At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  With the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Welles campaigned against fascism and associated with leading radical artists of the Popular Front. In the summer of 1937 he directed Marc Blitzstein’s Marxist opera The Cradle Will Rock, which creatively escaped forced closure by its sponsoring organisation, the Federal Theatre Project. Welles was additionally busy adapting and directing a seven-part radio version of Les Misérables.

  Welles and Houseman founded the Mercury Theatre in 1937. Their first production was a modern-dress Julius Caesar meant to evoke Mussolini’s Italy. In 1938 the Mercury produced The Shoemaker’s Holiday and a revived Cradle Will Rock. That year Welles made the cover of Time magazine as the star and director of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House.

  In the summer of 1938 Welles moved more seriously towards moviemaking. He shot ambitious silent film sequences intended, but not used, for projection during the Mercury stage production of William Gillette’s Too Much Johnson. Around the same time Welles and the Mercury were invited to create a weekly series of CBS radio dramas named successively First Person Singular, The Mercury Theatre on the Air, and The Campbell Playhouse. At twenty-three Welles already possessed one of the century’s most distinctive voices. He used that voice (as narrator and actor) to tie together adaptations of mostly classic and contemporary plays and novels. The source texts were varied and indicative of Welles’s high- and middle-brow tastes. The adaptations were written by Welles or by Houseman, Howard Koch, Howard Teichmann, or Herman J. Mankiewicz. War of the Worlds gained Welles global notoriety on 30 October 1938. At the same time Welles’s theatrical productions continued: Danton’s Death (1938), the first part of Five Kings, and The Green Goddess (1939).

  Precociously famous for his attention-grabbing innovations in theatre and radio, Welles was invited to make movies in Hollywood. He later claimed a reluctance to move into cinema; to scare away the studios, he demanded impossible conditions of artistic autonomy that, to his surprise, were met by RKO studio chief George Schaefer. Welles signed a two-picture contract in 1939. He later called the contract “a kind of a defiance of everything that was established in the Hollywood industrial system”.8

  Welles first scripted an anti-fascist adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) moved to the contemporary world. For the production he planned a subjective camera technique: nearly every shot would present the eyes of its narrator. That film was never made. Throughout his long period of project development in 1939–40, Welles remained active in radio and in theatre, for which he directed Richard Wright’s Native Son.

  Welles finally moved forward in Hollywood with Citizen Kane, a fragmentary portrait of a news mogul who resembled William Randolph Hearst. It was scripted in collaboration with Herman J. Mankiewicz. The Mercury Theatre company provided actors without prior experience in films including Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warwick, and Everett Sloan. Welles also brought CBS radio composer Bernard Herrmann to the West Coast to work on the film and revolutionise film music.

  With Kane, Welles made the most auspicious debut of any American filmmaker. It is still widely considered the pinnacle of American filmmaking for its structural and technical innovations, and the brilliance of its collaborators on and off screen. And somehow Kane’s sum is even greater than its numerous brilliant components.

  Conditions did not endure to allow Welles to repeat that miraculous first effort, although he came close to scraping through with The Magnificent Ambersons. The two movies engaged with the same period in American history. Each was audacious and difficult for its time. In 1941 Hearst’s press empire attempted to suppress Citizen Kane and slander Welles’s reputation. The following year RKO assumed complete authority over the final cut of Ambersons while Welles was serving as a Good Will Ambassador in South America and filming the semi-documentary anthology project It’s All True.

  After his falling out with RKO, which also resulted in the cancellation of It’s All True, Welles continued his work in American radio and focused more intently on progressive politics. He also produced an ambitious and costly production of Around the World in Eighty Days for the stage in 1946.

  His next films for Hollywood turned out to be a trilogy of unsatisfactory compromise, each made for a different production company or studio – respectively International Pictures, Columbia, and Republic. From the outset Welles tried to work creatively within circumscribed limits to his authority; in each case he was unable to see the film finally released in his preferred version. His screenplay for the thriller The Stranger, which had been originally co-written by Anthony Veiller and John Huston, suffered studio cuts before shooting even commenced. The prologue in a fictional South American city was shortened, and then the sequence was cut further during editing. The Lady from Shanghai’s making proved a torturous process of negotiation with studio boss Harry Cohn, who demanded substantial cuts, retakes, close-ups, a musical number by Rita Hayworth, and a score dominated by the melody of that theme song. Macbeth was made with a brisk shooting schedule and small budget. Welles was able to prepare a 107-minute edit to his satisfaction, which premiered in 1948, but it was withdrawn and rereleased in 1950 in a shorter, redubbed cut. In this case Welles was able to prepare the 86-minute edit himself, and both versions have survived.

  In 1947, as opportunities opened up in the Italian film industry, Welles left Hollywood. He briefly returned to the United States in late 1955 for a period of about two years. In addition to acting in film and theatre, he worked on several television projects in Hollywood. The Fountain of Youth was an innovative pilot financed by Desilu Productions in 1956 and broadcast in 1958, but it was never picked up. He also produced a never-broadcast and now-lost pilot based on the life of Alexandre Dumas called Camille, the Naked Lady and the Musketeers. Frank Sinatra provided financing for a television Don Quixote, which Welles began to film in Mexico. It evolved from the television format into a long-term, privately financed project, a permanent work-in-progress.

