by Simon Callow
Too polite to point out that Welles has not answered the question, Clay steps back from the interview to attempt a tour d’horizon of this strangely ungraspable figure. Clay is baffled: ‘Can anyone really know him? His private life is so public that it has become almost anonymous. Though he has been talked about since childhood, he has remained unknown.’ There is no question of Welles’s abilities, he says: he sees how Welles’s collaborators respect him, and is astonished at his technical skill in editing: ‘Technique?’ Welles bellows, offering his familiar dismissal of his craft. ‘Don’t make me laugh. In the movies, just as in every other trade, you can learn the technique in four days . . . any amateur photographer knows enough technique to make a film.’ But now he adds a new complaint: ‘Technicians always try to manacle the creative artist and prevent him from taking risks.’ This is Promethean Welles, bound by the forces that be; Welles as Gulliver, trammelled by the little people. All this, says Clay, is put forward with impressive energy: ‘Welles has the physical and mental energy of three men.’ ‘On this point everybody agrees,’ says Clay, carefully choosing his words: ‘here is a man equipped to be a genius.’ He describes Welles’s lifestyle: ‘he over-tips flagrantly, stays only in best hotels, rides in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, has no trouble getting through his $1,000 per week allowance and in general lives by the adage quoted to me by his wife: “The more it costs, the cheaper it is.”’ Welles perfectly lives up to his myth. But is he sincere, wonders Clay, meticulously demolishing Welles’s story about seeing the clock faces of the Gare d’Orsay; and then, more boldly, he asks, ‘Is he a liar? He told me he was a descendant of the Norman conquerors and that his name was originally Vilibus.’
On the set, Clay sees him spreading energy and enthusiasm everywhere; he also witnesses an alarming outburst of rage. But, like Enrique Martinez of Films and Filming, he sees something else behind all this extrovert behaviour. Martinez had been permitted to observe filming. Every time Welles spotted him, he ordered the studio manager to throw him out, but Martinez kept creeping back, hiding behind boxes or filing cabinets. From this oblique vantage point, Martinez surprisingly noted that, ‘in spite of giving himself the airs of genius and in spite of his enormous cigars and his appearance of ox-like strength, Orson Welles seemed to me to reveal a side of himself that was full of timidity, excessively sensitive and even fearful’. Clay, too, has sensed timidity in him: Welles works alone in Rome, says Clay, because he is afraid of new faces; he always tries to hire the same actors, the same technicians; he dreads the idea of a press conference, being afraid to walk into a crowded room. ‘I consider my face an enemy,’ Welles confesses. ‘I don’t want to be the man I am. It’s sad for an actor not to have a nose. Even when I shave, I don’t look in a mirror.’ His wife tells Clay that Welles has a collection of all the beards, false noses, sideburns, false teeth and other disguises he has ever used in his career. ‘It so happens that I’ve always had the body of a man and the face of a baby,’ says Welles. ‘The two have to be harmonized, that’s all.’
Frustrated by what he feels is a diversion, Clay quotes back at him a remark he once made about Picasso being a son of the sun, whereas he, Welles, is a son of the moon. Clay wants to know what that means. Welles refuses, angrily, to elaborate. He hates to be questioned, he says; 75 per cent of anything he says in any interview is a lie. Clay bravely persists: ‘But if I’ve only got witty remarks—’ ‘I’m a medium,’ barks Welles, ‘not an orator. Like certain Oriental and Christian mystics, I think the self is a kind of enemy. My work is precisely what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am. Asking me questions is death to me. I’m fanatically against psychoanalysis. Freud kills the poet in man. He kills the contradictions – and they’re essential to him. Until someone learns the secrets of the world, I demand that man should have the right to keep and encourage his contradictions.’ Clay sticks to his guns, trying to get something concrete, quantifiable, out of him: ‘Isn’t a man’s work a way of surviving death?’ he asks. ‘The idea of survival doesn’t interest me,’ says Welles. ‘Being alive means not killing the tensions that one carries within oneself. On the contrary, a poet must seek out and cultivate his contradictions.’
