by Simon Callow
There is a thing called the Decca Company which owns Universal, and I have a plan of battle based on this very interesting fact. There is a lot of money tied up in our picture, and the argument that its potential importance, as a box office attraction, has been compromised by arbitrary and ignorant behaviour would certainly carry much weight with the stockholders. It’s my best guess that Muhl and Company are going to try to put up the most convincing display of cooperation they can manage, in order to protect themselves . . .
These are the fantasies of the powerless: fearless confrontations, cunning ruses, killer facts, chicanery exposed, authority trounced, virtue rewarded. It gives a vivid glimpse of Welles’s profound innocence of the way the world works. As it happens, before long Universal International was saved by selling off a large studio and eventually being taken over by MCA, after which they had a run of successful movies, many of them starring Doris Day; Edward Muhl remained head of production until 1969. In the context of these tectonic upheavals, Touch of Evil was a tiny, barely noticed speck on the horizon. Would its destiny have been other, had Welles taken a more conciliatory line, expended a little more effort on cultivating and charming what Heston called the ‘studio brass’? Flattered them a little? Impossible to know. Such things were beneath him. Thinking that Welles needed to be protected against himself, Heston offered to set him up with his very powerful agent, Herman Citron of MCA. They met: ‘I’m so honoured to meet you,’ said Citron. ‘May I call you Orson?’ To which the reply came: ‘Mr Welles will do.’15 He remained unrepresented. It was, as the scorpion observed, in his nature to behave as he did.
In December, Welles went to Europe (to shoot Portrait of Gina, of all things), and he stayed there. He was thus not present when in January 1958 Touch of Evil was sneaked into a cinema in Pacific Palisades for a preview; incorporating about half of his notes in the December memorandum, it lasted some 109 minutes. It was not liked. When it went on release, in February, it was as the B-half of a double bill of which the A-half was The Female Animal – shot by Russell Metty, directed by Harry Keller, produced by Albert Zugsmith and starring Hedy Lamarr, ex-Mrs Fritz Mandl. On this outing Touch of Evil lasted ninety-four minutes, much of the excised material being Harry Keller’s reshoots; Welles’s memo had pointed up so many inconsistencies in them that Universal decided that it would be easier simply to drop them all.
The whole business was uncannily like a rerun of the Magnificent Ambersons fiasco, even down to being slipped into the mainstream on a double bill. In both cases, the studio reacted adversely to what Welles had filmed. ‘They don’t like the way he made the film, I suppose,’ a baffled Heston confided in his diary.16 Even Welles was somewhat baffled. ‘The picture was just too dark and strange for them,’ he told Peter Bogdanovich. ‘It’s the only trouble I’ve ever had that I can’t begin to fathom. The picture rocked them in some funny way . . . They were deeply shocked – they felt insulted by the film in a funny way. And hurt and injured – I’d taken them for some kind of awful ride.’17 With both The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil, the studio was in trouble, in need of a hit, and sensed that the film Welles had made for them was out of step with the zeitgeist. In each case, their instinct was to modify it in some way, to normalise it, to try to turn it into something belonging to a recognisable genre: to make The Magnificent Ambersons a simple family saga; to turn Touch of Evil into a movie about a bent cop. When their tampering resulted in something that was neither itself nor quite anything else, they abandoned the movie in question, which is really the saddest thing that can ever happen to a film. To fail is one thing, but to be rejected by your own studio – to be a waif, an orphan – is a harsh fate for any film, which needs all the help it can get.
