At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  The embryonic scripts of Journey into Fear are more politically sophisticated than the shortened, watered-down version finally released to cinemas in 1943. They illustrate the challenges Welles faced as a political filmmaker during wartime, even within such a commercially orientated genre. The ‘Budget Script’, the next-to-last draft, is dated 1 August 1941 and was written by Welles and actor Joseph Cotten. Numerous blue replacement pages were inserted up until January, when a new final shooting script was typed for production. Norman Foster’s copy of this ‘Budget Script’ contains annotations in pink pencil from somebody at RKO to guide revisions that would satisfy both the moral censorship of the Production Code and the political sensitivities of the State Department now that the United States had entered World War II. Anti-fascism had obviously become the official stance all around, but many of Welles’s and Cotten’s nuances were stripped out at the outset.

  The pre-censorship version of the ‘Budget Script’ (incorporating the blue pages) begins in a grimy Istanbul hotel. Banat, a silent assassin armed with a revolver, listens to a “very sentimental French song” on a skipping gramophone record – his aural signature. He wanders into the street and observes the arrival of an American couple at the Hotel Adler-Palace. The Americans are Howard Graham, a timid American ballistics expert on assignment to survey the armaments of the Turkish navy, and his wife, Stephanie. Kopeikin, the obsequious local representative of Graham’s firm, goes to great effort to pull Graham away from the comforts of a hot bath and dinner. Graham is uninterested in Kopeikin’s promise of “girlies” but is eventually dragged away from his wife.

  At Le Jockey Cabaret, a cosmopolitan nightclub, Graham meets the beautiful Serbian singer Josette. During a magic act, the magician is shot by Banat. Kopeikin and Graham visit Colonel Haki, chief of the Turkish secret police, who reveals an assassination plot by a Nazi agent, Moeller, to delay the rearmament of the Turkish navy. Banat’s bullet was intended for Graham. Haki decides Graham will escape Turkey via a cargo ship (the Persephone) bound for Batumi in Soviet Georgia, and assures him that Mrs Graham will meet him at his destination. With Graham now out of the way, Haki will pursue the seduction of Mrs Graham, allowing her to believe her husband is involved with another woman.

  Meanwhile, Graham is onboard the Persephone with Josette and her Basque manager, Gogo, as well as mysterious characters of various nationalities and political attitudes. Josette seems to propose an affair, although it is later revealed as more of a financial proposal administered by Gogo. Banat appears in the ship’s dining room and intimidates Graham. One of Haki’s secret agents, Kuvetli, is killed shortly after revealing his true identity to Graham. Haller, a polite German archaeologist, in turn reveals himself to be the Nazi Moeller. Graham is bundled off the boat in Batumi by Moeller and his henchmen, but he escapes and seeks his wife at the Grand Hotel. Alas, Moeller is already with Stephanie (and there are hints that Haki has made progress in his seduction of the woman). Graham winds up in a rooftop duel with Banat. Moeller is shot, Colonel Haki turns up for the shootout and is killed, and finally Banat slips to his death. Graham survives. The script ends incomplete, with a “TAG TO FOLLOW”.

  The film was nominally directed by Norman Foster under the heavy pre-production guidance of Welles, who was a key supporting player as well as the film’s uncredited producer and co-writer with Joseph Cotten. Early scripting work was also contributed by Richard Collins and Ellis St. Joseph, but Cotten was assigned sole screenplay credit.57 Virtually every scene was carefully storyboarded in pre-production. The storyboards, which have survived, were very closely followed in execution by Foster, which is hardly surprising considering the short time he had to prepare for filming.58 For these reasons Journey into Fear is best considered an ensemble work of the Mercury company. Everett Sloan, who played Kopeikin, remembered that Welles directed his own scenes, and said, “I think it retains much of Orson’s original conception of the picture.”59

