Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Welles’s next engagement in his re-establishment of himself in America was a Hollywood B-movie, Man in the Shadow. Welles’s agents proposed him for the film’s heavy, Renchler, for $60,000, rather less than his going rate, but he urgently needed it. The studio – astonished – agreed, though it was rather more than their going rate. Up to that point the film, produced by Albert Zugsmith for Universal, had been, in Zugsmith’s words, ‘a lousy little Jeff Chandler movie’; now it was ‘a big, big picture’.13 In truth, it was never just a lousy little picture: it is a serious account of racism on the Mexican–American border and of the tyranny and corruption of wealth. It is also shot in CinemaScope, and no CinemaScope movie was ever a lousy little movie: lousy, perhaps, but not little. Moreover Chandler (who, by curious chance, had – as a singer – very successfully preceded Welles at the Riviera Club in Las Vegas a year earlier) was only held back from being a major star by his contract with Universal; when he left them, he swiftly rose to the front rank. And Jack Arnold, who was slated to direct, although scarcely D.W. Griffith, had had some considerable success with The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man and It Came from Outer Space, all superb examples of their genre (and all produced by Welles’s old whipping boy from Mercury days, William Alland – Thompson the reporter in Citizen Kane).

  Clearly, though, Welles’s presence in the cast raised the temperature, especially on the first day: he showed up on the set, according to Zugsmith, with a fistful of closely typed pages, saying, ‘You’ll be interested to see the changes for today.’ Welles and Zugsmith had already met, in the wardrobe department: Welles had demanded the use of his own make-up artist and Zugsmith had refused. Reasonably and pleasantly, Welles asked again for the man; he was, Welles said, the only one who understood his ‘nose problem’, and Zugsmith, charmed by this display of vulnerability, graciously acceded. The rewrite situation was less easily resolved. By the time Zugsmith arrived at the set on that first morning they were already shooting the scene, in Welles’s rewritten version. Zugsmith went over and told him he thought it was a great improvement, but that it would really help everyone if they could have the scene the night before shooting. Over vodka and his favourite cigar, Welles agreed that he and Zugsmith would rewrite the following day’s scenes every night, which is how it happened. The director, Jack Arnold, seems to have been surprisingly compliant with this usurpation of his authority, but he and Welles had a contretemps that same first day of shooting, a stand-off that was clearly in the nature of a test. They were shooting the last scene of the picture, where all the townspeople went out to Renchler’s ranch and started chasing him. Arnold wanted a shot, he told Lawrence French, in which Welles, running away, would be tripped up:

  I had a mattress that was out of camera range to catch him, and as I was setting up the shot Orson came over to me and looked at me with piercing eyes and said with that deep sonorous voice of his, ‘Mr Arnold, exactly what are you doing?’ I told him: ‘In this scene you’re going to trip and fall onto a mattress that’s off-camera.’ He said, ‘Oh no, I can’t do that. That’s not going to work.’ I said, ‘Mr Welles, you are a genius and a wonderful director, but I’m making this picture and it’s my name that will be on it, so if it’s the last shot I make, it’s going to be in this movie.’14

  And so it was. The film is well made, well and interestingly shot and on the whole well acted. The weakest spot, alas, is Welles’s performance, his expressive powers as so often blocked by his nose. The easy communicativeness of The Fountain of Youth or the wit of Harry Lime are strait-jacketed; he wears a mask, but it is not a mask that liberates, it only confines. Every line he utters simply restates the character – there is no sense whatever of immediacy, of what the American stage actor William Gillette so precisely described as the illusion of the first time; no sense that the character might possibly have responded differently. Welles’s Renchler technically fulfils the function of the heavy, but he has no actuality, so there is no danger, no surprise, no life. There is nothing for us to discover: Welles tells us at every turn exactly what to think about the character and his actions. Interestingly enough, Welles asked Arnold if in a certain sequence he could be filmed from below; Arnold agreed, and they shot the sequence as Welles proposed. It does not appear in the finished film; it would have no doubt stood out as stylised. But Welles was right: for his performances in this vein to have life (and there were many, many more such performances to come) a degree of distortion in the filming is called for, producing a heightened expressiveness, the grotesque danger and energy of fable or fairy tale. Filmed in the missionary position, as it were, Welles’s Renchler is like opera without music – like a vampire in the daylight. It is stranded, beached, lacking the element that brings it to life.

