23 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 130.
24 See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 287.
25 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 83.
26 George and Lucy’s final walk together occurs in 1905, although the film posters decorating the Bijoux Theatre date mysteriously from 1912. The date of 1905 is both consistent with the film’s chronology and noted in the shooting script, making the 1912 posters an apparent historical inaccuracy. The care with which the theatre sets were dressed is indicated by the fictional film poster starring Tim Holt’s father, Jack. See Bordwell, ‘The Magnificent Ambersons: A Usable Past’.
27 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 90.
28 David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows (eds), The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 956.
29 Jon C. Teaford, Cities of the Heartland: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 27–8, 38–9.
30 Kershner, ‘From Country Town to Industrial City’, 329.
31 Kershner, ‘From Country Town to Industrial City’, 328.
32 Kershner, ‘From Country Town to Industrial City’, 328.
33 Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 27–8.
34 Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 110–11.
35 Dennis E. Horvath and Terri Horvath, Indiana Cars: A History of the Automobile in Indiana (Indianapolis: Hoosier Auto Show and Swap Meet, 2013), 3.
36 Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 109.
37 Bodenhamer and Barrows, The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 1,488.
38 Kershner, ‘From Country Town to Industrial City’, 334.
39 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 131.
40 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 130.
41 Teaford, Cities of the Heartland, 79.
42 See Susanah Mayberry, My Amiable Uncle: Recollections About Booth Tarkington (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1983), 13; also Bodenhamer and Barrows, The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 1,453.
43 Timothy J. Sehr, ‘Three Gilded Age Suburbs of Indianapolis: Irvington, Brightwood, and Woodruff Place’, Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 77, No. 4, December 1981, 306–7, 314.
44 Sehr, ‘Three Gilded Age Suburbs of Indianapolis’, 323.
45 Bodenhamer and Barrows, The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 1,453.
46 Sehr, ‘Three Gilded Age Suburbs of Indianapolis’, 326–7.
47 Bodenhamer and Barrows, The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis, 1,453.
48 Orson Welles, The Magnificent Ambersons ‘Final Script’ (7 October 1941), A-155. Orson Welles Manuscripts, Lilly Library.
49 Carringer, The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruction, 243–5.
50 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 128.
51 Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 203.
52 Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons, 228.
53 In the novel, George’s “come-upance” is announced later, after the Ambersons’ mansions have been razed, when he discovers that Amberson Boulevard has become Tenth Street and the Ambersons have been excluded from a vanity publication containing “Biographies of the 500 Most Prominent Citizens and Families in the History of the City”.
54 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988), 151.
55 Kershner, ‘From Country Town to Industrial City’, 329.
56 Richard B. Pierce, Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920–1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3; Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 11, 91, 144.
PAN-AMERICA
CHAPTER 4
DARKNESS AND FEAR
The Early Anti-fascist Thrillers
Aside from Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, most of Welles’s creative energies in Hollywood were devoted to contemporary political films about the American hemisphere. He attempted to interrogate the threat of fascism in a string of projects dating from 1939. Most never reached production.
Recurrent and politically significant settings of the Pan-American film projects include urban political frontiers (port cities and the border town) and the impoverished urban periphery (the shantytown). These are spaces of authoritarian control and social exclusion where fascist manoeuvers frequently burst to the surface. Welles would consistently develop experimental techniques to illustrate such manoeuvers.
Later in the 1940s, a number of Hollywood directors would pursue synoptic overviews of urban space, often in films shot on location on the theme of police investigation and surveillance, such as The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948) and Side Street (Anthony Mann, 1950).1 Earlier in the decade, and through his perspective of anti-fascism, Welles had frequently pursued comprehensive visions of the total city. In this pursuit he attempted to synthesise the ambitions of the international ‘city symphony’ cycle of the silent era with Hollywood narrative filmmaking of the 1940s. He experimented with long and mobile shots that would track ambulatory characters, vehicles, and ritual human and animal processions through diverse passages of urban space. He conceived ambient sound schemes, planned intercutting between contrasting social spaces, and the integration of synoptic maps and architectural models into the mise-en-scène. In his early years at RKO (1939–1942) he had access to expensive studio sets, miniatures, matte paintings, and optical printing. As he shifted from studio-based to location-based filmmaking, Welles sketched and was sometimes able to implement innovative methods of transforming found urban spaces into cinematic spaces that expressed his ideological and personal vision. This programme reached its zenith in Touch of Evil, when he converted Venice Beach in Los Angeles into his fictional Texan-Mexican border town, ‘Los Robles’.
* * *
Welles’s first feature project under contract to RKO was an experimental and Americanised anti-fascist adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was never produced, despite extensive scripting and pre-production planning. Following Kane and Ambersons, he shot but was unable to finish It’s All True, a celebratory semi-documentary anthology intended as an emissary for President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. Although Welles rather dubiously disavowed any particular fondness for the thriller genre – “I can pretend no special interest or aptitude”2 – the rest of his anti-fascist Pan-American film projects fall into that genre.