Something clicks in Clay’s mind. ‘These ambiguities, internal clashes and tensions add up to something far more than a mere love of paradox,’ he says. ‘Look at his films; they reflect the strange dissociation of his personality, the contrast between what he could be – a monster – and what his intelligence and lucidity have made him: a humanist. A Nietzschean personality tempered with liberalism, a monster tamed by virtue of his own reason. Welles himself is a tumultuous combat that is reflected in his work. The tension is the key to the man. Through it, he becomes truly great.’ His work, surmises Clay, is a psychodrama, a means for its creator to get a grip on himself by describing himself. The inner tension explains ‘the impetuosity and the baroque seething’ in Welles’s style. But more important than this, says Clay, is that behind all this maelstrom of contradictory sentiments is ‘a parallel to that moment in a bullfight when the crowd becomes hushed in anticipation of the death thrust. It is a zone of glacial silence.’ Like the humans-turned-rhinoceroses in Ionesco’s play, the sceptical, analytical Clay has begun to think like Welles, to talk like him. Tragic pessimism is at the root of Welles and his work, he says: ‘there is only one standard by which to judge people: their attitude to death.’ And there, says Clay, you have his message. ‘It may be that the director of The Trial, if he can probe his own anxiety and settle his own fate more lucidly, will bring a new acuteness to his art. It may be that this man, to whom we owe some of the greatest moments in cinema, will in the future lift his song (as he calls it) to heights as yet unattained by the seventh art.’
This remarkable interview/profile demonstrates how deeply people were affected by Welles. It is a striking example of what might be called the Mounties school of journalism: Clay hangs in there till he gets his man. Usually Welles profoundly resists classification, tries to create a smokescreen, refuses self-analysis except as a kind of parlour game. But with Clay he doesn’t fantasticate his past: he grapples with himself as an artist. Clay persuades Welles to give an account, however defensively, of his personal preoccupations, the things he thinks about most deeply. His delineation of Welles as being himself ‘a tumultuous combat’ that is reflected in his work comes very close to the mystery at the centre of Welles. Clay’s notion that Welles needs to probe his own anxiety and settle his own fate more lucidly if he is to scale the heights is profoundly suggestive. Clay’s encounter with Welles puts him in a majestic framework, away from the external and towards what is going on inside, changing the terms of reference from either the popular obsession with his versatility and flamboyance or the intellectuals’ imputations of calculated cleverness, instead suggesting a depth and a disturbance within him predicated on profound contradictions.
It was to be the last acknowledgement of that kind that Welles would receive for some time. He edited the film with tremendous application, day and night, with a couple of assistants. Eventually, an outsider editor was brought in. Fritz Muller had some experience on Hollywood movies and had been working in Rome. When he entered the cutting room Welles roared, ‘Who are YOU? And how did you get in here?’ Muller told him he was the editor. ‘Get out of here!!!’ hollered Welles. ‘Now!!!’ Muller left, bewildered. Welles suddenly emerged from the station and called to him again. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’ve come to edit the film,’ said Muller. ‘Oh,’ said Welles, ‘you’re not an Editor, you’re a CUTTER. I thought you were a Newspaper Editor. You’re a cutter. Well, come in. Let’s get to work.’29
Once in the editing suite, Muller realised that chaos prevailed: his assistants were untrained, there were sacks of unlabelled film everywhere, and Welles, in cutting sequences together, had simply discarded the bits he didn’t want. Muller told him that he had to reprint all the footage again and start from scratch, systematically. Well
es agreed. He knew what he wanted, said Muller, but he had no idea how to get it. ‘The challenge of editing any of Orson Welles’s films,’ he told the interviewer Peter Tonguette, ‘was that he did not like script girls and he did not like the clapper boards. So one had to search and find and create source materials. Normally, you go by numbers and you find a take. But in this case, you couldn’t. So the challenge was to try to find the pieces and put it together.’30 He and Welles then worked closely and in harmony, until, predictably, they had a blazing row. Muller walked out; later Welles called him. ‘“You’re the only man that knows how to talk to me,” he said. I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, nobody tells me to fuck off.” I said, “Well, you probably scare people, but you don’t treat people the way you should treat them.”’31 Welles worked obsessively, driving himself and everyone else, never satisfied. When he was exhausted, he would have a hot bath for twenty minutes and return refreshed. He was never satisfied, but the film began to takes shape.