  A fortunate set of circumstances led to Welles’s promotion from supporting actor to writer, director, and star of Touch of Evil at Universal. By that time he seems to have been almost forgotten as a director by Hollywood. Even that studio deal deteriorated during editing and the film came out partially reshot, restructured and significantly truncated.

  Welles continued to work as an actor in Hollywood films and television when in the United States, but apart from some screenplay commissions in the early 1970s, he was never again hired in a creative capacity by mainstream Hollywood.

  NOTES

  For this section, I have drawn on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s chronology of Welles’s career in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 323–453; and Jean-Pierre Berthome and François Thomas, Orson Welles at Work (London: Phaidon, 2008).

  1 Orson Welles, ‘Twilight in the Smog’.

  2 Welles interviewed on Parkinson (UK: BBC TV, 1974). Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dAGcorF1Vo (accessed 19 May 2015).

  3 Orson Welles, ‘My Father Wore Black Spats’, Vogue (Paris), December 1982 – January 1983, reprinted at http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-on-his-childhood-my-father-wore-black-spats-and-a-brief-career-as-a-musical-prodigy (accessed 19 May 2015).

  4 F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1974).

  5 Joseph McBride argues that Welles was influenced by German Expressionism indirectly through Hilton Edward’s direction at the Gate. See McBride, ‘Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema’.

  6 Todd Tarbox (ed.), Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts (BearManor Media, 2013), 12.

  7 Parkinson.

  8 Undated, uncredited interview (late 1970s). Available at https://vimeo.com/127736401 (accessed 19 May 2015).

  WELLES’S U.S.A.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE LINCOLN REPUBLIC

  Charles Foster Kane’s “empire upon an empire”

  Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons were not conceived as sister projects
. They were only two of several features developed for production while Orson Welles was under contract to RKO Studios between 1939 and 1942. Nevertheless, while widely divergent in their stylistic approaches, Welles’s first two released films reimagine much of the same sweep of American history. Both are mythical narratives of national decay in the half-century following the Civil War.

  The settings are American cities. Kane’s Gilded Age New York is one theatre of the ideological war between unchecked capitalism and progressive reform. The battlefield of the city’s slums and infrastructure is clouded by the interference of a megalomaniac newspaper tycoon who tries to become a politician. In Ambersons, the rise of the automobile at the turn of the century is the catalyst for a shift of wealth and social power from a genteel urban aristocracy to a suburban entrepreneurial class. The Ambersons of Indianapolis humanise the transformation of the near-pastoral ‘midland’ into the grim industrial Midwest. In these films Welles creates American cities in the flux of transformation, cities that situate the characters’ struggles for personal and political power.

  Most of Welles’s subsequent cinematic cities were shot on location, as had been the historical New York of Too Much Johnson. This makes the cities of Kane and Ambersons unique within the Welles oeuvre: they were almost totally created at RKO’s facilities in Hollywood, with full access to studio resources, including a brilliant special effects department. They are also the only two feature films Welles was able to make about the history of the United States.

  * * *

  The title of this section is intended to draw comparison to John Dos Passos’s trilogy of novels – The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936) – republished together as U.S.A. in 1938. The author’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) had sought an encompassing view of New York City in the early decades of the twentieth century: its diversity of personalities, sensations, energy, and human subjectivities. U.S.A.’s ambition expanded to chronicle the nation’s growth in the same period.

  When Cahiers du cinéma asked Welles in 1958 about Dos Passos’s influence on Kane, he claimed that he had never read the author’s fiction.1 There’s no reason to doubt his word, but in Kane and Ambersons Welles attempted an artistic-historical project that shared U.S.A.’s historical breadth, albeit without its vast extended form.2 What’s more, the two figures were active in the liberal artistic wing of the Popular Front. In 1934 the Soviet Comintern had altered their aggressive policy attacking international socialists and liberals and instead favoured alliances across the left to oppose the fascism that was conquering Europe and spreading throughout the world. The Popular Front found sympathy across the Depression-stricken United States.3

  Nevertheless, with the simultaneous official ascendancy of Socialist Realism in the USSR, Dos Passos was already an ideological outcast among the Stalinists. In 1934 he had been denounced by the Soviet Writers’ Congress as a follower of James Joyce, that creator (so they insisted) of “a dunghill swarming with worms seen through a microscope held upside down”.4 Like Welles, Dos Passos lamented an idealised American past. The regressive historical arc he sketched in his work registered poorly with the dogmatic left; John P. Diggins notes that “underlying the eloquent rage and protest of U.S.A. is a conservative desire to restore what contemporary radicals wanted to transcend”.5

  Dos Passos’s break from the Popular Front came in 1937 when he was working in Spain as a writer on Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth. His friend José Robles had just been mysteriously executed, possibly under false charges of spying for Franco. For demanding an explanation, Dos Passos was mocked by such ideological tourists as Ernest Hemingway, who had essentially supplanted him as the writer of The Spanish Earth. Dos Passos soon went public in revolt against the Stalinist influence in Spain.6