The Mercury production of Eric Ambler’s 1940 novel Journey into Fear was the first of these spy thrillers to reach cinemas, under Welles’s (partial) supervision. Of the other many Pan-American thrillers Welles developed at least until the end of the 1970s, only The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Touch of Evil were actually finished and released, and all three were travesties of the director’s editorial wishes. These three were later categorised as film noirs. Welles’s Pan-American and anti-fascist emphases in these three films were frequently blunted by studio interference. As the earlier, more Wellesian versions of these three films no longer exist (or were never finished), scholars have long found it fruitful to examine evidence of the director’s original conceptions in production documents. In fact, the long-term Pan-American strain of Welles’s oeuvre can only be comprehensively appraised with recourse to such scripts, treatments, correspondence, and pre-production art for both his produced and his unmade films. These documents contain sketches for innovative approaches to creating cinematic cities that did not find fruition in any of the commercially released films. Welles accrued masses of written texts during the sometimes permanent pre-production stage of a project. The surviving documents are, however, often fragmentary and occasionally of ambiguous authorship. In the early to mid-1940s, Welles commissioned writers such as Norman Foster, Paul Trivers, John Fante, Paul Elliot, Brainerd Duffiel
d, Fletcher Markle, Les White and Bud Pearson to draft treatments and screenplays which would be the rough material for Welles’s rewrites and final revisions (as he had used Herman J. Mankiewicz’s preliminary drafts in the writing process of Citizen Kane).3 He had managed to stamp his personality on a vast turnover of weekly radio dramas by the same method. But these collaborations complicate Welles’s auteur status and demand a careful appraisal of the many surviving documents, which range from Welles’s own meticulously detailed and industry-standard ‘Revised Estimating Script’ for Heart of Darkness (“I did a very elaborate preparation for that, such as I’ve never done again – never could”4) to an uncredited, incomplete, hand-annotated draft adaptation of Michael Fessier’s novel Fully Dressed and In His Right Mind (1934). There are also drafts annotated with studio censorship guidelines, storyboards, and other types of production artwork.
The best approach is to contextualise these pre-production documents, by Welles’s own definition totally provisional, as best as possible within the known details of his creative process. From early on Welles showed no particular loyalty to conventional industry-standard screenplay formats and much interest in expanding the definition of screenwriting as a practice. During the making of the ‘Carnaval’ segment of It’s All True in 1942, he explained to RKO that he considered the ‘minutes’ of his detailed nightly discussions with research collaborators “the nearest thing we have to a script”. These minutes recorded the fruitful debates within the collaborative creative process, provided a clarifying recap of the segment’s thematic and structural evolution, and determined the logistical approach to realising new ideas on film, even if they were not comprehensible to everyone; the minutes “can mean little to anybody except ourselves”, stated Welles.5
* * *
Welles had already performed Heart of Darkness in a radio script by Howard Koch in 1938. For his own screenplay, he altered Conrad’s late nineteenth-century Congo setting to a contemporary unnamed ‘dark country’.6 Welles declared, “The film is frankly an attack on the Nazi system.”7 He intended to play both the American narrator, Marlow, and the object of his search in the jungle, the insane ivory agent Kurtz. In preparation Welles commissioned a comprehensive study of tribal anthropology,8 similar to the exhaustive research into Brazilian culture he would gather while making It’s All True.
Welles’s ‘Revised Estimating Script’ of Heart of Darkness is dated 30 November 1939, less than three months after Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. Following an introduction to the film’s unprecedented technique – a first-person method that will present the action almost entirely through the eyes, ears, and inner monologue of Marlow – the action proper begins in New York Harbor, a port setting that will turn up again in drafts of The Smiler with the Knife, Don’t Catch Me, The Lady from Shanghai, and The Cradle Will Rock. The city appears in long shot, “seen from the East River just at dusk”, followed by a “SERIES OF DISSOLVES showing the movement of traffic on the river”.9 We see Manhattan from afar against the sunset sky. Marlow narrates, “Further west – on the upper reaches – the place of the monstrous town marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in the sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.”10 Then we see a series of ‘lap dissolves’ to various places in the city at the very moment its lights illuminate: bridges over the Hudson and East Rivers, parkways, boulevards, and skyscrapers.
In his first Hollywood script, Welles brings his extensive radio experience to the task of attempting to revolutionise cinema sound. He makes notes for a now commonplace ambient use of fragmentary diegetic sound sources to help convey the city’s spatial distinctions:
As we move down the length of the Island, snatches of sound and music, the beginnings of life of the city at night, are heard on the sound track. In Central Park, snatches of jazz music is heard from the radios in the moving taxicabs. The sweet dinner music in the restaurants of the big hotels further West. The throb of tom-toms foreshadow the jungle music of the story to come. The lament of brasses, the gala noodling of big orchestras tuning up in concert halls and opera houses, and finally as the camera finds its way downtown below Broadway, the music freezes into an expression of the empty shopping district of the deserted Battery – the mournful muted clangor of the bell buoys out at sea, and the hoot of shipping.11
Welles would sketch versions of this sound scheme for different projects throughout the years – most notably to accompany Touch of Evil’s long opening tracking shot through Los Robles – but he was consistently thwarted.12 Despite his innovations on Kane and Ambersons in collaboration with RKO sound editor James G. Stewart, Welles was frequently constrained in experimenting with sound in Hollywood.
