Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  Despite his reverential air Wheldon does tease Welles a little: after showing a clip of the great scene towards the end of Citizen Kane in which Susan Alexander struggles with a jigsaw puzzle while Kane paces restlessly in front of Xanadu’s vast fireplace, he says, ‘If I had made that, I would be terrified that I was just on the point of toppling over into farce, that I had made the fire too big, that I had made the room too large. Did you have this sort of anxiety?’ ‘No,’ says Welles, ‘because the room is that big.’ ‘What room is that big?’ ‘Awfully pompous answer – his room . . . I do feel that a man like Kane is very close to farce and very close to parody – very close to burlesque, and that’s why I tried every sort of thing from sentimental tricks to an attempt at genuine humanity – to keep him always counterbalanced; but of course anybody who could build a place of that kind, you know, is very close to low comedy.’ The impression left by the interview is one of complete transparency, of a trusting simplicity that has been baffled by the ways of the world; Welles candidly laments his apparent unemployability as a director. At the end of the interview Wheldon asks Welles how he would like to be remembered. He gets a surprisingly emotional and, for Welles, nearly inarticulate answer:

  Almost every American book on the cinema pricks the bubble and proves that what is said about me is a lie and I am no good. There is no book that says I am good in American literature; and I must say that talking about posterity . . . all I care about is, er, really my children, my grandchildren, if they ever say as I do, wondering about my grandfather who was a politician and a cabinet minister in America; and I would like to know more about him, and if somebody should ever want to know about me, which is the only posterity, I cannot take the rest of it seriously. I really wish there was something nicer that they could read about me.

  Setting aside the fact that Welles’s grandfather was not a politician, much less a Cabinet minister, and the slightly manipulative mention of his children, with whom he spent as little time as he could, his plea is the more remarkable for it having preceded by a good ten years the outcrop of books that called his whole career into question. The impression that he gives is of a man who underneath all the exuberance has been deeply hurt, and Wheldon was clearly both surprised and touched by the revelation. The response of reviewers was not warm: the Daily Telegraph called it ‘disastrous’. It was felt that Wheldon had given Welles an easy ride.

  Just slightly before the Wheldon interview was taped, Welles gave another one, in Paris, where he was staying in the swanky Meurice Hotel, this time to the Canadian actor/interviewer Bernard Braden.8 Braden prefaces the interview by saying (in voice-over) that Welles is forty-five, ‘which, for a Boy Wonder, is getting on a bit. Has he failed?’ asks Braden. ‘If so, at what? He is unique, one of the most stimulating and exasperating, exciting and erratic North Americans who ever made story-telling their trade’ – a description which, if Welles had heard it, might not have displeased him too much. The tone is noticeably freer, Braden’s questions much nimbler than Wheldon’s: this is not the masterfully modest Welles of Monitor; he is not especially buoyant, looks heavy-featured and is often melancholy, sometimes on the brink of being aggressively defensive, cornered even, but finally expansive and uproarious. Braden’s not unsympathetic but quick-fire questioning doesn’t give Welles time to consider his responses; he says the first, often most revealing thing that comes into his head. Braden immediately touches a nerve with mention of exile: ‘I don’t think of myself as an exile,’ protests Welles. ‘I just happen to have lived abroad all my life. I’m from the mid-West.’ ‘What does the word “home” mean to you?’ asks Braden. ‘I have lots of homes. I would like to have one. It’s a wonderful question: it may take me 40 years to think of the answer.’ And then, out of nowhere, Welles says: ‘Woodstock, Illinois’ – the location of his old school, the Todd School for Boys. He reels off a list of great cities, including Peking (‘I spent a lot of my childhood there’), then tells Braden, rather ruefully, that he lives in Rome ‘because my wife’s family is there – I’m longing to get away: it’s turning into Philadelphia with spaghetti’. ‘Does poverty bother you?’ ‘Oh yes, it’s bothering me here, living in the Meurice Hotel.’

