Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  His arrival with his cameras at the scene of the inquiry stirred up the controversy all over again. Many local people, including the civic authorities, were critical of Welles’s involvement, claiming that it would be prejudicial to a calm reconsideration of the events of two years earlier. Questions were asked in Parliament, there were critical newspaper articles and protests, and threats to refuse to allow any film that Welles shot to leave the country – all of which was of course grist to Welles’s mill: ‘he didn’t give a shit,’ reported his cameraman, admiringly.1 His approach, he told France-Soir, was to allow each of the witnesses to reveal what they knew in turn, so that everyone watching would be able to form his or her own opinion, like the members of a jury in a murder trial. No wonder the authorities resented this subversion of due legal process. The latent demagogue in Welles was always lurking, ready to emerge at the slightest provocation.

  He filmed in Lurs on 10–15 May, deploying two cameras: an Arriflex, noiseless, light and flexible – a news camera, in fact, but without sound – and a much heavier one, which shot synchronous sound. This was the first time this method had been used. For The Dominici Affair, unlike the other films in the series, Welles was striving above all for a sense of actuality, which the swiftly responsive Arriflex would allow him to create; he was especially keen to establish his presence on screen as a sort of impassioned bystander, asking all the questions, actually being on the spot. He encouraged his cameraman, Alain Pol, to put him in the frame, even if it was just an ear, a shoulder, the tip of his cigar, so that it was unquestionably Orson Welles conducting the investigation. ‘I followed him,’ said Pol, ‘like a dog follows its master.’ Pol was impressed by Welles’s certainty about what he wanted, not only specifying the lens and the shot with great precision, but also being able to gauge the angle of a filter, not by looking through the camera, but by looking at the reflection on the lens. ‘“Too much sky”, he’d say, and he was always right’, which proved, Pol concluded, ‘that he was not just a great director, but a great technician’.

  Stylistically, Welles seems to have been interested above all in generating energy with the frequent use of whip-pans, and in the free hand-held feel of certain shots. He encouraged the France-Soir journalist Jacques Chapus, who had been obsessively covering the case from the beginning, to reconstruct the events leading up to the crime, and indeed to act out the crime itself, with great physical abandon, as the camera follows him wherever he goes. Give or take a few shots of the ravishing Hautes-Pyrénées landscape, Welles seemed uninterested in characteristic Wellesian framings or camera angles. ‘Television is nothing more than illustrated radio,’ he told Cahiers du Cinéma, still wrestling with the question of what the medium was. ‘The word has primacy; the images are unimportant.’2 This is another Welles, not Welles the artist: it is Welles the reporter, Welles the dramatiser of democracy, Welles the people’s tribune. He enters into the role with relish.

  After his allotted six days of shooting, Welles had gone back to London to start rehearsals for Moby-Dick, leaving Pol, whom he trusted implicitly, to shoot any useful pickup shots that might occur to him. The play opened in mid-June, whereupon he turned his attention to further episodes in the series. He had asked his friend Lael Wertenbaker to write two episodes of Around the World with Orson Welles for him: one about women in Spain, the other about the French Basque country. She told him that she had never seen television, to which he replied: ‘All the better.’3 Predictably, Welles was more interested in the script about the Basque country – a culture and a cause upon which he now became a world authority overnight. He had a notion that the episode should be framed around him supposedly visiting the son of a friend – Wertenbaker’s eleven-year-old, Chris, to be precise – who would be, in Wertenbaker’s phrase, ‘Orson’s local host and sidekick and translator’ (from Euskara, the local tongue). Wertenbaker was a distinguished American journalist who in a couple of years would become famous – notorious, even – for her memoir, Death of a Man, in which she described how she assisted her ailing husband Charles to end his life. Welles had met Charles in 1953, for an interview to which neither man had been looking forward, only to find that they were enchanted by one other; he had visited them frequently in the small fishing village of Ciboure where they lived, near the Spanish border on the Basque coast of France.

  Endless telegrams and letters flew back and forth between them during the run of Moby-Dick; the moment the show closed, Welles arrived in Ciboure with two cameramen and a sound truck, approved the script and nominated Wertenbaker as his assistant director, and little Chris as his talent scout. They shot scenes for a day and a half, then Welles abruptly announced he was leaving to join Paola in Italy: they were, he said, to ‘get on with it’. Fortunately the technicians he had brought with him were top-flight. ‘I knew what I wanted,’ Wertenbaker wrote, ‘they knew how to get it.’ After ten days, Welles suddenly appeared in Bordeaux for a day. Wertenbaker sent a chauffeur-driven car to pick him up and take him to a location in the interior of the Basque country. He was in grumpy form – tired, he said, of speaking French; he did not, moreover, like the chauffeur. He would ride instead in her tiny Hillman Minx, which she would drive. Knowing that they were well over budget, Wertenbaker proposed dismissing the other car. No, Welles said, he might need it. ‘So an empty limousine was tooled up and down the narrow mountain roads and into remote villages and back all that long day.’