Even the reviewers were conscious of the second-class status the film was being accorded by its studio. ‘Touch of Evil came creeping quietly into the theaters a few weeks ago,’ wrote Gerald Weales in the Reporter. ‘No fanfare. No publicity. Universal International dumped Touch of Evil into the neighborhood theaters in New York . . . as though they wanted to get the film off their hands in a hurry.’18 In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann asked: ‘Are there so many pictures available today that this one has to be released furtively?’ As it happens, Kauffmann found that the film, ‘while not in the same galaxy with Kane’, is ‘an exceptionally good thriller stunningly directed’.19 And, rather more importantly for the film’s sales, the New York Times – announcing that, ‘thanks to Orson Welles, nobody, and we mean nobody, will nap during Touch of Evil, which opened yesterday at R.K.O. theatres. Just try’ – went on to describe the film as ‘an obvious but brilliant bag of tricks. Using a superlative camera (manned by Russell Metty) like a black-snake whip, he lashes the action right into the spectator’s eye . . . where Mr Welles soundly succeeds is in generating enough sinister electricity for three such yarns and in generally staging it like a wild, murky nightmare . . .’20
Still Universal did nothing to promote it; like RKO in 1942, they just wanted rid of Welles. ‘I was so sure I was going to go on making a lot of pictures at Universal,’ Welles told Bogdanovich, ‘when suddenly I was fired from the lot. A terribly traumatic experience. Because I was so sure. They went out of their way to compliment me every night for the rushes, and “When are you going to sign a four to five picture contract with us? Please come and see us.” Every day they kept asking me to sign the contract. Then they saw the cut version and barred me from the lot.’21 Janet Leigh remained angry about it, forty years later: ‘Even now I think: What have we been robbed of? What have we been cheated of? We might have had five more masterpieces. We’ll never know. It’s a shame.’22 The truth is that the movie would probably have been a flop even if Welles had edited it from beginning to end, exactly as he wanted it. It’s private, quirky, bizarre. One for posterity. Welles was deeply disappointed, though he never puzzled out why or how it might have happened. ‘It was sad for me it turned out that way,’ he told Bogdanovich, ‘because I was ready to settle down in America.’23
Instead, he went back to Europe. He remained friendly with Heston, but nothing practical came out of their relationship; certainly no ‘partnership’ of the kind they had spoken of that drunken night in Welles’s car. He returned, agentless, to his travaux alimentaires – in this case the secondary role of a bullish TV commentator in John Huston’s The Roots of Heaven.
It was while he was shooting it in Paris that he got an entirely unexpected invitation to attend the International Film Festival, which was part of the very high-profile Brussels World Fair of that year; Touch of Evil received its European premiere at the festival. To his astonishment and that of Universal, which had done everything it could to prevent the film from being entered, it won the International Critics’ Prize, and Welles won a separate award for his Life’s Work. The film was an immense success, both with the critics (especially the French critics associated with Cahiers du Cinéma) and with the public. As acutely described by Sarah Nilsen in Projecting America, this outcome was deeply displeasing to the organisers of the American contribution to the World Fair: giving publicity to the dystopian vision of America purveyed by Touch of Evil was not the reason President Eisenhower had secured emergency funding from Congress for what he considered ‘by far the most significant opportunity for the United States to use culture as an asset to the nation’s foreign policy’. What they had in mind was Walt Disney’s fifteen-minute America the Beautiful in 360-degree Circarama, offering a whistle-stop tour of the nation, encompassing both the Grand Canyon and Ford’s Rouge River automobile factory, ‘America depicted as a singular, unified organism,’ as Nilsen says, ‘pulsating with the heartbeat of a booming capitalist economy’.24 It certainly did the trick. ‘With the ending,’ reported the Los Angeles Times, ‘there is a loud applause . . . from persons of many countries . . . yes, even a few Russian visitors’.25 That was what Eisenhower had in mind, not a forensic probe of the diseased underbelly of the American Dream.