  By comparison, Jeff Chandler, certainly a lesser figure in every way than Welles, is alive and involving; we care for him, we follow his story – and a very good one it is. It has often been pointed out that Man in the Shadow is a sort of companion piece to Touch of Evil: both are studies of racism; both turn, symbolically, on a badge. Ben Sadler, Chandler’s character, has his stripped from him, while Welles’s Quinlan tenders his in pique. The big difference between the films is, of course, that Touch of Evil is a work of idiosyncratic genius, as opposed to a good solid achievement.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Venice of America

  THERE ARE a number of versions of how Welles came to direct Touch of Evil. Al Zugsmith’s is perhaps the most colourful: on the last night of shooting Man in the Shadow in 1956, he told Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn – in the anthology of film history and criticism, Kings of the Bs – that he and Welles got together to celebrate their successful working relationship. Welles said he’d like to direct a movie for Zugsmith. ‘What’s the worst script you’ve got?’ he asked. Zugsmith handed him Badge of Evil, adapted by Paul Monash from a recently published novel by ‘Whit Masterson’ (a pseudonym for the successful novel-writing team of Bob Wade and Bill Miller), which Universal had optioned. Welles asked for two weeks to write a new screenplay, which he duly delivered; he and Zugsmith then went through it together, trimming it down to size. ‘The studios aren’t interested in artistic product,’ observes Zugsmith. ‘Orson’, he adds, piously, ‘is primarily an artist, a great one.’1 There is no mention in this account of Welles being cast as Quinlan.

  Welles himself recollected it quite differently when talking to Peter Bogdanovich: after Man in the Shadow, he said, Universal sent him a script – ‘a very bad one’ – featuring a crooked detective they wanted him to play. ‘I was still wondering whether I could afford not to make it when they called up Chuck Heston and said, “Here’s a script – we’d like you to read it. We have Welles.” And Heston misunderstood them and said, “Well, any picture that Welles directs, I’ll make.”’ And so, according to Welles, they asked him to direct it.2 Heston’s own story is significantly, if subtly different: he read the script on Boxing Day 1956 and the conversation with the studio the following day went, he says, like this:

  ‘This really depends on who directs it. Who’s going to direct it?’ They said, ‘We don’t know who’s going to direct it, but we have Orson Welles to play the heavy.’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, he’s a pretty good director. Why don’t you have him direct it?’ And you’d think I’d suggested my mother direct it. But they came back and they said, ‘Well, yes. Okay.’3

  Heston is much the most reliable of the three witnesses: he kept a daily journal throughout the period, which, though perhaps not as surreally entertaining as Micheál MacLiammóir’s Othello journal, Put Money in Thy Purse, gives – along with the relevant chapters of his autobiography, In the Arena – a very clear guide to the tangled history, especially in its murky post-production period, of the last film Welles directed in America.

  The almost grudging manner in which Universal had accepted Welles as director was reflected in his being paid neither to direct nor to rewrite the film: he
did the whole thing for his relatively modest actor’s salary. It was well worth it to him. This was exactly what he needed; exactly what he had come back from Europe for a year earlier – not television, not the stage, not Las Vegas; he wanted to direct a film, in Hollywood. He had earlier been announced as directing his pal Charlie Lederer’s script from ‘Tip on a Dead Jockey’ for MGM, but it had fallen through. Badge of Evil was a better option: a major Hollywood film with a star of the highest magnitude; The Ten Commandments had opened in October 1956 and Heston was now a household name.

