Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  How had things come to this pass? What had happened to the huge excitement and admiration that had surrounded Welles by the end of shooting? Clearly shooting is a very different phenomenon from post-production. During the shoot, exhilaration and energy were paramount; anything that slowed down the process had to be eliminated (like prissiness about sound, for example). The more that could be improvised, the better. Editing, however, was an entirely different matter. The possibilities were endless; a frame more or less could transform a sequence. But it was, by its nature, a slow, painstaking process. And one from which it was necessary to keep stepping back.

  Welles invoked a Spanish word to describe what that meant: querencia. He described it to Mrs Rogers as ‘a place where one feels secure, from which one’s strength of character is drawn. The place in the ring where the wounded bull goes to renew his strength and centre himself, ready for a fresh charge. A place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.’8 It is the zone of real creativity. That, of course, was not a place to which any studio boss was going to allow his film-makers to go: not on his dollar. Chaplin had done exactly that: when he needed time to create, he simply suspended work on the film until inspiration came. Unless and until Welles, like Chaplin, owned his own studio, he would never get that time. But it is a strange art form where the work can be taken away from the artist and handed over to others to finish: this does not happen with a poem, a painting, a symphony or a sculpture. Welles was doomed to work in a sphere where money was the central determining factor and where instant results were required. It was his tragedy that he lacked the gift of working conceptually, to conceive his work in his head. His inspiration came from what he saw in front of his eyes; his genius depended on being able to improvise and interact with the material, during filming and after it. It was a costly process, and after he left RKO in 1942, no one was prepared to pick up the tab.

  The retakes went ahead. Heston experienced ‘a deep moral ache’, but his lawyers were clear: he had to do it. He tried to call Welles, but failed to get him. Then he wired him, which finally provoked an emotional reply, replete with underlinings and capital letters.

  The studio can have no possible excuse for refusing your request that you be directed by the man whose participation in this project was your first and fundamental condition for being in it.

  He finishes by summing up in the ‘baldest possible terms’: unless the studio is stopped they will wreck the picture –

  AND I MEAN WRECK IT BECAUSE IT IS NOT THE KIND OF ONE-TWO-THREE ABC VARIETY OF PRODUCT THAT CAN BE SLIGHTLY WRECKED.9

  Without his help, Welles says, the result will be very much less satisfactory than the most routine film, not just something less than Heston had hoped it would be, but ‘GENUINELY BAD.’ Critics all over the world will say it is bad, says Welles, and he will have to explain himself to the critics. He envisages a terrible fight: as things are with him in the film industry he simply cannot afford to sustain such a blow, which means that even if Heston chooses to give up the fight, Welles has no choice at all. ‘As far as I’m concerned the fight will just be beginning. I dread it and I’m heartsick at the idea of having to involve you. But you really cannot avoid some involvement – now or later.’ Heston thinks of himself as helpless against the studio, but, says Welles, ‘you aren’t helpless at all, and it’s well within your own power to save much of a rather large investment of time, money and – yes – love.’ He can do this by getting a little tough. If he doesn’t then Welles will have to get very tough later – ‘and that will be very tough indeed on everybody.’ It could be Lear speaking: ‘I will have such revenges on you both / That all the world shall – I will do such things / What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be / The terrors of the earth . . . ’ The fight he is talking about, he says, is not one that he imagines he can win. ‘It’s a fight everybody must lose. You can be decisive in avoiding it, and in making up your mind you must consider well that it’s not a fight I can afford to refuse. Much love as always Orson.’ He was on the brink of hysteria: terrified that he’d blown it – his return to Hollywood, and the movie. And he had – up to a point. The truth is it would probably have been a flop even if he’d edited it from beginning to end, exactly as he wanted it. It’s private, quirky, bizarre. One for posterity.

  On the strength of this letter, Heston pulled out of the shooting scheduled for the following day, agreeing to pay for it himself. It cost him $8,000 ($68,000 today): a rather large sop to his conscience. But he knew he had to do it. The following day, after he showed up for the reshoots, under the circumspect direction of Harry Keller, veteran of over twenty Westerns and some episodic television, Heston confided to his journal: ‘I have done worse work in the movies than this day’s retakes, but I don’t remember feeling worse . . . I was able to talk them out of one change.’10

  The next day Welles wrote him a letter that is simultaneously menacing and playful, oddly reminiscent of Arkadin toying with Guy Van Stratten. Welles has heard, he says, that both Heston and Janet Leigh have been increasingly cooperative with Keller. He acknowledges that, since the new dialogue was not ‘absolute hogwash’, Keller himself was not altogether incompetent, and the additional shooting would necessarily involve a substantial amount of ‘close footage on both you bums’, their participation in the project was not unreasonable. However, he says, the reality is that the reshoots will destroy the picture. The actual process may have turned out to be a bit less crude than they had all feared, but the fact is, Welles grimly insists, that it is no longer his film. He begs Heston ‘not to permit the merry stimulation of work to interfere with that air of reticence you had sworn to maintain.’ Not only are they doing things to his picture – adding things, reworking it, reshaping it – but he’s locked out, locked out of Eden, the only Eden he knows. He’s a child cast out of the nursery: the games have suddenly stopped, the caper’s over, the fun has finished, he’s banned from the playground, feeling what Falstaff feels by the end of the second part of King Henry IV.