  Joseph Breen, in between stints as Hollywood’s chief film censor, was in 1941–42 the general manager at RKO and effusive with praise for what he had seen of The Magnificent Ambersons.60 The annotations to Foster’s copy of the ‘Budget Script’ of Journey into Fear make clear that Breen had read the script and passed along his comments. The moral objections mainly concerned Josette and Graham’s proposed transactional adulterous affair. The censorship annotator also cautions against negative comments about Turks, who had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in mid-1941. Colonel Haki’s casual mockery of “the American point of view” is pencilled out because it “presents Turks (and a ranking officer at that) without morals”.61 The character of Josette describes Turks as “heathen animals” who in the last war “killed babies with their bayonets” (“Mr. Breen cautions that not only censorship but our own State Department will strenuously object to this”62). The wide diversity of political opinions presented in dialogue onboard the cargo ship was to be stripped of controversy. The Basque Gogo is in favour of appeasing Germany as long as business can continue; this was objectionable because the film would be watched by “thousands in places (Latin America) where agreement with speeches could bring applause and even riot”.63 Gogo recalls he had taken no sides in the Spanish Civil War, either, but another passenger, Madame Mathews, shudders to imagine “if the Reds had won… They violated Nuns and murdered Priests.” RKO’s legal advice: “Church Legion of Decency positively will fight to the end on this … same thing State Dep’t … very delicate. Reds are our allies.”64 The political situation would be drastically reversed in Hollywood five years later.

  A 102-minute version was previewed in Pasadena on 17 April 1942, in a double feature with the Charles Laughton comedy Tuttles of Tahiti. The comment cards ranged from high praise to total dismissal. A dialogue continuity has been preserved but the long version is lost.65

  RKO amended this long cut to an unconventionally brief 71-minute version, which was previewed in August 1942 and has survived. Welles later remembered it as “the opposite of an action picture” but that RKO “just took out everything that made it interesting except the action”.66 Although estranged in other ways from RKO, Welles was allowed a short time to revise this cut in October 1942 for a 68-minute version that was commercially released the following year.67 Welles reframed the narrative to play via the point of view of Howard Graham (Cotten); Cotten voiced an amusing narration that comically emphasised Graham’s husbandly devotion. The changes demoted Stephanie (Ruth Warwick) to genial one-dimensionality; the restriction to Graham’s point of view meant eliminating the scene where Colonel Haki prepares to seduce Mrs Graham, and downplayed Welles’s separated couple motif. Welles filmed a new single-shot ending with Cotten that resurrected the dead Haki, who had only suffered a mere flesh wound. Welles also removed his producer and co-writer credits.

  Journey into Fear remains an enjoyable orientalist spy fantasy that never takes its anti-fascist agenda too seriously. To be fair, this was true even before RKO’s censoring of the script. The opening page of Welles and Cotten’s ‘Budget Script’ insists: “The names ‘Athens’ and ‘Alexandria’ are used in this draft only for convenience. Pay no attention to geographic correctness.”68 That’s the general spirit; Ambler’s novel was written without the experience of visiting the Central Asian settings.69 The film was created almost entirely inside RKO Studios in the manner of Hollywood orientalist concoctions such as Algiers (John Cromwell, 1938), Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943), and the adaptations of Ambler’s novels Background to Danger (Raoul Walsh, 1943) and A Coffin for Dimitrios (as The Mask of Dimitrios, Jean Negulesco, 1944). In Journey into Fear, Istanbul is briefly glimpsed in exteriors by night as Banat (Jack Moss) stalks the Grahams outside their hotel; sandbags mounted alongside the street suggest wartime. At the city’s shadowy Bosphorus port Ambleresque anxieties play out when Colonel Haki takes Stephanie’s passport from Graham and establishes arbitrary control over the fate of the couple. At the end of the journey at the port of Batumi, a convincing ne
ighbourhood in the Soviet city is created on the Hollywood backlot by signs in Cyrillic (although not in Georgian script) and large portraits of Joseph Stalin.

  Joseph McBride has described Journey into Fear as “at best a very rough draft for some of Welles’s later films”.70 When Welles returned to the anti-fascist thriller in the mid-1940s, with the valuable experience of location work in South America, he would pursue new techniques of putting urban spaces on screen.

  The port at Istanbul

  The port at Batumi

  NOTES

  1 See Bond Love, ‘“Architectural jungle” or the “sum of its people”? Policing Post-War Urban Space in Anthony Mann’s Side Street (1950)’, in Jens Martin Gurr and Wilfried Raussert (eds), Cityscapes in the Americas and Beyond: Representations of Urban Complexity in Literature and Film (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2011), 243–56.