  Welles instantly saw the potential in the material: the Monash screenplay’s story of corruption and betrayal spoke to his preoccupations loud and clear. In fact, as François Thomas and Jean-Pierre Berthomé have shown, he retained a great deal of Monash’s work: Monash was no hack, either as writer or producer; in 1958, the year Touch of Evil appeared, he picked up an Emmy Award; a year later, he wrote and produced the pilot for the TV series The Untouchables. Welles retained many of the changes Monash had made to the extremely readable, hard-hitting original novel, Badge of Evil, which he claimed not to have read until after he’d shot the film; in fact he incorporated elements from the novel that Monash had not thought to include. The result was a screenplay that was exceptionally well grounded, a sturdy springboard for the story Welles wanted to tell, centring on the struggle between a veteran cop in the grip of an entrenched racism because his wife was killed by a Mexican, a man so convinced of his own intuition that he forges evidence to support it, and an idealistic young district attorney who stands for the letter of the law.

  Welles and Heston quickly got acquainted, Welles overwhelming the very serious and proper new young star with his charm: ‘He filled the room with his voice, his energy . . . with himself,’ Heston wrote in In the Arena. ‘He gave me a very large malt whiskey splashed with water, and mesmerised me for an afternoon.’ Heston had just turned down a lot of money to appear in a television special; for Badge of Evil, as it was still known, he would get an unreliable 7.5 per cent of the gross, but he was excited by the prospect of working with Welles. ‘I think we have a chance at a better picture than almost any I could make now,’ he told his journal. ‘I’m bound to learn a great deal from Welles, in any case. I think he has what I need now.’4

  Heston was immensely impressed by the new screenplay. Welles had done his rewrite in less than a week, adding layers to his own character, Hank Quinlan; crucially relocating the action to a Mexican–American border town; and changing the name and nationality of the investigating attorney (Heston’s character): he would now be a Mexican called Vargas, they decided, whereas his wife – Mexican in the novel – would be an upper-class gringa; these changes intensify and dramatise the racist undercurrent already present in both screenplay and novel. The revised screenplay was palpably the work of the man who, eleven years earlier, had bravely and passionately taken up the cause of the real-life blinded black veteran Isaac Woodard. As he had said frequently in his interviews in Europe, nothing upset Welles more than the abuse of police powers, and his commitment to the idea of racial equality had been unwavering, from as early as his 1936 Harlem Macbeth. It may well be, too, that he was responding to the mood in America in early 1957: when he started filming Badge of Evil, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – Welles’s old comrades-in-arms on the Isaac Woodard campaign – had just initiated the actions that would culminate six months later in the extraordinary scenes in Little Rock, Arkansas, in which a thousand paratroopers escorted nine black students into a desegregated school. Of course the border town in Touch of Evil is in Mexico, but racism is racism, and in America, in 1957, it was endemic.

  The studio was resistant to the idea of shooting on location at the border itself (‘they wanted Orson where they could keep an eye on him,’ says Heston),5 which prompted Welles to one of his great creative leaps: he found a location outside Los Angeles, which he would make into his own border town, shooting it selectively, to create its reality in the camera. The place was Venice, California, known as ‘the Slum by the sea’, with its low-rent, rundown bungalows that were attractive to immigrants (among them a number of Holocaust survivors) and a lot of arty young kids; their hangouts were frequently raided by the police. There, fifty years earlier, the quixotic philanthropist Abbot Kinney had built what he called ‘Venice of America’, at vast expense – a people’s Xanadu on water, with a network of canals and bridges and streets faithfully reproducing those of Venice itself. It had been a sort of mirage, gondolas and gondoliers on the Californian coast, and it had evaporated soon enough, with the Great Crash. In that same year oil was discovered, derricks and refineries were installed in vast numbers and it was suddenly a boom-town. This too was short-lived. But, though many of the canals had been filled in and most of the bridges pulled down, a picturesque few had remained, along with whole blocks of ornate and faithfully reproduced Venetian arcades, loured over by the cranes and derricks. Out of this haunted, shabby environment, with its myriad ghosts, Welles fashioned his Las Robles, a Mexican border town like none other, a capriccio made up of disparate and incongruous elements, each with its own potent echoes.