  They got most of what they needed that day, with Welles scowling and growling at everyone; the remainder of the pickups – Welles’s side of the interviews with other people and his conversations with Chris – were shot outside Paris a little later, in Alain Pol’s garden on the Seine, where they found neutral backgrounds to match the Basque settings of the original encounters. The material was good enough, Welles decided, to justify two episodes, which it certainly did. In these episodes there is no question of the kind of verité reportage that characterised The Dominici Affair; here he rejoiced in his more usual artifice, in visual prestidigitation. When he and Chris were purportedly watching pelota in Ciboure, they were in fact – hey presto! – in Paris, with Welles’s driver and Wertenbaker pitching a ball at each other off screen to provide them with eye-lines; the fandango Welles and Chris were supposedly watching was hilariously rendered off screen by Wertenbaker, which amused and relaxed both Welles and his youthful cicerone: ‘Orson at his most charming,’ wrote Wertenbaker, ‘with a wholly natural eleven-year-old boy.’ Then, in a studio outside Paris, she watched, astonished, as Welles cut the Basque footage they had shot – ‘thousands of strips hanging from pegs’ – into a seamless and authentic-seeming programme. This was Welles in his element. ‘His visual memory was astounding,’ she wrote. Even the hard-bitten and resentful technicians, who had not yet been paid – they never would be, as it happens – applauded as he performed his marvels. By August the two Basque episodes were as near as dammit complete.

  But time was running out. Transmission date for the first episode was 22 September. Welles zipped over to Paris to shoot some eccentrics, including Isadora Duncan’s brother in a toga; he went to Spain and shot a bullfight; he went down to that grand old music hall, the Hackney Empire in the east of London, and talked to the local housewives; he went to the Royal Hospital in Chelsea to talk to some Chelsea Pensioners (the octogenarian and nonagenarian retired soldiers seemed not to have the slightest idea who he was). In these episodes, or potential episodes, he did not appear in most of the shots himself, but spoke from behind the camera, so from time to time he would make his way back to Alain Pol’s garden on the Seine and shoot large numbers of drop-in linking sequences, improvising all-purpose lighting effects that suited quite different episodes equally well – flickering lights on his face stood in for reactions both to fireworks in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and candlelit processions in the Basque country.

  From August to September, Welles edited round the clock, mostly in Paris. Alain Pol noted, awed, that he worked fro
m 6 p.m. to noon, fuelled only by Scotch whisky. From time to time he would get up to use the toilet; occasionally he’d smoke a cigar. Otherwise he cut through the night and into the following day. The technicians were baffled by what he was doing with the film; it didn’t seem to make any sense. Finally he would show it to them. ‘Well?’ he’d say. ‘And it was marvellous,’ said Pol. ‘Alas, he didn’t always do the editing.’ Sometimes it was one of the journeymen studio cutters. Or Dolivet – officially the producer, answerable directly to Rediffusion – would demand a change, and on those occasions, said Pol, Welles would go into a black rage. He was always willing to accept suggestions from below, but never from above, and, to his inexpressible chagrin, once again somebody else was in charge.

  Now panic was in the air. Despite his Herculean editing stints, he had run out of time. The Dominici Affair, which was always to have been the first programme, was close to completion, but at the last moment the French government, as they had threatened they would, stopped it from leaving the country, ‘until it had been submitted to the official committee for the control of films’, stated the Minister of Industry and Commerce, ‘and approved by them’. Welles went public, claiming he had been accused of corrupting witnesses. ‘Nonsense. The trial has been over for months. I have a right to use a movie camera as surely as a journalist uses his typewriter.’ According to Lael Wertenbaker, Welles secreted a copy of the film in his luggage and headed for London, but Rediffusion’s lawyers refused to let the company so much as touch the illegal film; this received widespread publicity, but the impasse was total, and The Dominici Affair sat in its sealed cans until, more than forty years later, the documentary director Christophe Cognet put together everything that could be found, along with interviews with many of the participants. It is deeply ironic that Welles’s career as a television director should start with the impoundment of his first film.

  In the absence of the first episode, Rediffusion had to withdraw Around the World with Orson Welles from its glittering launch, promising that it would start soon. The nation was now waiting with bated breath. Welles called Wertenbaker in Paris to tell her that she had seventy-two hours to complete editing the first Basque episode, which she would then have to fly over with personally, in time for transmission. He told her he would pretend to be in Paris, but would in fact be hiding out in London, because if he came over and worked on the film himself he would never finish it. ‘Know thyself!’ remarks Wertenbaker, who, with her three cutting-room technicians, worked straight through those seventy-two hours, whereupon the boss of the LTC studio where they had done the round-the-clock editing refused to release the film and soundtrack until Welles paid the 7 million francs he owed them. Wertenbaker argued that if Welles’s Rediffusion contract was broken, they would never get a franc. ‘They had only one chance (slim, as we all knew) to collect, and that was to release this film.’ Which they did, barely in time for her to make the last possible plane to London. Needless to say, no one was ever paid – not the studios, not the technicians, and of course not Wertenbaker.