  Braden quickly gets Welles talking candidly about his work – about his feeling, for example, that in the film of Othello he failed in the epileptic fit: ‘I just cut to the seagulls.’ He talks about directing, ‘the most overrated job in the world,’ he says. ‘I know a lot of big directors that every actor knows are useless. Unless a director is something of a cameraman, something of a cutter, something of a writer, something of an actor – but a lot of a cameraman – he won’t make any difference.’ He has been lucky with actors, he says, but miserably unlucky with producers and money people. ‘The scripts they send me are terrible.’ Then, he says with striking simplicity, ‘I would like to do something which would at least leave the art form or profession in question better for my having done it’ – a remark at once more modest and more real than the sob story he fed Wheldon. There is huge melancholy here, alongside a glorious sense of absurdity; a helpless frustration allied to an immense sense of what might be; a genuine humility and a profound pride. But it is certainly not a portrait of a man on the brink of imminent achievement.

  The following year Welles sat for a pen-portraitist with whom he had a much more complex relationship than either Wheldon or Braden: Kenneth Tynan. It was Tynan’s fourth major profile of Welles so far. This one – or rather these two; it was a diptych, spread over two issues – was for Show magazine.9 The headline was not encouraging: ‘Portrait of the legendary genius whose greatest production is, and always will be, his own life’. The first part is almost as much about Tynan as it is about his subject, but it provides a useful framework for the questions Tynan poses: why is the world so disappointed in Welles – why did we expect so much? Despite what Tynan clearly regards as the meagre accomplishments of the eighteen years since Kane – ‘a handful of stylish thrillers, a couple of bombastic Shakespeare films, a few hit-or-miss stage productions, a number of self-exploiting television appearances, and several tongue-in-cheek performances in other people’s bad films’ – he bunches Welles with Chaplin, Cocteau, Picasso, Ellington and Hemingway as possessing ‘a fixed international reputation that can never wholly be tarnished . . . the quickest ears prick up and the keenest eyes brighten at the advent of a new Orson Welles production – or rather manifestation, because one can never predict the form in which his talent will manifest itself.’

  Welles offers him no clues as to what might be in the offing. Instead he fobs Tynan off with freewheeling fantasies, which Tynan reports, deadpan: he hardly lived in America till he was eighteen, he says; his father owned two factories, and tried to invent the aeroplane; his brother Richard ‘upheld the family tradition of intelligent dilettantism’ (he was actually in an asylum); he met Ravel and Stravinsky as a child; he sat down to dinner with Hitler when he was nine; during the war he was bundled out of the country under a false name ‘to examine captured Nazi newsreels and other such filmic trivia’. This was going quite far, even for Welles; only one thing remained – to go further, so he adds that while he was on the mission he had an affair with Eva Perón. Inexplicably, having swallowed all that, Tynan capriciously decides to discredit an absolutely unimpeachable fact – namely, that Welles himself wrote Harry Lime’s line about the cuckoo clock. Still trying to probe the question of Welles’s failure to deliver what he promised, Tynan remarks on his proneness to ‘depressions, onslaughts of gloom, spleen and sulks that the Middle Ages would probably have ascribed to the cardinal sin of accidie, which induces a sense of futility and a temporary paralysis of the will’. At such times, says Tynan, you feel that Welles has given up on people, but then, at the prospect of meeting Isak Dinesen, say, or Chou En-lai or Robert Graves, he revives: ‘you feel kindled by his presence, by his mastery of rhetoric, by his uncalculating generosity’. Echoing what Michael Lindsay-Hogg had so keenly felt in
Dublin, Tynan tells us that ‘when he leaves a room, something irreplaceable and life-enhancing goes with him; something’, he feels, ‘that may eventually install him, given our luck and his help, in the special pantheon whose other occupants are Stanislavsky, Gordon Craig, Max Reinhardt, Jacques Copeau, and Bertolt Brecht’. For Tynan, and always excepting Kane, Welles remains – this genius without portfolio, as he calls him – just promising.

  The Playboy profile perfectly encapsulates the absurdity of Welles’s position: this peerless creature, this many-layered, multi-talented force of nature, this fountain of ideas, this cinematic wizard couldn’t get a job. In a world where journeyman directors were churning out movies by the dozen, Orson Welles was a name on no one’s lips or, indeed, lists. And then, after months of dreary alimentary travails and occasional stabs at Don Quixote (now known as Don Quixote Flies to the Moon and apparently, so he told Bernard Braden, finished and soon to be released), the wheel of fortune began to turn again in his favour.

  In 1961, a production manager named Yves Laplanche decided to kick-start his career as a producer by acquiring the rights to some classic twentieth-century novels. Among them was Kafka’s The Trial, for which he thought Welles would be the ideal director. Laplanche approached the producer Alexander Salkind (Franco-Russian, though technically Mexican), who had shown some entrepreneurial pluck by raising the money for Austerlitz, the seventy-year-old Abel Gance’s sequel to his masterly and ceaselessly innovative Napoléon of thirty years earlier; as it happens, Welles had appeared in Austerlitz (playing Robert Fulton, American inventor of torpedoes), as had Vittorio De Sica; what interesting conversations the three colossi must have had during their tea-breaks. Salkind’s immediate reaction to Laplanche’s proposal was negative, but on touting the idea around among his investors, he found that he was able to raise the money ($1 million) without any difficulty. Needless to say, Welles was cock-a-hoop, but he was also astonished. ‘It’s a very expensive film, it’s a big film,’ an almost disbelieving Welles told Huw Wheldon in an extended Monitor interview devoted exclusively to the film:

  What’s remarkable is that The Trial is being made by anybody! It’s such an avant-garde sort of thing. Oh it’s wonderful, and it’s very hopeful. Five years ago there is nobody who could have made it, nobody who could have persuaded distributors or backers or anybody else to make it. But the globe has changed recently. There is a new moment in filmmaking and I don’t mean by that that we’re better filmmakers, but that the distribution system has broken down a little and the public is more open, more ready for difficult subjects.10

  He was right: the European public, at any rate, was flocking to see avant-garde movies like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year At Marienbad. Moreover, the stars were queuing up to appear in them; when Salkind started casting The Trial (co-producing with his father Michael), he signed up, in rapid succession, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Elsa Martinelli, all of them as hot as cakes; Martinelli didn’t even ask to see a script. Welles recruited some of his old Arkadin team, Suzanne Flon, Katina Paxinou and – almost a mascot for him now – Akim Tamiroff; Welles’s wife Paola, bespectacled, had a scene as the court archivist. He wanted a big American name for Joseph K. and he found one immediately. Anthony Perkins, after his massive success with Psycho, was eager to explore the possibilities of working in Europe. He was the first American star, before Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood, to become a major star in his own right in Europe. ‘He would get two or three new scripts a week,’ his agent noted with satisfaction. ‘For the first time, French companies were prepared to pay an American star his American salary.’11 Perkins made three films in quick succession with René Clément, Jules Dassin and Anatole Litvak; it was indeed the last-named who introduced Perkins to Welles, who immediately sent him the script of The Trial. ‘Orson paid me the great compliment of saying he would like to know whether I would make the picture because if I wasn’t going to make it, he wasn’t going to make it either,’ wrote Perkins. ‘I’ll never know if that’s the way it really would have been or not, but I prefer to take it as the truth and I will always want to believe that.’12