  Welles knew how important this film was to him, and he embarked on it with intense focus, flair and cunning. This last was necessary, he felt, because he was working for a boss again. Louis Dolivet, his last producer, whom he had thought a friend, had turned into a boss – a vengeful one, at that, who would continue pursuing Welles for some years. But here at Universal he was working for real old-style Studio Bosses: in this instance, Edward Muhl, a decent, civilised fellow, but a studio man through and through, who started as secretary to the founder of Universal, Carl Laemmle; now he was head of production at Universal International and would remain in that job until 1973, through thick and thin (and there was rather a lot of both). To Welles, Muhl was The Enemy. It was nothing personal: Muhl simply represented authority, and authority threatened autonomy. Authority was determined to contain Welles, to limit him, to tell him what to do. Heston saw what was going on. ‘Orson had an odd blind spot,’ he observed. ‘He was infinitely charming with his crew and actors, but I’ve seen him deliberately insult studio heads. Very dumb. Those are the guys with the money. If they won’t give you any, you don’t get to make any movies.’6

  This simple truth was not one Welles was ever going to embrace. On this occasion his deep-seated sense of Us Against Them stimulated him into a brilliantly executed coup de théâtre. In cahoots with the actors, he rehearsed – in his own house, unbeknown to the studio – a particularly complex single-shot sequence: the scene in the crowded apartment of the prime suspect, Sanchez, which involved people going back and forth, talking over each other, moving in and out of the rooms of the apartment as Vargas begins to suspect that Sanchez is not getting a fair hearing. The studio sensed something was going on: ‘they seem to fear what I hope,’ wrote Heston in his diary for 7 February 1957, ten days before shooting began: ‘that he’ll make an offbeat film out of what they’d planned as a predictable little programmer.’ The studio’s anxiety was all grist to Welles’s mill. Heston vividly catches the drama of it: on the first day of shooting, 18 February, ‘we never turned a camera all morning or all afternoon, then the studio brass started gathering in the shadows in anxious little knots. By the time we began filming at a quarter to six, I know they’d written off the whole day. At seven-forty, Orson said, “OK, print. That’s a wrap on this set. We’re two days ahead of schedule.”’ They had shot, as Heston records, twelve pages in one take, as well as inserts, two-shots and over-the-shoulder shots: ‘the whole scene in one, moving through three rooms, with seven speaking parts’. This mightily impressed the studio brass, just as it was intended to; from then on they left Welles to his own devices – exactly the result he had wanted.

  Welles’s adrenalin was now at full flood; he mined every scene for its cinematic potential, constantly adapting to changing circumstances, ceaselessly inventing, pushing
the crew, the actors and himself as far as possible. This was Welles in his absolute element, leaving his signature on every frame, every performance, every location. Heston’s journal again captures the exhilaration of the experience, the sense of freedom from received practice, in his account of a scene between Heston’s Vargas and Mort Mills’s Schwartz, which was set in a car. This would normally have been shot in the studio, against back-projection, but Welles wanted to do it in a real car, driving down a real alley – no easy matter in 1957. The cinematographer rigged up the shot, cramming the back of the car with batteries and strapping the camera to a wooden platform on the hood; the recording unit twisted their cables around the seats and taped mikes to the dashboard. There was no room on the car for a camera operator or a sound mixer. ‘Someone suggested cutting the front off the car and towing the rear half behind a truck large enough to carry a crew,’ says Heston. Welles was outraged. ‘Nonsense!’ he shouted. ‘These boys can shoot it without a crew.’ At the prospect, ‘these boys’ really became boys. Catching Welles’s spirit of derring-do, Heston drove half a mile down the alley and said, ‘Turn over.’ Mills flipped the right switches, checked the appropriate dials. ‘Speed.’ Heston revved up the car’s engine and shouted, ‘Action!’ and they were off. When they got down to the end of the alley, Welles said, ‘How was it?’ Heston said, ‘Perfect! I’d like one more.’7 The shot is exhilarating: the roof is down, the wind blows on their shirts, the adrenalin is sky-high – perhaps higher, to be strict about it, than the scene calls for. But the excitement of seeing the streets hurtling by behind the two men is irresistible. Heston proudly claimed that it was the first time a dialogue scene had been shot in a moving car. ‘We had a marvellous time,’ he wrote, which he did – and they all did, from the beginning of the shoot to the end.