Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  The huge mass of material they shot that November of 1964, plus some later pickups made early the following year, was toiled over unceasingly by Welles, even before filming was complete, and drove the editorial team, headed by Fred Muller, his editor on The Trial, to the point of collapse – in Muller’s case, beyond it; Welles had literally to pick him up off the floor and carry him downstairs. On this extremely raw material – ‘you can’t imagine . . . how sad the beginning and end of each shot was,’ Welles told Leslie Megahey, ‘pitiful in all the wrong senses of the word. Showing a lot of tired gypsy extras turning around, wondering where they were gonna eat’27 – Welles worked, demonically possessed, day and night, to create a wholly original texture and rhythm for the sequence, a fluidity and an instability created by speeding up and slowing down the film, excising every other frame, using the tiniest fragments of the footage, introduced almost subliminally. This, as Welles so often said, is where the film was made. It was crucial for the story he wanted to tell that the duel that results in the death of Hotspur should signal the end of the chivalric age, and the subsequent battle the beginning of the modern – the end, of heroism, of honour, of dignity, of Merrie England, in fact. Welles’s Battle of Shrewsbury is thus deliberately and consciously anachronistic, owing as much to Mons as it does to the medieval period: it is muddy, messy, bloody, at times farcical, but ultimately tragic. How, one feels at the end, can England – the world, indeed – ever recover from this ugly slaughter? While editing, he listened to medieval music to shape his sense of the film, and Francesco Lavagnino, with whom he had worked so successfully on Othello, supplied a splendidly sturdy score, which Welles treated with his usual freedom, as on Othello and equally effectively, speeding it up, cutting it down, stringing random bits together.

  He left shooting the denouement of the film till last, laying the crew off before Christmas 1964 and resuming with a much-slimmed-down crew in late January 1965 until March. Of the leading actors, only Keith Baxter was retained, and the end of filming was an emotional business for both men. Edmond Richard reports that when they shot Hal’s coronation, Welles was exhausted, having sprained his ankle in the dance scene in the tavern. ‘He’d lived his film, and when we saw him come into the church, throw himself at the feet of the new king, and be rejected by him, the whole set wept. We’d seen the guy emptied out. He’d given everything he had to give, he’d lived the character.’28 As well as the end of the story, it was the core of Welles’s performance, the re-enactment of the great betrayal that, in King Henry IV, Parts One and Two, comes twice: the first time as farce, the second as tragedy. It is unquestionably the most personal performance Welles ever gave, in the most personal film he ever made. Paradoxically, it is also the one he least dominates.

  Falstaff, unlike every other character he ever played, is essentially reactive: throughout the action (in Welles’s version of the story) he is a satellite to Hal’s star; he is also – again, in Welles’s version – in physical decline. Despite the astounding brilliance of the battle sequence, and indeed of much of the film, one is not conscious of the directorial presence imposing itself on the material. In this film, though as usual Welles dubs several of the characters, it is subtly and delicately done, so that only the closest scrutiny can detect it: it is not part of the expressive gesture of the piece that we should identify the voices as Welles’s, as it seems to be in The Trial. He doesn’t even narrate the film himself, instead importing the ripely eccentric voice of Ralph Richardson, who becomes a character in his own right – the chronicler Holinshed. The film permits of more perspectives than Welles’s movies habitually do; it is, in Leo Braudy’s terminology, a more open film than Welles was wont to make, and therefore, perhaps, a more Shakespearean one than his versions of either Macbeth or Othello. The characters seem to live their own lives, breathe their own breath, independently of the concept of the film. Its theatricality, which is all-pervading, is entirely cinematic – that is to say, the camera participates in the theatricality of the protagonists, but does not present it to the audience. We are drawn into the game-playing world of these people, not expected to applaud it.

  Out of impossibly skimpy materials, Welles has created an entirely and consistently credible world. The epitome of this is his magicking, out of the three remaining walls of the abbey at Cardona, the church in which the coronation takes place. It appears massive and solid, a result of superb lighting and a feeling of perpendicularity evoked by the shafts of the crowd’s banners. It is a consummate work of craftsmanship: apart from anything else, on the strength of it alone Welles deserves to be known as one of the greatest set decorators film has ever known. His formidable technical brilliance is entirely at the disposal of the material, of this story he so deeply wanted to tell.