He and Muller laboured especially hard on the sound. The Salkinds had allotted him a composer, Jean Drut, who had composed the score for Austerlitz, and Welles found himself at loggerheads with him, chiefly because he was not interested in Drut composing a score in any conventional sense: what he required were musical (or, to be more precise, sonic) building blocks, which he would reassemble as required, at whatever speed he chose, played backwards if necessary. This was understandably dispiriting for a composer of some track record and unquestioned skills. Moreover Welles determined from an early point that he would use the then not especially familiar Adagio souped up in the 1940s by the musicologist Remo Giazotto from a fragment by Tomaso Albinoni. Its phoney religiose emotionalism must have suggested something specific to Welles, but he rarely uses it unadorned – most prominently at the very end of the film. Otherwise, as with the music Drut composed for him, he subjects it to every indignity imaginable, but the effect is curiously haunting, as the tune struggles against all sorts of other elements to assert itself – sometimes trudging backwards, sometimes emerging in tiny bursts. It’s a curious musical ecology, contributing to the film’s general sense of diffraction, often seeming to go its own way without reference to anything happening on the screen or in the narrative – part of Welles’s ongoing experiment with sound, which had started on radio in the early 1930s. The dubbing of the dialogue was a huge task in itself. Perkins had the lion’s share of it, and learned from Welles, he said, to love the process, coming to see that it was a chance to improve his performance; he became as skilled at it as Welles himself. Peter Sallis and other British actors were flown in to dub other characters. Welles, delighted to see Sallis again, showed him some favourite sequences from the footage:
and he was, what he had always been I suppose, just a little bit of a child. He had a childlike delight in what he was doing and he wanted to share it with somebody, so he shared it with me, and I was flattered and pleased that he did.32
Welles dubbed many of the characters himself, as he had done on all of his films since Othello. The effect is to make Welles omnipresent; this is First Person Singular carried to new heights. It has been suggested that he embodies every aspect of the Law, but it is a little difficult to square that with his dubbing the Priest or, particularly, the painter, Titorelli, whom he endows with a slightly camp, rather sneering tone that seems at odds both with Billy Chappell’s performance and with the character. Instead, it suggests a desire to stamp every second of the film with his own imprint, alongside a very human, Bottom the Weaver-like desire to play everyone. Complex as Welles was, one should never discount simple motives.
The film, in what was now almost a ritual with Welles, was entered for the Venice Film Festival and then withdrawn from it; in this case, it was replaced by another story of alienation and police brutality, West Side Story, co-directed by Robert Wise, Welles’s editor on Citizen Kane and collaborator with the enemy (as he saw it) on The Magnificent Ambersons – a man from whose earnings the interest alone would have paid for every project Welles ever dreamed of. As the Paris premiere of The Trial approached, Welles lost faith in the one scene in the film that was entirely his invention, the one between Perkins and Katina Paxinou as the scientist, in which the computer (rather archly referred to as ‘she’) predicts that the one crime Joseph K. would be likely to commit would be suicide. Welles never really explained why it was cut; all his team thought it would work wonderfully, he said, but it didn’t.