  Welles was never so sidelined by the Popular Front, although he was also excluded from contributing to the final cut of The Spanish Earth in the marginally less tense atmosphere of a New York recording studio. In Welles’s version of the story, the circumstances were not tragic but farcical: Hemingway’s baseless homophobic contempt for the young Welles led to a provocation and a fist fight, and Hemingway subsequently replaced Welles’s narration with his own voice.7 Following Welles’s brave standoff with the Federal Theatre over the attempted censorship of Blitzstein’s Cradle Will Rock, he created several overtly anti-fascist projects. Welles’s theatrical audacity helped make him a celebrity, although the Mercury Theatre did not win over all left-wing critics. The Partisan Review viewed Welles’s aesthetics as middlebrow kitsch, which they deemed representative of the Popular Front.8

  Welles is probably best considered a committed progressive of conflicting allegiances. Prone to dogma in his political speeches, his film, radio, and theatre works betray a higher calling than any sort of ideological obedience, even when ostensibly anti-fascist in conception.

  * * *

  For Kane’s audacity in reimagining the life of proto-fascist William Randolph Hearst, the Hearst empire declared war on the film even before its release. There was an attempt, in the name of rival studio executive Louis B. Mayer, to buy the negative from RKO in order to destroy it. George Schaefer at RKO persisted with Kane. Hearst newspapers refused to advertise the film and some cinema chains were too intimidated to book it.

  A month before Kane’s premiere, editorials smeared Welles’s patriotic radio play His Honor, the Mayor as pro-communist. In this atmosphere, and possibly through the influence of Hearst, the FBI began investigating Welles for his communist associations and ridiculously deemed Kane “nothing more than an extension of the Communist Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents in the United States”.9 Welles was not a communist, but the League of American Writers, an organ of the Communist Party, campaigned for the film’s release.10 The film failed to make a profit.11

  J. E. Smyth has persuasively argued that the effort to downplay the Hearst biographical connection, as well as Kane’s innovations in cinematography, have distracted from the film’s serious critical engagement with post-Civil War history and how that history had been depicted on screen.12 Kane is indeed a serious historical fiction, although Welles’s critical reimagining of America’s past is neither scrupulous nor warped by ideology: it is personal and mythical.

  The Magnificent Ambersons is difficult to read as any sort of politically radical film. In his adaptation, Welles acquiesces to Booth Tarkington’s middle-class lament over the decline of a short-lived Midwestern aristocracy, albeit with a little more affectionate irony and some judicious cuts. By almost any standards the Ambersons are a parasitic, socially worthless bunch – lacking creative energy and imagination, condescending and shallow in their judgments of the other townsfolk, and oblivious to change – but their passing into death, poverty, and obscurity is the film’s melodramatic tragedy, an inevitable but lamentable shame. Welles pulls it off by his tender evocation of the vanished, purer American culture the Ambersons represented at their peak of influence.

  Fascism was the era’s present danger, and most of Welles’s ideologically driven anti-fascist projects were set in the contemporary Americas. The past, by contrast, was Welles’s playground, the irresistible opportunity to create a mythical ‘Merrie England’ out of the America as it existed before his birth, and in doing so he focused mainly on the upper middle class and aristocratic milieu of his own family. Welles later said that he had deep sympathy for Kane’s Jedediah Leland, the impoverished, drunken southern aristocrat whose sense of honour and noblesse oblige leads him to break with Charles Foster Kane.13 The only significant working-class character in either film is the salesgirl Susan Alexander, who becomes the second Mrs Kane – and perhaps Kane’s parents in rural Little Salem, Colorado. In Kane the working masses are mostly invisible. The newsreel includes some stock footage of a workers’ rally in San Francisco, which is combined with an original shot of a rabble-rouser denouncing Kane as a fascist. On the other hand, the crowds in Kane’s Madison Square Gard
en political rally are matte art and inevitably appear as an abstraction, even when given some clever animation by the use of lights flickering through pinholes in the painting.14

  There are other factors which limit the political radicalism of Welles’s early historical films. Firstly, there is Welles’s consistently humanist enactment of his villainous characters, often those whose politics he most despised. In the 1930s he evoked Uncle Tom’s Cabin when disdaining “the error of left-wing melodrama, wherein the villains are cardboard Simon Legrees”.15 He also remarked later that “an actor is not a devil’s advocate: he is a lover”.16

  There is also Welles’s status as an adaptor, his formidable skill as a writer. He did not create the scripts of Kane and Ambersons from scratch. Welles’s priorities were to transform source texts into innovatively cinematic material as well as to elevate melodrama into moving human drama. Herman J. Mankiewicz’s early muckraking drafts of Kane were commissioned as raw material for Welles’s extensive rewrites, so there was never a question of faithfulness to a source text.17 For Ambersons, a popular Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Welles liberally reworked the material but, apart from some specific departures and omissions, remained essentially faithful to the author’s world-view. In fact, if Welles had shed Tarkington’s conservative historical myth of decline, the story would have lost its raison d’être.