  As for his own performance, it is inarguably one of the finest things – if not the finest thing – he ever did as an actor. Qua Shakespeare, it is, to put it mildly, a remarkably personal conception of Falstaff. On the face of it, Falstaff is a slumming aristocrat who knows no shame, a drunk and a gourmandiser, who believes that the world owes him a living, who has had the extraordinary good fortune to fall in with the heir to the throne, and who leads for a while a charmed existence as a result. Behind this engaging rogue seems to lie a much bigger figure. His titanic energy and majestic self-confidence put him in the realm of myth, allying him to characters like the Greek satyr Silenus and the Egyptian god Bes, prodigious imbibers who act as tutors to young gods (Dionysus, in the case of Silenus) and who are summarily discarded when the god (or sometimes the king) matures and has no further need of them. But a strong and, to some scholars, compelling connection has also been made between Falstaff and the figure of the Vice, the devil’s emissary, in the medieval morality plays. It is therefore an astonishing leap for Welles to have decided that Falstaff is essentially benevolent, telling Kenneth Tynan that he was ‘the only great character in dramatic literature who is also good’. Pressed by Tynan, he agrees with Auden’s even more extreme view that Falstaff was a Christ-figure. Later in the interview Welles describes him as ‘the prince’s spiritual father, who is a kind of secular saint’.29 This is remarkably counter-intuitive stuff. In fact, Welles does not appear to play Falstaff as either saintly or even especially good. He does, however, play him as sweet and tender, in relation both to his regular whore, Doll Tearsheet, and, of course, to young Hal, whom he pretty well idolises (though he is not above insulting him behind his back and deploring his lack of honesty). It is love – Falstaff’s love of Hal – that is, for Welles, at the centre of the man; and it is love that sanctifies him. Like the woman taken in sin in St Luke’s Gospel, Falstaff’s sins are forgiven him, because he has loved.

  It is incontestably one of Welles’s very best, richest, most detailed, most human performances; whether it is strictly Shakespeare’s Falstaff is neither here nor there. It is also patently autobiographical. ‘Falstaff has to live by his wits, he has to be funny,’ as Keith Baxter observed. ‘He hasn’t a place to sleep if he doesn’t get a laugh out of his patron.’ Welles often despairingly referred to his obligation to go through what he called his Dancing Bear routine – the all-singing, all-laughing, all-dancing Orson Welles routine – if he was to be allowed to make a film. Baxter made it explicit: ‘There are many things of which Falstaff is culpable of which you could not accuse Welles. His terrible betrayal and dishonesty, which was not true of Orson. But Falstaff needed to duck and dive and to scheme and to plan and always living on the edge of no money at all – but being adored. That’s very much Welles.’30 His Falstaff is a self-portrait, both justification and apologia: greed sanctified, mendacity hallowed, rascality blessed; he is both child and fallen monarch, an exiled citizen of Eden. He is life, he is laughter, he knows no laws, he bows to no king. He is playfulness incarnate; he liberates us all from our straitjackets. He is indispensable. ‘Banish Jack, and banish all the world.’

  Over and beyond that is the question of betrayal. If, as Welles claim
ed, he bore all his life the guilt of having let his father die alone and in despair, then perhaps there is something in the unexpected way in which Welles’s Falstaff seems to accept, maybe even to embrace, his punishment at the hands of the young King that suggests acceptance of some sort of sacrificial role, as proposed by Auden.31 This same emphasis on Falstaff’s goodness in Welles’s performance sometimes robs the character’s pithy and often savage utterances of their force. The famous speech in which Falstaff deconstructs the notion of honour, denuding it of its fabled majesty – ‘what is honour? . . . can it set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No’ – is spoken by Welles in a vein of reflective and rather rueful irony. Many of the speeches with which, in Belfast and Dublin, he had amused and provoked the audience, his legs dangling raffishly over the edge of the stage, are, in the film, given rather inward performances, often as muttered soliloquies rather than as bitter or profane jokes. It is a somewhat sanitised, slightly subdued Falstaff, though superb in melancholy and deeply poignant in rejection. Falstaff’s deluded assurance to his companions after being dismissed – ‘I shall be sent for soon. At night’ – one of the most heartbreaking lines even Shakespeare ever wrote, is deeply, personally upsetting, in a way that Welles’s performances rarely are.

