, of course, but not when he was obliged to do so because of the inadequacy of the team. Dissatisfied with the results he was getting, he constantly sought reshoots, on the French Riviera, in Munich and back in Spain; in mid-June in Paris, five months after shooting had begun, Renzo Lucidi started editing in earnest: he had a staggering fifty-five hours’ worth of film to work with; Citizen Kane, by contrast, had essentially been edited in the camera. Meanwhile, Dolivet threatened to take over the film unless Welles honoured the deadlines he had agreed.

  Shooting came to an end on 26 June 1954; Welles signed a new contract with Filmorsa, to whom he granted his exclusive services till the end of 1956, assigning his recent screenplays to the company as collateral on which to raise new investment – an astonishing vote of confidence in the fledgling company and a testament, apparently, to his confidence in his relationship with Dolivet. By August the Spanish version was finished. It had been submitted as Spain’s entry in the Venice Film Festival, but it was withdrawn, another in the long line of Wellesian withdrawals. Welles threw himself into shooting the shots still missing from the English-language version, in a Paris studio and on the Riviera: these included the scenes with the Baroness, Sophie and Oscar. He also finally added Misraki’s score. He had only given general indications to the composer as to what he wanted for each scene, and now he cut and patched it as he deemed appropriate. The music and the uses to which it is put are, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has observed, one of the most successful elements in the film; Welles’s instinct in these matters was exemplary. But it is a very different notion of composing for film from Bernard Herrmann’s: Herrmann needed precise timings, he needed to see the film, he needed to receive, and he expected to give, input. He was Welles’s partner in the enterprise. Now Welles was in sole command: an absolute monarch of celluloid.

  But work was not proceeding quickly enough for Dolivet: in October he issued a two-week ultimatum. It passed. Welles was given a new and final deadline: Christmas. Christmas came and went. In January 1955 Dolivet formally instructed Welles to stay away from the editing suite, which he did, though he continued to work with Lucidi at long distance. Surprisingly, this was not the end of the road for the partnership of Welles and Dolivet; they continued to plan future projects. In October, they had started pre-production for their next venture, a post-atomic version of the Noah story, going so far as to start casting and scheduling the film. This project (an old subject of Welles’s) petered out, but in late January, while still banished from the editing suite, Welles – underwritten by Filmorsa – did some tests, i
n colour, for a new project. It was the first time he had worked with colour since 1942 in Brazil, and it would be more than ten years before he came back to it; it was also his first engagement with a subject that he would never again be able to let alone, Don Quixote.

  It seems that the spur for making the test was interest from CBS in a film somehow related to Cervantes’s epic; it was to last half an hour. One might as well attempt the Bible in ten minutes. Welles had the inspired idea of plonking Quixote and his doughty man, Sancho Panza, into the modern world. He called it Don Quixote Passes By, casting two recent graduates of the Mr Arkadin school of hard knocks, Mischa Auer and Akim Tamiroff (Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively – obvious but inspired casting), and setting them loose in the Bois de Boulogne on a crisp winter’s day. The stills taken on the day are superb. CBS, it appears, were unimpressed with the results and there the project ended for the moment. But Welles had been bitten by the Quixote bug and would come back to the venture again. And again. Meanwhile Mr Arkadin was ready, in a version put together by Lucidi and Dolivet, with some telephonic input from Welles.