But if Welles displeased his fellow-countrymen (or at least their elected representatives), he delighted his hosts and the European press in general. As Nilsen points out, 1958 was a pivotal year for Europe, marking its emergence from austerity and a return to both prosperity and self-respect. France in particular, having just installed Charles de Gaulle as premier of the tottering Fourth Republic (during the last week of the Brussels World Fair, as it happens), began to assert itself on the world stage; for the first time since the end of the war, American hegemony was seriously threatened. Nilsen makes an interesting, if slightly overheated case for Touch of Evil as a parable of the decline of the old America (Quinlan), imperilled by the vitality of its neighbours (the Mexicans). ‘A bomb literally explodes open the relations that will drive the narrative. At the height of the Cold War, atomic bombs were omnipresent in the minds of most spectators and clearly also in Welles’s,’ she says. ‘The film was a nightmare vision of America collapsing under the panic and fears produced by the racial, sexual and gender changes transforming the outdated America of Quinlan and his cronies.’26 This reading is consistent with Welles’s own political views – he was deeply preoccupied by the bomb – though it is not necessarily the film he thought he had made. For him, the crucial figure was Vargas. ‘The things said by Vargas are what I would say myself,’ Welles told André Bazin in Cannes, a month before he went to Brussels. ‘He talks like a man brought up in the classic liberal tradition, which is absolutely my attitude. So that’s the angle the film should be seen from; everything Vargas says, I say. Also, is it better to see a murderer go unpunished, or the police being authorized to abuse their power? If one had to choose, I’d rather see crime going unpunished. That is my point of view.’27
Welles’s success in Brussels and the warmth of his personal reception marked a new phase in his European profile as a film-maker; from now on, especially in France, but also in Britain, Germany and even Italy, he was admired, analysed, interviewed, idolised. He enjoyed it greatly, almost invariably agreeing with the questioner’s interpretation of his work, however arcane; he even sometimes advanced a few interpretations of his own work that had just occurred to him. It was a favourite pastime: the exchange of theor-ies, the definition of genres, the interpretation of life. It was glorious table-talk, for him, in which everything and its opposite were simultaneously true; the cigar smoke hangs in the air; there is always another bottle of good wine on hand, and the talk flows on and on. ‘I strongly believe,’ he told Bazin and Bitsch in Cannes, expansively ‘that a critic knows more about an artist’s work than the artist himself; but at the same time he knows less; it’s even the function of the critic to know simultaneously more and less than the artist.’ Enjoyable though all this was, Welles knew it would not get him one inch closer to being asked to direct a film. And, as he knew, it emphasised the huge transatlantic gap of perception about him, though even he can scarcely have imagined that he would never again direct a film in his own country.
For Welles, 1958 was a year for winning awards: the two at Brussels, and the Peabody Award for The Fountain of Youth, both to do with past work – in the case of The Fountain of Youth, long past. Meanwhile there was money to be made, and thus acting to be done, which he found increasingly disagreeable, especially since he found himself being directed by men with, as he saw it, less title to the director’s chair than he.
In December of 1957, while locked in mortal combat with Universal over Touch of Evil, he had been acting for 20th Century Fox in a film whipped together from three Faulkner novels and drenched in a great deal of essence of Tennessee Williams. The director was Martin Ritt, a former teacher at Lee Strasberg’s Studio, and thus, in Welles’s view, second cousin to Satan. The press department of 20th Century Fox, like their counterparts at Universal, had obviously decided that instead of trying to conceal Welles’s antics during filming, they should make a feature of them. Accordingly, in February of 1958, an article appeared in Life magazine under the heading ‘The Return of Awesome Welles’. ‘Two weeks after we started,’ Ritt told the reporter, ‘you could lay bets we would never finish. Such rows!’ Welles, said Life, ‘approaches every movie scene with the Olympian omnipotence of the director, even when – as in the latest and biggest of his Hollywood films – he is not the director’. They quoted him as saying: ‘There was a note of suspicion: I did not know what kind of monkeyshines I would have to put up with and the cast did not know what kind of caprices they would have to put up with from me.’ ‘But,’ stated Life, ‘from one battle to the next, they worked out the problem. The result is rich acting by Welles as a blustery plantation owner and a first-rate movie full of sex, fun and barn burnings.’ Enough said.