This plan for the beginning of the film suggests a miniature city symphony that emphasises New York as a port city. Its “sleepless river” leads to “the mystery of an unknown earth. The dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germ of Empires.”13 Marlow leans against the single mast of a ship in the harbour and narrates how New York, the towering modern city, was once “one of the dark places on the earth … they must have been dying here like flies four hundred years ago.” His narration then closely follows Conrad: “It’s not a pretty thing when you look into it too much, the conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away [sic] from those who have a different complexion or slightly different shaped noses than ourselves.”14
There is a flashback to another harbour in “some Central European seaport town”.15 These are the first two instances of a dramatically pregnant and cosmopolitan setting that frequently occurs in Welles’s films: the international seaport where characters of diverse and ambiguous backgrounds intermingle and scheme. Welles would use seaport settings in Journey into Fear (Istanbul and Batumi), The Stranger (a Buenos Aires-like port in South America), The Lady from Shanghai (New York, San Francisco, and Acapulco), Mr. Arkadin (Naples, Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, Tangier, and Acapulco), The Immortal Story (Macau), and the unproduced late 1960s script Santo Spirito (a fictional island in the Caribbean).16
Marlow the sailor is “used to clearing out for any port in the world with less thought than most men give to crossing a street”.17 Parts of this Central European seaport were intended to be created with miniatures by RKO’s special effects department. Welles inserts a note to special effects artist Vern Walker: “when making long shots of harbor and settlement from the miniature, suggest the following to give movement in the shots: a dredge working near the railroad track, dynamite explosions with accompanying dust and smoke, etc.”18 At the beginning of the seaport town sequence Marlow looks at a map of the “dark country” through a shop window. “I’ve always had a passion for maps,” he narrates. “When I was a child there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked inviting – I’d put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I’ll go there.’”19 Maps were frequently interpolated into Welles’s mise-en-scène in this period as one way of providing an economical geographical synopsis. They would be used in Citizen Kane, the pre-release cuts of Journey into Fear, and the script for The Smiler with the Knife. At a later stage in Heart of Darkness Kurtz’s fiancée, Elsa, draws a map of the dark country’s river.
When Marlow accepts the job to find Kurtz, the script enters the jungle and ceases to concern city culture. Welles’s projected budget of more than a million dollars, twice the target amount for Welles’s first film, made the experimental film unworkable for RKO.20
* * *
Early on Welles was attracted to the contemporary anti-fascist incarnation of the spy novel epitomised by the work of English writers Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. Cultural historian Michael Denning calls this new type of spy novel the ‘serious thriller’, although that does not necessarily imply grimness of execution in the age of Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, the novels are wildly entertaining. Aside from the considerable literary qualities of Ambler’s and Greene’s work, the ‘serious thriller’ surely appealed to Welles because it abandoned the genre’s tradition
ally conservative political orientation to embrace the cause of the Popular Front.21
Welles would eventually come to adapt Ambler and, much later, Greene. To Denning, the archetypal narrative of the Ambler–Greene ‘serious thriller’ novel is as follows:
An educated, middle-class man (a journalist, teacher, engineer) travelling for business or pleasure on the Continent … accidentally gets caught up in a low and sinister game (no longer the Great Game) of spies, informers, and thugs. He is innocent both in the sense of not being guilty, and in the sense of being naive. He is an amateur spy, but not the sort of enthusiastic and willing amateur that [John Buchan’s Richard Hannay] is; rather he is an incompetent and inexperienced amateur in a world of professionals.22
In novels of the 1930s Ambler and Greene present a European milieu of spies, criminals, lowlifes, and refugees whose ethnic and national identities have been obscured by the political disruptions of World War I. The stories are frequently set in cosmopolitan crossroads in upheaval following the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires or in transit between such cities by railway (Greene’s Stamboul Train, 1932), by ship (Ambler’s Journey into Fear), or by foot (Ambler’s Cause for Alarm, 1938).23
Welles was ideologically opposed to political borders and the fictions of nationalism (he was loyal to more antiquated, romantic, and inclusive cultural identifications). His strong antipathy to police, government bureaucracies, borders, and passports would be expressed in his British television documentaries several times in the mid-1950s. He found a kindred thinker in Ambler, whose novels frequently focus on hapless but sympathetic characters rendered stateless by the vicissitudes of war and occupation, or on the difficulties, anxieties, and sometimes arbitrary violence of bureaucratic control over human passage across political frontiers.24
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