  2 Welles quoted in Heylin, Despite the System, 200.

  3 Bret Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990), 194.

  4 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 31.

  5 Orson Welles, ‘Carnaval’ (memo to RKO and Treatment), n.d. (probably late May 1942), 10–12. It’s All True file, box 17, folder 7, Lilly Library.

  6 A three-page plot treatment by Welles’s assistant Herbert Drake describes a jungle river of “no particular continent or island. It is just a place of mystery.” Quoted in Marguerite H. Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 91.

  7 Welles quoted in Denning, ‘The Politics of Magic: Orson Welles’s Allegories of Anti-Fascism’, 186.

  8 According to Marguerite H. Rippy, Welles’s commissioned research into the primitive was in order to create a “composite native” for the project, “a familiar Other based on sights and sounds of ‘primitive’ cultures that fit the fantasies of the white American public.” He also scouted for existing jungle footage. See Rippy, Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects, 91.

  9 Orson Welles, Heart of Darkness ‘Revised Estimating Script’ (30 November 1939), 1. Box 14, folder 16, Lilly Library.

  10 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 2.

  11 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 2.

  12 See Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Voice and the Eye: A Commentary on the Heart of Darkness Script’, in Discovering Orson Welles, 33; and Heylin, Despite the System, 127. The 1998 version of Touch of Evil featured a soundtrack remixed by Walter Murch that attempted to honour Welles’s intentions as set out in his now-famous 58-page memo to the studio.

  13 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 3.

  14 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 3–4.

  15 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 5.

  16 Santo Spirito, the initial setting of the rip-roaring early nineteenth-century pirate adventure of heroes Dinty and Beauregard, is a Caribbean island. The historical note remarks that the island has been colonised successively by the Spanish, the English, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish (again), and the English (again). “Only the Africans are permanent. If there’s a point to this history, it’s the rich cultural mixture which makes for so cosmopolitan flavor in the location of our next adventure.” Santo Spirito – Scripts – [Final?] Draft (photocopy of typescript, n.d.) (2 folders), 1. Box 3, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

  17 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 12.

  18 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 14.

  19 Welles, Heart of Darkness, 5.

  20 Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 12.

  21 See Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1987), 65.

  22 Denning, Cover Stories, 67.

  23 Denning, Cover Stories, 78.

  24 Denning, Cover Stories, 71.

  25 Joel Hopkin, ‘An Interview with Eric Ambler’, Journal of Popular Culture, Fall 1975, 290.

  26 Uncredited ‘Summary’ of Smiler with the Knife. Box 14, folder 24, Lilly Library. Bret Wood speculates the author is Welles or Houseman. See Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 159.

  27 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 160.

  28 Uncredited [Orson Welles], The Smiler with the Knife ‘Revised Estimating Script’ (9 January 1940), 20. Box 14, folder 20, Lilly Library.

  29 Uncredited [Welles], The Smiler with the Knife, 23.

  30 Bret Wood identifies this trend in the thriller scripts. See Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 157.

  31 Uncredited [Welles], The Smiler with the Knife, 50.

  32 Uncredited [Welles], The Smiler with the Knife, 123.

  33 Uncredited [Welles], The Smiler with the Knife, 110, 134.

  34 Uncredited [Welles], The Smiler with the Knife, 131.

  35 Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 20.

  36 Uncredited [Orson Welles], Orson Welles #4 [The Way to Santiago] ‘Third Revised Continuity’ (25 March 1941). Box 15, folder 18, Lilly Library.

  37 McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, 33.

  38 Uncredited [Welles], Orson Welles #4, 18.

  39 Uncredited [Welles], Orson Welles #4, 23.

  40 Uncredited [Welles], Orson Welles #4, 42.

  41 Uncredited [Welles], Orson Welles #4, 46.

  42 Uncredited [Welles], Orson Welles #4, 71.

  43 Uncredited [Welles], Orson Welles #4, 119.

  44 Uncredited [Welles], Orson Welles #4, 122.

  45 Carringer cites a Variety article of 16 April 1941 that reports the Mexican rejection of the project. See Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, 123.