  Now distinctly more menacing than affectionate, Welles continues his letter with a merciless portrait of Heston as a goody-goody – ‘cooperative Chuck’ – highly respected by all his colleagues, a professional who is disciplined on the set and ‘wildly eager’ to make the shooting smooth both for his fellow actors and for the film’s executives: ‘In a word,’ says Welles, ‘he’s the Eagle Scout of the Screen Actors’ Guild.’ Welles urges Heston to ‘leave his uniform and flag in the dressing room.’ He doesn’t go so far as to propose, he says, that the actor should ‘growl and snap at the folks’, but he does implore him at the very least to avoid giving any indication publicly that he thinks the reshoots are of any value or are contributing to making the film clearer – even if, Welles adds naughtily, those happened to be Heston’s actual sentiments. He should avoid any opportunity, whether on the set or in the commissary, of granting ‘any element of justice’ to the reshoots, since anything he might say to that effect would be seized on by the producers, just as it had been in the past. ‘There’s nothing I can do about meeting the excitations of the close-up lens,’ Welles ends, ‘but I can implore you to curb your peace-making instincts and to maintain an aloof and non-committal silence. That goes for Janet, too, dammit. In a word, keep your yap shut. Much love Orson.’11

  The tone – passive-aggressive-playful – is uncomfortable, on the edge of being threatening, underpinned by a sense of Welles having spies on the set: the Shadow Knows. This feeling comes from deep hurt, a sense of betrayal in fact: they’re collaborating with the enemy, as he insists on seeing all producers and executives. ‘To Orson,’ Heston told James Naremore, ‘if you had an office and a secretary, you were the ENEMY.’12 For Welles, Heston and Leigh had sold their souls for a couple of tawdry close-ups.

  On 5 December, having been shown the latest version of the film, he tried a new tack, presenting Muhl with a now-famous fifty-eight-page memorandum,
in which he identified everything in the film he thought could, and should, be changed. It reveals an astonishingly detailed grasp of the material, frame by frame, and a formidable sense of how to use and integrate the elements he had often created off the cuff. The tone is perfectly judged; he rarely writes from an Olympian position of omniscience or infallibility: sometimes, indeed, he criticises his own work. Noting that the editors have restored a line which he cut from a scene between Vargas and Susan (‘Don’t be morbid . . .’), he says:

  The present editing not only retains this line, but the cut between Vargas’s leading Susan off-scene and their next two-shot is very rough. The original editing of this particular little section was really quite effective and I honestly can’t see what, from any point of view, has been accomplished by tearing it up and re-building it in this form. In terms of clarity, nothing is gained; considerable excitement has been lost and an unpleasant line (which I regret having written) has been put back in.13

  Again and again his comments show his original editing choices to have been made simply in order to tell the story better, ‘to aid clarity and improve the narrative line’, as he says at one point. Welles’s commitment to narrative – which of course includes sometimes deliberately destabilising it – is at the core of his project as an artist: he conceives of human affairs as a series of self-contradicting and often ironic events, the frog and the scorpion being the paradigm of all such narratives. All his stories are (in the words of the title of a collection by one of his most admired authors, Isak Dinesen) anecdotes of destiny. Touch of Evil is no exception. It ends with a series of ironies: in order to track down a cop who has been forging evidence, because that is the only way the guilty will be brought to justice, Vargas uses a recording device that he despises but must deploy, because it’s the only way he’ll get the evidence that will put Quinlan in prison. And at the very end of the film we discover that the prime suspect, Sanchez, the son-in-law of the man who was blown up, has confessed: he did plant the bomb. Quinlan’s intuition was right. For these ironies to register, it is vital that the story is crystal-clear at every turn. Welles’s explanation of his approach is almost naively straightforward: he wants the audience to identify with ‘the leading man and woman’, he says:

  What’s vital is that both stories – the leading man’s and the leading woman’s – be kept equally and continuously alive; each scene, as we move back and forth across the border, should play at roughly equal lengths leading up to the moment at the hotel when the lovers meet again. This simple but drastic improvement . . . will put the identification with the characters in a just proportion and in a form which I’m sure you’ll admit, if you’re willing to try it, is irresistibly interesting. No point concerning anything in the picture is made with such urgency and such confidence as this. Do please – please give it a fair try.

  It is an extraordinary document, in itself, as an example of Welles’s mastery of form and his awareness of the precise meaning and weight of every element in the film, but also because of the circumstances in which it was written: a world-class director of proven brilliance on his knees before an executive who had never shot a single frame of film in his life, begging him not to introduce any radical changes into the film, but simply to allow him to refine and clarify what is already there. Oh, and to contain any damage the reshooting may have done:

  In the light of the decision to deny me permission to direct these scenes, to write the dialogue for them or to collaborate in that writing, or indeed even to be present during your discussions of the matter, I must, of course, face the strong probability that I am the very last person whose opinion will be likely to carry any weight with you.