  It was under those perfectly Wellesian circumstances that Around the World with Orson Welles made its appearance on 7 October 1955 with ‘Pays Basque I (The Basque Countries)’. The programme was well liked, as was its sequel, and indeed the series in general and Welles in particular. Neither the audience nor the television commentators were to know that well over half the episodes had been cobbled together by Louis Dolivet and various editors from the bits and pieces Welles had shot; that half of the footage was from stock; and that when Welles was on screen he was rarely where he purported to be. The two Basque films are the nearest to what he originally had in mind, and they have charm, imagination and a certain passionate dignity. In fact, in the Basque region itself the films have become – to deploy a tiresomely overused word – almost literally iconic, as both celebration and rallying point. The remaining four episodes (all he ever completed) have less to recommend them, despite the engaging quirkiness of the oddball characters Welles chose to interview in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the grave charm of his faintly surreal conversations with the old soldiers in Chelsea, the chirpiness and honesty of the housewives in Hackney, and the drama he conjures out of an empty corrida in Madrid. They are for the most part scrappy, clumsy and a bit flat-footed, though Welles himself, bashful and confiding, always charms, almost as if he were sharing with the viewer a private joke at the manifest imperfections of the programmes.

  ‘Madrid Bullfight’, the third in the series, is something else. It caused a sensation, not because of Welles’s opinions or indeed his approach, but simply because of the subject matter. The fact that half the programme (to the intense annoyance of Rediffusion) consisted of a commentary by Kenneth Tynan and his then-wife Elaine Dundy – also passionate aficionados of bullfighting – only stoked the flames: Tynan and controversy were old bedfellows; his book Bull Fever had just come out, to roars of disapproval from some quarters. The moment Welles’s programme was announced, in fact, the Animal Defence League was up on its hind legs to protest, threatening writs. The board of directors of Associated-Rediffusion was convened, to see what was being spoken of as ‘the most controversial programme ever’. Small cuts were promised and the programme was preceded by a statement saying, ‘if any of you have very strong prejudices against this contest between man and beast and feel that the spectacle may be unnerving to you, we are giving you this warning. But we hope you will stay with us.’4 Welles’s old gift for spooking the public had not deserted him. The programme is a remarkable document in many ways. The Tynans, who open and close it, give a brisk account of the training of the bulls and the rituals of the corrida, striking a curious tone, enthusiastically confronting the reality of a bullfight head-on. ‘Twenty-three thousand people are going to see a cruel spectacle, but not for a cruel reason.’ Ingeniously concealing his severe stutter, Tynan talks about the death of the bull and the danger to the matadors with the blithe heartlessness of a precocious adolescent, celebrating the ‘sparkle and gaiety of the crowd’; Dundy describes the mules as ‘the undertakers of the bullfight, carrying away the dead bulls’. They are shocked and excited when Manolo Vázquez, the young matador, is gored by a bull that is then immediately killed.

  To twenty-first-century sensibilities, this is upsetting, but infinitely more disturbing is Welles’s contribution. He is seen taking his place in the packed corrida, and he delivers his commentary supposedly from among the crowd, but in fact in pickup shots in which his face is framed by the ropes demarcating the rows of seats, and a few extras behind him; he brilliantly conveys the impression that he is delivering his reflections while watching the fight itself. Occasionally he turns to look into the camera, sharing his thoughts with us with startling directness. And, as always, he is utterly indifferent to trivial matters like continuity: when he apparently turns round in his seat to buy a flower, he is wearing a different suit, a different bow tie and a different haircut. His commentary is a mine of information, encyclopaedic in his knowledge of the sport, its history and its significance, and seamlessly eloquent, which is all the more remarkable for clearly having been improvised. His tone is one of flattering intimacy – ‘you know all this old stuff,’ he seems to be saying, ‘I’m just reminding you of it’ – but he endows it with the particular colour he brought to Harry Lime in The Third Man: an odd smiling ruefulness, a tender melancholy in the face of the awful reality of human life.

  He describes the bullfight as a tragedy in three acts, invariably referring to the matador as ‘the killer of bulls’; recounting the history of modern bullfighting, he tells us of an innovation that made it possible to kill a bull face-to-face – ‘as you will see’, he tells us solemnly. Watching it is like sharing a box at the bullfight with Harry Lime, feeling oneself gently but inexorably infected by his diabolical world-view. When Tynan speaks of cruelty, he is self-consciously cynical and wilfully daring; but Welles really chills the blood. Both are playing themselves, of course, but Welles�
��s is a profound assumption, Tynan’s a posture. ‘Perhaps,’ says Dundy, at the end of the programme, ‘we’ve given you some idea of what it is that makes people like Orson and ourselves go to the bullfight when we’re in Spain.’ ‘It’s a fever,’ says Tynan, nicely plugging his book, ‘and as far as anyone knows, it’s incurable.’ Dundy laughs merrily. Reviewing the programme, the Daily Telegraph thought that ‘thousands must have been sickened’ by the ‘barbaric spectacle’. The Tynans and Welles, ‘though not exactly gloating over the performance, created the impression that bullfighting was a commendable affair’. Particularly offensive, thought the Telegraph, was the insertion of an advertisement halfway through ‘suggesting brightly that everyone would be having a wonderful time, and would enjoy a glass of wine just as much as this programme’.5 Welcome, Britain, to commercial television.