The part of Cy Sedgewick, television reporter, in The Roots of Heaven followed, relatively painlessly (his chum John Huston was directing), and then, later in the year, Welles appeared in Compulsion, an altogether more rewarding undertaking. In this light fictionalisation of the notorious Leopold and Loeb case, Welles was cast to play Jonathan Wilk, squarely based on Clarence Darrow, the real-life advocate who successfully defended the murderous youths. Richard Fleischer, hot from his success with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, was approached to direct the film. ‘When I learned that Orson Welles had already been cast as Darrow, my tongue was hanging out,’ said the fearless Fleischer. ‘I would kill to do this movie.’28
Welles only appears in the last third of the film, and then mostly in the courtroom, and he was available for exactly ten days, with no leeway: the day before shooting started he had been driven to Hollywood from Mexico, where he had been shooting more sequences for Don Quixote; and at midnight on the day shooting ended, he was booked onto a boat leaving Long Beach for China, where he would appear in Ferry to Hong Kong for the English director Lewis Gilbert. Fleischer, a shrewd, witty writer, left a well-observed and illuminating record of working with Welles in his post-Touch of Evil directorial hiatus. He quickly worked out how best to handle him. ‘There was no fooling him about the mystique of directing. He knew what you were going to do as soon as you started to do it,’ wrote Fleischer. ‘Since he knew as much about directing as I did, and was a bona fide genius in the bargain, I thought more than twice about how I was going to handle every scene he was in.’ It worked: Welles never once interfered with Fleischer’s work as director. ‘He was the actor, I was the director, and that was that. We developed a wonderful working relationship based on mutual respect.’ But Fleischer was aware that Welles must be feeling great envy of him. ‘They send me the worst, the most impossible, the most ridiculous pieces of crap you’ve ever read,’ Welles told him. ‘They say to themselves, “Welles is a genius. Maybe he can do something with this mess. And we can get him cheap, too.” They’re so bad that even I wouldn’t do them.’ Welles’s underlying frustration manifested itself only once with Fleischer: he had asked Welles to leave the scene by the left. Welles wanted to exit by the right. ‘I’m sorry, Orson,’ said Fleischer, ‘you can’t.’
‘Why not?’ ‘Well, you may have noticed that there is no wall on the right-hand side.’ He looked and thought for a moment. Then the jealousy and the challenge came out. ‘Do you know what I would do if I were directing this picture?’ ‘No, I don’t. What would you do?’ ‘I’d wait until they built me a wall.’ ‘That,’ I said, ‘is why I am directing this picture and you are not.’
Welles, Fleischer discovered, had his idiosyncrasies as an actor. In close-ups and reverses he preferred not to have the other actor off camera. He played the entire scene just as though the actor were there, reacting to non-existent dialogue, responding with his own, interrupting, overlapping, laughing, growing angry, exactly as though there were someone there speaking to him. When he absolutely had to act with another actor, he would avoid eye-contact; if he happened to catch the actor’s eye, he forgot his lines. In an early courtroom sequence he had no difficulty playing to the extras who filled the jury benches, but looking into the eyes of E.G. Marshall, to whom a lot of the spee
ch was directed, was so difficult for Welles that he finally asked him to close his eyes when he was addressing him; he asked the same of all the assistant DAs sitting next to Marshall. ‘There they were,’ says Fleischer, ‘all lined up, listening intently, with their eyes closed. It was a ludicrous but memorable sight. It seemed to me that the image he was facing would have been more distracting than having them looking at him, but no, Orson breezed through the speeches without any trouble at all.’
Because of the shortness of time, Fleischer devised a complex set-up for the final climactic summing up in which all three cameras shot everything in one direction, then they all moved round and shot the next segment, and so on, until they’d done the complete 360 degrees. ‘It was like throwing a large jigsaw puzzle into the air and planning it so all the pieces would fall in exactly the right place, with all of them fitted together perfectly.’ The final three minutes of the speech would be done in one long shot. Each time Fleischer suggested doing the final shot, Welles reacted ‘like a horse to a rattlesnake, rearing up with panic in his eyes’. Finally Fleischer asked him what the trouble was. ‘Stage fright! I’m scared to death of that scene. Please, let’s do it the last thing.’ Finally the day came. Welles asked if they could rehearse it technically till it was perfect, which they did for some hours. Then he rehearsed it alone for ninety minutes. And then they shot it. ‘It was deeply moving. It was Orson Welles at his best. There was spontaneous and prolonged applause from the crew when I quietly said, “Cut. Print.” I stood up and applauded, too. Orson came over and embraced me.’ At the end of the following day – Welles’s last – there was a little reception for him, which he attended in high good humour.