  He is by now calm enough to know that simply trying to get the film out in the least damaged form is the only practical, achievable result. ‘I want the picture to be as effective as possible – and now, of course, that means effective in your terms.’ At the end of the memo he writes in considerable detail about the soundtrack – ‘the rather sadly neglected dimension of the sound track’ – so carefully conceived by him and so wantonly unpicked by them:

  For the close angle of the chase, the plan was for a quite interesting pattern of newscasts to be heard on the radios of the two cars and in the two languages. When Vargas switched stations, there was to be a dreamy, old-fashioned Mexican waltz to take the place of the announcer’s excited chatter, and thus underscore our short love scene with a sentimental note, nicely combining ‘local color’ and, in realistic terms, perfectly justified. This pattern was to be rudely broken by the aggressive siren of Quinlan’s car, and then – after Vargas’s departure in that car – the gently picturesque lullaby would soothe Susan toward sleep as Menzies drove off with her.

  The usurpation of Welles’s intentions for the soundtrack begins with the first frame. Henry Mancini had declared himself in favour of Welles’s policy of using only source music, but the irresistibly visceral score he wrote for the opening tracking shot, with its underpinning Mexican rhythms, rasping horns, piercing trumpets and slinky winds, is the opposite in effect to what Welles had in mind. Here, in a nutshell, is the Universal view versus the Welles view: something punchy, effective, instantly graspable versus something subtle, sophisticated, complex. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

  In the memo, Welles reveals his sophistication at full stretch – a sensibility of immense subtlety and imagination, not one seeking instant solutions. It took him time to get to these ideas, and further time to execute them to his satisfaction; we cannot know what Touch of Evil would have been like, had he been given full licence to do what he wanted to do with the material. It could have become an entirely different film. Any film-maker knows, as he films, that the same script could result in a dozen different movies. And of course with Welles, as with many great film-makers, there is no such thing as the script, the screenplay – there is only the film, the film forged in the director’s mind, in the shoot and in the editing suite, of which Welles so memorably observed: ‘this is where the film is made.’ It was, for Welles, a dangerous seduction, which he was not always able to resist. With Touch of Evil, the film was taken out of his hands. Heston and others maintained that the finished result was not so very different from what Welles had in mind; but Rick Schmidlin, attempting to restore the film to something like its original state, used Welles’s memo – and Welles’s memo alone – as his guide, and he found that, without exception, every single one of Welles’s suggestions not only worked but had a transforming effect not just on the scene, but on the film itself. The memo ends with an impassioned plea:

  At the very end, I had a particular arrangement of short cuts building up to Quinlan’s collapse into the water of the canal. This involved the closing of the recording device, the backing up of Quinlan, his dead body dropping into the water, and other moving shots arranged in a very fast crescendo. As I left it, this brief montage, although not exactly as I wanted it, was quite close to being right. I honestly believe it was – or would have been – one of the most striking things I’ve ever had anything to do with. I close this memo with a very earnest plea that you consent to this brief visual pattern to which I gave so many long days of work.

  As it happens, Edward Muhl was not indifferent to Welles’s passionate plea. He wired him to say that the majority of changes in the memo would be implemented; would he turn up for dubbing on Wednesday? Welles was suspicious. He wrote to Heston like a seasoned tactician: ‘What interpretation are we to put on this?’14 The possibilities were: first, that they were afraid he wouldn’t go for the dubbing session unless they agreed to changes; second, that ‘a certain throbbing of war drums’ had reached their ears at last, and they intended to make a convincing show of cooperating with his suggestions, in the hope of spiking Welles’s guns; third, that they were in a state of ‘utter demoralisation’. The studio was indeed in crisis. Hundreds of employees, as Welles rightly said, were being fired from the studio, and the rumours o
f Muhl being next for the chop continued to spread. ‘In such an atmosphere of decay and despair, maybe the sheer force of energy – which they now see I am prepared to put into this fight – has awed them into momentary compliance.’ There were two more possibilities: the constructive spirit of the memo amounted to a strong weapon, which they did not wish to have used against them; or they had all been genuinely converted and were hastening to put the majority of the points into effect. This last possibility, Welles drily observed, was the least likely.

  He was clearly rather enjoying all of this, and began to fashion strategies to take advantage of what he perceived to be the weakness of the studio’s position. Nothing so naive for him as accepting Muhl’s statement at face value and cooperating with him to make sure the film was as good as it could be made. No, Welles was playing a longer game. In fact he rather wished that Muhl and company had continued to be as ‘muleish’ as Heston had found them to be, over whether Welles would be allowed to do the reshoots or not. Nonetheless, he had a master plan that would result in getting the picture ‘really right’, as he put it: