Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  But amidst all the texture, the imagery and the energy, the story – the element to which Welles professed ultimate loyalty – has gone missing. As The Times remarked, whether it is Kafka-like or not is irrelevant: but the question of what we are given in its stead is. Welles consummately creates an anti-statist nightmare. But Kafka’s darker, subtler parable of man’s alienation from himself pierces you, disturbs you, frightens you. The film does none of these things, for all the vividness of its imagery and the force of its outrage against the forces of conformism. A single passage from the book, a moment absent from Welles’s screenplay, shows what has been lost. It is the penultimate paragraph of the novel, as K. lies in the pit, awaiting – indeed expecting – his death at the hands of the police:

  The casement window flew open like a light flashing on; a human figure, faint and unsubstantial at that distance and height, forced itself far out and stretched its arms out even further. Who was it? A friend? A good man? One who sympathized? One who wanted to help? Was it one person? Was it everybody? Was there still help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? Certainly there were. Logic is of course unshakeable, but it cannot hold out against a man who wants to live.39

  There is nothing in the film to touch this with its ambiguity, its fearful glimpse of hope, its human anguish. In his film of The Trial it is as if Welles had forgotten or dismissed what Joseph K. was actually experiencing. He wanted to make a film more than he wanted to make a film of The Trial. It is as if the possibilities of the language he was inventing had become more interesting to him than what he was trying to say in it. The last few minutes of the film, with the atomic mushroom rising up as the faux-Albinoni blares out, is truly dismaying in its banality. Perhaps this is what happens when you make a film just for the sake of making a film, from a book you do not admire: you have to bend your imagination so far that you end up involved in a purely mechanical exercise, however much fun it might have been to execute it.

  Welles, for the good of his soul, needed to make a film that his heart was in. Fortunately, he did.

  And meanwhile, he met a girl.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Let’s Have a Brainwash

  WELLES’S MARRIAGE to Paola Mori was in many ways a great success. She was beautiful, organised, socially superb – both girlish and aristocratic – and an ideal mother; she kept house for Welles wherever they might be, and also provided him with the thing he had always lacked – a permanent base, a hearth – in her mother’s home in Fregene, where he had installed the Moviolas, the essential tool of his trade, which Darryl Zanuck had given him in lieu of a salary for his performance in Roots of Heaven.

  He, Beatrice and Paola constituted a happy unit, happy enough for Beatrice to remember it as an idyllic period, forever enshrined in the footage Welles shot for a remarkably free-form Italian television documentary entitled In the Land of Don Quixote, in which they behave like any loving family on holiday as they wander across Spain. But it was not enough. There is reason to believe that Welles was not monogamous; it was hard to break the habits of a lifetime. That was containable: Paola was a shrewd Italian wife and was not unaware of her husband’s need for new stimulants, for his adrenalin fix. But then, unbeknown to her, he fell in love – deeply and, as it turned out, permanently. It was on the set of The Trial in Paris, in the Gare d’Orsay, that he met a sensationally beautiful, sexually provocative young art student called Olga Palinkaš, of mixed Hungarian and Croatian parentage. It was some years before they met again, but true to his essentially romantic nature, Welles kept the flame burning; when they were reunited, their relationship quickly developed into the most important relationship he ever had with a woman. He and Paola never divorced; for some years they maintained the surface of their relationship. Welles’s new passion was a slow-burning thing, but as far as his heart was concerned, he was, to all intents and purposes, gone.

  Meanwhile he continued to make his living in the usual way, financing or otherwise supporting the jobs that he really cared about. He made In the Land of Don Quixote (Nella terra di Don Chisciotte) for RAI early in 1961, just before writing the screenplay for The Trial. It is the longest thing he ever did, nine one-hour programmes, and it is curiously unmediated, having the distinct feeling of a home movie: the camera just runs. For once Welles, no doubt eager to fill up the nine hours, was able to resist intervening editorially. ‘It’s just a travelogue,’ he told Juan Cobós, his assistant on Chimes at Midnight.1 But he turns his camera on some very striking things, and his always interested eyes frequently light on charming, curious and sometimes breathtaking scenes. It is, in effect, a photo-album recording his fascination with the country he had first visited as a sixteen-year-old boy, but in which, out of deep detestation for Franco and his regime, he had avoided working until he shot Mr Arkadin there. (Welles might have mellowed somewhat towards the old man. At a press conference around this time he asked his audience of journalists: ‘Which world statesman made movies? Franco: he made animated cartoons. Were they funny? No – but at least he made them.’) For In the Land of Don Quixote Welles had specifically requested his producer on the series, his old chum Alessandro Tasca di Cutò, to hire a newsreel cameraman – someone with quick reflexes and a keen eye. Tasca had gone to the state newsreel organisation, NO-DO, which churned out the unending official footage of Franco that was compulsorily shown with feature films in Spanish cinemas, and found José Manuel De La Chica, with whom Welles had a very amicable relationship, to the extent that a high percentage of the footage of In The Land of Don Quixote was shot by De La Chica on his own; indeed, some of the material in the series is actually lifted from the NO-DO archives.

  The nine programmes cover most of the tourist high points: the Prado, Seville, Toledo, Granada and further afield – the Bodega Della Domecq in Jerez de la Frontera; Cadiz and Palos, whence Columbus sailed to America; Gibraltar, Malaga and the Mediterranean coast. Inevitably there is a long bullfighting sequence of a decidedly gory nature showing the bull’s slow demise, and an interesting section in which the glamorous young El Cordobés prepares for a fight. Almost all of the footage is silent. Ardent Wellesian sleuths can detect motifs from his output, past and yet to come. But there is no coherence to it; it’s just one damned thing after another. Even if Welles had wanted to whittle down the material, transform it, bring some poetry to it, somehow render it truly cinematic, properly Wellesian, the absence of his personal charisma on screen, relating directly to the audience, would have made it all but impossible. Tasca suggested to RAI that Welles should narrate it himself, in Italian, a language that he spoke poorly, but pronounced perfectly. They not only declined the offer, but re-edited the material, rewrote the commentary and hired another actor, Arnoldo Foà (Inspector A. in The Trial) to read it. History repeating itself: his work jerked away from him yet again.

  But Welles shed no tears: he got exactly what he wanted out of the project: namely, money, which enabled him to commit yet more of his fleeting inspirations for Don Quixote to film. ‘As soon as he was ready to shoot, Orson would call Akim Tamiroff, who always came straightaway,’ reported Cobós. ‘He’d put on the Sancho Panza costume and jump straight onto the donkey.’2 Tamiroff was on his own this time; his master, Francisco Reiguera, by now ancient and frail, was stranded in Mexico, still barred from Franco’s Spain. In the Land of Don Quixote thus bought Welles more material for his cinematic sketchbook. But it gave him something else: a good working knowledge of the Spanish landscape. He used the programme as an excuse to visit potential locations for the film that was already germinating in his mind, Chimes at Midnight. He had decided to shoot it in Spain, firstly because he believed that only there would he find some credible semblance of the medieval world, the world of old Catholic England – and secondly because, as he sometimes claimed, Spain was the last country in the world that still believed in black-and-white film, in which form his film would unquestionably be shot. He was actively seeking financial backing for i
t, but the money was slow to materialise. Once again, it looked as if he would have to raise it himself.

  To which end, the prospect of decent payment loomed gratifyingly in the form of Dino De Laurentiis’s wildly ambitious venture to film the Bible. Each episode was to be directed by a different titan of the cinema: Bresson was going to direct Genesis, Visconti Joseph and His Brothers, and Welles Jacob and Esau. A photograph that was taken for De Laurentiis’s press release shows the three masters standing rather uncomfortably together; the caption reads: ‘The Magnificent Three’. It all began to unravel very quickly. Bresson was dumped early on, when he told De Laurentiis that the screenplay would be in Hebrew and Aramaic, and that there would be no animals in Noah’s Ark, just their footprints in the sand; Visconti simply stepped away; but Welles’s section, telling the vexed tale of the twins who founded warring nations, got quite close to being filmed. Keith Baxter was cast as Jacob and was duly flown to Rome for make-up tests; he had to age from seventeen to ninety. The tests were personally conducted by Welles, ‘gluing on beards and eyebrows,’ reported Baxter, ‘waxing out hair on my scalp for the old man, curling and highlighting and lavishly slapping on eye-shadow and false eyelashes for the teenager’. Welles, like the nineteenth-century actor-manager that he was, revelled in all of this. ‘“The thing about film, Keith,” he said, wielding the make-up sticks like a painter, “is that you can get away with a great deal more than people think. Confidence is all that matters”’3 – a profoundly characteristic observation.

  De Laurentiis’s confidence in Welles failed not over his version of the Jacob story, which, according to Baxter, was ‘both moving and hilarious, and always reverent’ in its delineation of Jacob’s transformation ‘from a really odious teenager on the make into the archetypal Jewish patriarch’,4 but in his approach to the savage story of Abraham and Isaac, an episode that Welles took on when Ingmar Bergman turned it down. He had a vivid take on the story, predictably rejecting any submission to destiny on the boy’s part. If Welles would not allow Joseph K. to acquiesce in his own demise, why should he let Isaac? ‘I saw nothing in the story,’ he told Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘which meant that Isaac should be a willing sacrifice.’5 He planned to shoot the picture on the barren slopes of Vesuvius, ‘in that ashy ominous landscape,’ according to Baxter, ‘with Isaac running for his life, falling, stumbling, screaming in terror as his father pursued him with a knife’.6 It should be, said Welles, ‘a brutal, terrible scene’. This conception, however, ran up against Catholic theology. For the Church, the story foreshadows the Crucifixion, with Isaac prefiguring Jesus’s self-sacrifice: to show him fearful or resistant would be heretical. Isaac had to be – or be willing to be – a Lamb of God. Welles wouldn’t budge, nor would De Laurentiis.

  In the end the great producer threw in the towel, replacing his bevy of troublesome titans and their fancy ideas with one tested buccaneer director, John Huston, who would also narrate and play Noah – exactly what Welles would have liked to have done: Huston and Welles treading parallel paths yet again. Welles claimed that Huston used his screenplay for Abraham: The Sacrifice, but, as shot, the sequence does not in any way match Welles’s or Baxter’s description of what he planned. One of the most enterprising sections of Huston’s movie, it is filmed entirely in stills and is silent (apart from a massively throbbing score, which won its composer an Oscar); at no point does Isaac run away from his father. Nonetheless Welles cheerfully pocketed a large sum of money for his work on the film, the exact amount revealed in one of his best jokes, to the New York Post, which had asked him why he wanted to make the film. ‘An angel came to me and said unto me: “Orson, bow down before de Laurentiis and sign for $200,000.”’ It would have been interesting to have seen what the author of Miracle in Hollywood, that savage satire of religiose cinema, would have made of the project. From any perspective, it is one of the more regrettable of the many projects to have got away from Welles. It is almost equally vexing that he never filmed his script for Jacob and Esau, in view of the fact that, as the Angel Peniel with whom Jacob wrestles, Welles had cast the recently defected Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev – ‘twenty-three years old, sensationally callipygous’, as Keith Baxter appreciatively describes him, ‘with a mane of untidy blond hair, the physique of an athlete and the movements of a tiger’. Added to all of which Welles would have had a decent budget, something he was never again to command. It is true that at the time all he really wanted to film was Chimes at Midnight, but from his earliest days at RKO, when Mercury Productions were exploding with projects, he had had his eye on various sections of the Bible, from both New and Old Testaments; Noah was a permanent presence on his list of potential projects. It is especially frustrating that, at a time when he was writing his screenplay for Chimes at Midnight and reflecting deeply on the matter of fathers and sons, he came so close to telling one of the most terrible of all such stories, of a child so very nearly slain by his father, out of obedience to his god.

  Later that year of 1963, Welles lumbered onto the screen in one of the most wretched of all the many wretched films in which he appeared, the sadly misnamed Marco the Magnificent, playing, as the narration has it, ‘a wise old Jew’, Marco Polo’s tutor, Akerman. It is a brilliant performance, vocally – a wonderfully observed Yiddish accent – but the make-up is lamentable, featuring a recycling of his Macy’s Santa Claus beard and another impossibly aquiline nose, and there is nothing whatever that he or anyone could have done with the scene, or indeed with Horst Buchholz as Polo; one can only hope that he made a great deal of money from it.