The Trial had a splendid premiere in Paris; in fact, it had two premieres in Paris, one in English and one in French. The French version was much criticised, but the English version was highly acclaimed. Welles’s good feeling persisted; he was convinced that, as he told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1964, ‘this is the best film I have ever made’. Then the English-language critics weighed in. The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, the legendary Janet Flanner, writing under her nom de plume Genêt, described The Trial as ‘the most expectantly awaited cinema event of the winter’. Her verdict was a mildly expressed presage of everything that was to come: ‘as a film it is typical, talented, pure Welles’, but ‘there seems to be no emotion behind the film to squeeze the heart or inflame the brain’.33 Brendan Gill, in the same magazine a few months later, at the time of the film’s American release, noted that Kafka succeeds by the suppression of vivid images and that ‘what a movie version of The Trial requires isn’t exotic settings, weird camera angles, and voice echoing hollowly down improbable passageways but a bleak, bland ordinariness of film and sound, in which every setting, every action is precisely what it appears to be. Outrageous reasonableness is the iron rule and may not be violated. Have I sufficiently indicated’, he purrs, ‘that I think Orson Welles is the last man on earth who ought to have made a movie out of The Trial?’34 From Esquire magazine came the same refrain: ‘That Welles should have attempted The Trial shows an extraordinary lack of self-knowledge.’35
Six months later the film was released in England, having the misfortune to appear in the same week as Joseph Losey’s The Servant, with its superb screenplay by Harold Pinter and its unsettling anatomisation of class differences; that, as well as Kafka, was used by the British critics to clobber The Trial. The Times headline was pretty explicit: ‘ORSON WELLES FAILS WITH KAFKA’.36 ‘Technically, the film is masterful,’ says the anonymous critic. ‘And yet for most of the way it is just dull and lifeless.’ Why? the critic asks. Not because it is not good Kafka: ‘what matters here is whether it is good Welles’. It was not, according to The Times. ‘Mr Welles has made bad films before and then surprised us all with his acrobatic powers of recovery, and will no doubt do so again. But meanwhile one is left by The Trial reflecting ruefully that it must, after all, take genius of a sort to make so little out of so much.’ In Sight and Sound, normally very supportive of Welles, William S. Pechter laid into the film with a will:
Though I had expected The Trial to be bad, I went to it truly hoping for the best. And in fact though I had expected it to be bad, bad as a mannerist painting can be bad, bad, for instance, as Welles’s Othello is bad, I had not been expecting the worst; I had not expected that it might be boring. Orson Welles boring! And boring to stupefaction . . . for anyone familiar with Orson Welles’s talents at their peak, even more shocking than how bad The Trial is, is how bad it looks: it looks like the dregs of Cinema 16.37
And in one of the few reviews to attempt even a modicum of analysis, Robert Hatch in Horizon noted that:
The Trial goes astray because Welles is a romantic – and, I think, an optimist . . . in the book the law devours its most ardent disciple: in the picture the totalitarian police pick up a potential dissident (and quite properly, given the viewpoint). That is an idea for a picture, but it is not Kafka’s idea. Nor did Kafka have it in mind to warn his public against the imminence of atomic war – he was dealing with a horror of the soul. The mushroom cloud at the end of the film is another example of the boy scout in Welles; he has never been able
to pass a soapbox without jumping up for a brief exhortation.38
The disjunct between the joy in creating a work and the critical response is not unknown in the lives of artists, but here it is particularly violent, and particularly dismaying in contemplating Welles’s personal trajectory. Fortune proved, after all, a cruel and fickle goddess. There was no respite; Welles was still being punished for being himself. It is pitiful. However, there is no question that The Trial – the film made under ideal conditions, the film in which there was no one to blame except himself, in which there could be no extended memos showing how he had been misunderstood and betrayed, the film that was his, from beginning to end – is a problematic film in his output. It has its partisans, but it has never sparked the sort of passionate defences and rehabilitations that even Mr Arkadin, god help us all, has attracted. As virtually every review, bad or indifferent, acknowledges, it is a staggering achievement, technically. Visually it is powerful, challenging, imaginative. The camera moves are superbly accomplished, the nightmare chases disturbing, the sense of space breathtaking. The film is filled with felicities: the deeply distressing sequences of the beating of the policemen; the Alice-in-Wonderland staging of the tribunal, in which K. first pleads his innocence; the numb faces of the extras who (not understanding English) so brilliantly suggest an absolute incomprehension of what is going on; the performances, especially of Tamiroff, who manages, yet again, to be grotesque and real in equal measure; and of Welles himself, his most relaxed, witty, fluid work as an actor for years (no prosthetics, phew). Welles’s first appearance, lying on a bed, swathed in cigar smoke, in which he might as well be dead, is a brilliant coup de théâtre. Echoes of other Welles films abound: the courtroom scene in The Lady from Shanghai, the terrorisation of Janet Leigh in the motel in Touch of Evil, the projection-room sequence from Citizen Kane at different points inform the film with powerful resonances.