  It is interesting that, in speaking of the film to Leslie Megahey, Welles again used religious terminology: ‘If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up.’32 But maybe that is just another way of saying what Sandro Tasca said of it: ‘it was the picture he had in his heart.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Genius Without Portfolio

  WELLES HAD been cutting the film from the first day of shooting. Chimes at Midnight is the most tightly edited of all his films. As he cut tighter and tighter, he was in danger of making it incomprehensible. ‘One day in the lift,’ reported Tasca, ‘he talked to me about a scene he had been editing for two days; then he concluded: “I want to shorten it.” I replied: “If you keep shortening it, you will be the only person who understands what it is about; the audience won’t understand a thing”. He went berserk and shook his fist. I shook mine and he growled: “Now you want to tell me how to edit”.’1 Later, says Tasca, Welles restored much of what he had cut. He was in the dangerous realm of infinite possibilities. Fred Muller, Welles’s editor, felt that ‘because he knew what was happening, he got bored. And he didn’t allow for an audience who saw it for the first and only time to absorb what was happening before going into the next scene. He was on the next step before the first step was completed.’2 And on Chimes at Midnight he had a bigger editing team than he had ever had: eight cutters and a sound editor, Peter Parasheles, who, like Muller, toiled around the clock, day in and day out. One night, Welles invited Parasheles to supper with Paola and Beatrice, regaling him with vintage anecdotes, after which Parasheles went back to work in the editing suite, finally going home at about 1.30 a.m. Welles was furious: he had expected him, newly energised by the food and the fine talk, to work through the night, and refused to speak to him for a week.3 He drove himself, and everyone else, like a man convinced that this was his last chance of immortality.

  Principal photography had been due to finish in December of 1964, but by the time the crew was laid off at the end of the month there was still a great deal to be shot, notably the crucial scenes between Hal and Falstaff. Welles sent Keith Baxter off to Morocco to cool his heels over Christmas and into January, and then they resumed, continuing to pick up shots until March of 1965. This portion of the filming was paid for by the maverick producer Harry Saltzman; Piedra had finally run out of money. Saltzman was then riding high on the success of the early James Bond films, as well as the Tony Richardson films Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer, part of the English new wave that Saltzman had made possible, in collaboration with Welles’s old partner Oscar Lewenstein and his company, Woodfall Films. Saltzman stumped up the not inconsiderable sum of $750,000. Had it not been for this investment, said Saltzman’s widow, ‘it would have just been one more movie by Welles that was never completed’, a sobering thought, although in truth, up to this point, all of Welles’s films – with the spectacular exceptions of It’s All True, abandoned and to a large extent destroyed by RKO, and his intensely personal Don Quixote, already ten years in the making – had been completed: incompletion lay in the future.

  But Saltzman’s investment was critical. The saviour of Chimes at Midnight was a man after Welles’s own heart: at the age of seventeen he had run away to join the circus; before long he had become a circus impresario. During the Second World War he was part of the Psychological Warfare Division – what better training for being a film producer? – and subsequently helped to found UNESCO’s film division. Then movies beckoned. After his initial success with Bond, it all blew up in his face, though not before he had bought out (and wound up) the illustrious London theatre management, H.M. Tennent. But if Saltzman had saved Chimes at Midnight, he had also condemned it to decades of confusion in the matter of rights, by selling on his share in the film to a distribution company, which then sold it on to another, resulting in the film being blocked for many years from public exhibition, and even from reproduction on cassette or DVD. For many years Welles’s masterpiece was a film largely unknown to the movie-going public, who now, with the recent resolution of these problems, can at last form a more balanced view of his achievements.