  He alleviated the humiliation and boredom by moonlighting on another, much less lucrative but infinitely more rewarding engagement, arriving at the crack of dawn on the train from Paris, still in Akerman’s nose and beard, to be swept off to a location deep in the Roman countryside, then raced back to Paris three days later. The film for which he made such strenuous efforts was the catchily titled Let’s Have a Brainwash: RoGoPaG, one of the portmanteau films fashionable in Italy in the Sixties, this one named after its quartet of distinguished directors, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ugo Gregoretti. Comprising four films, announces the title-sequence, ‘whose authors limit themselves to recounting the joyous end of the world’, RoGoPaG mounts a bilious assault on Italy in the early 1960s; it was put together by Pasolini’s regular producer, Alfredo Bini, and it is Pasolini’s contribution, La Ricotta, that has stood the test of time, its thirty-four minutes a startling and savage allegorical attack on modern Italy’s abandonment of its proletariat, fobbed off with the tacky baubles of consumerism.

  Pre-dating Pasolini’s masterpiece The Gospel According to St Matthew by a year, La Ricotta concerns the making of a film about the Crucifixion; Welles was cast as the director or, rather, according to the credits, ‘The Director’, of the film; for Welles, in 1963, there seemed to be no escaping the Good Book. The action focuses on its stars (Laura Betti among them), its director (Welles) and, crucially and centrally, its extras: the story concerns one of them, Stracci, playing the Good Thief crucified alongside Jesus. Desperately hungry, Stracci (his name means rags in Italian) hides the rations he gets from the film’s caterers; coming back to enjoy them, he finds a dog has got there before him. Stracci sells the dog to a passer-by, and with the money he buys a large cream cheese (the eponymous ricotta); in a break from filming, he shoves it into his mouth in a kind of frenzy. His fellow-extras start throwing him bits of food, cheering him on in his frenzied eating marathon. At the height of it, he’s called back to the set: it’s the last scene, he’s on the cross and the producers’ invited guests are descending, paparazzi in tow, to watch the filming. Before the cameras roll, an assistant director makes him repeat his one line – ‘Lord, when you get to heaven, remember me to your Father’ – after which, unnoticed by anyone, he dies. Welles arrives to shoot the scene, the spectators gather round, Welles cries ‘Motore!’, the cameras roll – and nothing happens. He says it
again; again nothing. When he realises what’s happened, they cut Stracci down and Welles muses: ‘Poor Stracci: he had to die to remind us that he was ever alive.’

  Instinct with Pasolini’s characteristic poetry, both visual and verbal, La Ricotta has as many narrative strands as it has visual styles: the film-within-the-film (which features reconstructions of the Crucifixion after Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino) is shot in saturated Technicolor; the scenes with the extras hanging around are done in newsreel colour film; the rest is in black-and-white, with two sequences comically speeded up. The music is sometimes baroque, sometimes pop, often by Verdi (‘Libiamo’, of course), played by a brass band at varying tempos. It all hangs together perfectly, including the very striking sequences featuring Welles as The Director, which, in yet another change of idiom, paint a lightly satirical portrait of the artist as Marxist intellectual, which somehow, improbably but entirely convincingly, merges aspects of both Welles and Pasolini. Pasolini cast Welles because he was by now the iconic representative of the whole tribe of Director-Geniuses, more so than Hitchcock, Renoir or Bergman – more so, even, than Ford or DeMille, von Stroheim or von Sternberg, Fellini or Antonioni or Rossellini; he was the man, after all, who made Citizen Kane, by now universally acknowledged as the epitome of auteur film-making. In the film Welles plays himself, exactly as Pasolini had written him: as a philosopher-director, a whimsical, erudite, reflective provocateur. This is the Welles of the Cahiers du Cinéma interviews, rather than hands-on Welles, Welles the human tornado, the maker of props, the applier of make-up, the designer of sets, the wielder of the Caméflex. He was very happy with the script, said his co-star, Pasolini’s close friend Laura Betti. ‘He changed nothing, he asked for no changes. He got it in one.’7 He wore no make-up for the part, always significant in a Welles performance.