  For the role of the pompous, discursive lawyer Huld (renamed Hastler in the film) he approached Charles Laughton, their falling-out some quarter of a century earlier over Welles’s withdrawal from the premiere of Galileo a distant memory. But Laughton was ill – terminally, though he didn’t know it – and he declined the part; Jackie Gleason, whom Welles had courted to play the role of Mosca when he thought he was going to do Volpone fifteen years earlier at the City Center, was nervous of flying all the way to France, and so, with genuine reluctance, Welles himself took on the part. He had originally cast himself in the small but important role of the priest who, in the novel, recounts the story of a countryman who comes to the Gate of the Law with a complaint and is made to wait and wait until, many years later, he dies there, without ever having being admitted. Welles gave the role to a very young Michael Lonsdale, but stripped of the Gate of the Law story, which ended up in a very different place in the film – on Welles’s lips, twice. The story, related by Welles in voice-over, became the prologue to the film, illustrated by striking black-and-white projections. Then, almost at the end of the film, K., encountering Hastler, who is of course his lawyer, finds himself standing in the light of the projector, as the Advocate briefly recapitulates the story – there is perhaps some sort of reference to the projection room at the beginning of Kane, some allusion to the art of film. It also puts Welles/Hastler, the representative of the law that has so tormented and failed K., back into the centre of the action.

  Welles had worked exceptionally hard on the script over a period of six highly productive months, holed up with the family in Fregene. If Rhinoceros was the unhappiest job he ever had, worse even than Mr Arkadin, then The Trial, he claimed, was the happiest, though, interestingly, he had about as much sympathy for the source material as he had for Rhinoceros. He was no more admiring of Kafka than he was of Ionesco, and for much the same reasons: they both postulate an insane universe in which innocent Everyman is doomed; this was unacceptable to Welles, smacking of what Marxists used to call bourgeois despair. For him, man is guilty, but mankind is not doomed. The crucial difference in the two projects was that with The Trial he was uninhibited by a living author and could adjust the text as he chose, making it his own. He had no compunction, he told Huw Wheldon, about making alterations to a masterpiece when he put it on screen, ‘because film is quite a different medium. Film should not be a fully illustrated, all-talking, all-moving version of a printed work, but should be itself, a thing of itself. It’s a film inspired by the book, in which my collaborator and partner is Kafka. I’ve tried to make it my film because I think that it will have more validity if it’s mine.’13

  In fact, though he updated the story to the time of filming – 1962 – he stuck pretty faithfully to the narrative of the novel. What was radically different was his sense of the meaning of the material, and this fundamentally affected the way in which he shot it. Of the interpreting of The Trial there will never be an end: as a crucial twentieth-century text, it has been all things to all men, lavished with historical, political, psychological, theological and metaphysical exegeses. Welles’s conception of Kafka was not far from Brecht’s: Kafka, Brecht said, had described ‘with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state Apparat’.14 Echoing Brecht’s words, Welles’s official press release said, ‘The Trial is a contemporary nightmare, a film about police bureaucracy, the totalitarian power of the Apparatus, and the oppression of the individual in modern society. I’ve told the story of a particular individual. If you find a universal parable behind this story, so much the better.’15

  The objection to this approach is that by allying the story so specifically to ‘modern society’, Kafka’s very particular vision of human experience is diluted, or at the very least generalised. To say as
Welles does: it’s the state – it’s the law – it’s the police – it’s society – that is at fault, is too easy. Kafka’s theme is, famously, the frozen sea within us. This did not interest Welles. In a contemporary interview that he gave to the Anglo-French writer Jean Clay, he described two critical changes he had made to the novel. Firstly, he dismissed the endlessly debated question of what K. is supposed to have done, and whether indeed he has done it: ‘Joseph K. belongs to the Apparatus – the Organisation – himself. He’s an official. He’s the head of a department. He too keeps people waiting, he too is arrogant and cloaked in a mystery of his own making. K. is a vain man and a climber. As a victim of the Apparatus, he tries to resist it but he’s an accomplice just the same.’ K., in Welles’s script, is as guilty as hell: ‘his crime is surrendering to the system that’s destroying his individuality. Yet he tries to fight it. He represents the human condition today, half alive, half dead, conforming yet protesting. Like all of us.’16 This had been Welles’s theme for many years, at least since Press Conference, ten years earlier, but it most certainly was not Kafka’s theme.