  From the beginning, the film’s commanding position in his output was confirmed by those who saw it before its release. In August 1965, Welles’s friend Darryl Zanuck, who fifteen years earlier did for Othello what Saltzman had just done for Chimes at Midnight, wrote to Welles to say how ‘deeply moved and emotionally thrilled by your film’ he was;4 it was, Zanuck continued, ‘far and away the best film in this category I have seen’, by which he presumably means that it surpassed not just Welles’s two essays in Shakespearean adaptation, but Olivier’s three – perhaps even including Kozinstev’s remarkable Hamlet, which had been released in America the previous year. Putting his money where his mouth was, Zanuck went on to propose that Welles’s representatives at 20th Century Fox should immediately travel to Europe to see the film: ‘Please cable me at the St Regis Hotel in New York the date so they can arrange their plans accordingly.’ This very direct offer was presumably forestalled by Saltzman’s distribution arrangement with Welles. Nothing came of it, a deeply regrettable fact: Zanuck’s intervention could have transformed the film’s fortunes in America. ‘My congratulations on a masterful job,’ Zanuck, no hyperbolist, ended his letter.

  The following year Welles entered the film for Cannes and, by a supreme effort of willpower, didn’t withdraw it. He was, as ever, reluctant to let the film go, hoping to implement yet more editing refinements. To some extent every director feels this, but with Welles it was a physical grief to send his celluloid child out into the world in what he thought was not a fully achieved form. And it is true that, especially in the area of sound, Chimes at Midnight is far from perfect technically; sometimes, too, the limitations of the physical setting are apparent. But it was still, despite these flaws, exactly the film Welles wanted to make – except that he had meant Falstaff to be funnier. Somehow, in the making, it had turned out otherwise: ‘having made a story, a film, which contains Falstaff’s rejection and death,’ he told Kathleen Tynan, ‘I felt I had to prepare for it from the very first moment of the film.’5 He was not displeased by the way the film had turned out, just surprised.

  It was the twentieth year of the Cannes Festival and both Welles and Chimes at Midnight were honoured with the award of a special Grand Prix to celebrate the occasion. ‘This was the Festival,’ a French commentator noted, ‘which crowned King Orson.’6 Jean Marais read the citation: ‘Orson Welles, for his contribution to World Cinema’. Welles shook him warmly by the hand, kissed Sophia Loren, Chair of the Jury, and was given the award itself – bizarrely, by a youthful and properly bashful Raq
uel Welch. In the newsreel footage, King Orson seems genuinely delighted and touched. It was a notably lightweight festival: the Palme d’Or was shared between Claude Lelouch’s monosodium-glutamate Un homme et une femme and a now-forgotten Italian film by Pietro Germi, Signore e Signori, known in the English-speaking world (insofar as it is known at all) as The Birds, the Bees and the Italians; the Special Jury Award went to Alfie. Chimes at Midnight also shared the Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement with a short film, Skaterdater. All very gratifying. Welles got into the prevailing merry mood, throwing a picnic for the press immediately after the warmly received film was projected.

  First responses across the Channel were highly laudatory: ‘Olé For Citizen Falstaff,’ said the Daily Mail, alluding to the film’s technically Spanish provenance. ‘Rich, rare, rewarding – the most ambitious and most successful film that Welles has created since Citizen Kane. His battle . . . is a swirling, massive affair which outdoes anything in this line before – not excluding Olivier’s Henry V.’7 But transatlantic reactions were much more guarded: describing him as ‘that American International journeyman filmmaker Orson Welles’, Variety described him as trying ‘to veer from the theatrical in creating visuals . . . he succeeds sometimes and at other times detracts from the language or replaces life and content by showiness and overdone angles’. Its verdict on the film’s commercial potential was not exactly positive (or particularly coherent): ‘film looms mainly on arty house possibility for abroad on its Shakespearean backdrop . . . an irritating, so personal but knowing Shakespearean pic’.8 Much more damagingly, Bosley Crowther, who was covering Cannes for the New York Times, casually dismissed the film. He returned to the fray at greater length on its American release: nothing, he said, had made him change his mind about what he called ‘a big, squashy, tatterdemalion show’. For a start, he couldn’t understand the actors, especially Welles’s basso profundo, as he put it, ‘which he seems to direct into his innards rather than through his lips’. The performance, said Crowther, ranged between a farcical conception of the character and a mawkishly sentimental one. ‘He makes him a sort of Jackie Gleason getting off on one of his homilies when he gives his great apostrophe to honour . . . and he chokes up like an opera grandma when he is suddenly banished by the new Henry V.’ In closing, he notes, sneeringly, that Welles has always wanted to play Falstaff. ‘Now he has had his chance. Those who are interested may see him at the Little Carnegie.’9