  46 Jose Noriega, letter to Secretario de Gobernacion, 29 August 1941 (translated copy). Box 15, folder 18, Lilly Library.

  47 F. Gregorio Castillo, letter to Jose Noriega, 5 September 1941 (translated copy). Box 15, folder 18, Lilly Library.

  48 Uncredited, shooting schedule and production notes for Way to Santiago project. Box 15, folder 22, Lilly Library.

  49 Benamou, It’s All True, 27, 324.

  50 Welles to Norman Foster, 10 December 1941. Correspondence, 1941, December 1–15, boxes 1–4, Lilly Library.

  51 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 172–4.

  52 I found no evidence that this press release was ever issued. Uncredited, Mercury Production draft press release for Don’t Catch Me. Box 21, folder 8, Lilly Library.

  53 Bud Pearson, Les White, and Orson Welles, Don’t Catch Me: A Farce Melodrama (n.d.). Box 20, folder 34, Lilly Library.

  54 See Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 195.

  55 Pearson, White, and Welles, Don’t Catch Me, 79.

  56 Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 243–4.

  57 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 97.

  58 Uncredited, Journey into Fear storyboards, n.d. Box 20, folder 14, Lilly Library; Berthome and Thomas note some divergences between the storyboards and the ultimate framing in the final rooftop chase in Orson Welles at Work, 98–9.

  59 Sloan quoted in Joseph McBride, Orson Welles (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 89–90.

  60 Joseph Breen, inter-department communication to Orson Welles, 2 December 1941. Correspondence, 1930–1959, boxes 1–4, Lilly Library.

  61 Uncredited [Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten], Journey into Fear ‘Second Revised Budgeting’ (‘Norman Foster Censorship’) (1 August 1941), 40. Box 20, folder 12, Lilly Library.

  62 Uncredited [Welles and Cotten], Journey into Fear, 48.

  63 Uncredited [Welles and Cotten], Journey into Fear, 56.

  64 Uncredited [Welles and Cotten], Journey into Fear, 57.

  65 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 100; Journey into Fear comment cards from 17 April 1942 preview at U.A. Theatre, Pasadena, document dated 18 April 1942. Box 20, folder 19, Lilly Library.

  66 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 166.

  67 Benamou, It’s All True, 131; Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 100.

 
68 Uncredited [Welles and Cotten], Journey into Fear, unpaginated.

  69 Mark Mozower, ‘Introduction’, in Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009), vi.

  70 McBride, Orson Welles, 90.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE RAUCOUS RAGGLE-TAGGLE JAMBOREE OF THE STREETS

  It’s All True (unfinished, 1942)

  Orson Welles’s lifelong enthusiasm for the exotic was founded on a thoughtful and humanistic embrace of the foreign: languages, social rituals, food, music, and literature. Few other prominent Americans of the time gave such energy to the promotion of a cosmopolitan sensibility. To be cosmopolitan was to be inclusive, open-minded, committed to social justice, and orientated to an internationalist future. Nevertheless, many of Welles’s cosmopolitan enthusiasms were steeped in the same romantic nostalgia for pre-industrial society he had invested in the vanished America of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. Welles continued to combine the political and the romantic within the same vision.

  In the 1930s and 1940s his cosmopolitanism was instilled with moral seriousness and urgency. Fascism not only was destroying Europe but threatened the rest of the world. The OCIAA, implementing Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, sought to improve relations across the Americas to ward off the influence of fascist Europe and to increase Pan-American economic and cultural ties.1 Welles’s inclusive, cosmopolitan persona and charismatic mastery of the mass media made him a likely Good Will Ambassador, even though he was only twenty-six years old at the time.

  Welles’s interpretation of the mission of the Good Neighbor Policy was idealistic and radically progressive. He employed a staff of researchers to educate him in Latin American history and culture.2 His approach was to seek an unusual depth of cultural knowledge which he would then filter through his personal artistic sensibility. For the Rio Carnaval segment of It’s All True, he expanded his attention from street parades and elegant nightclubs to the city’s favelas – its hillside slums – in order to seriously explore the Afro-Brazilian roots of samba music. He quickly became an enthusiast. The surviving Technicolor footage of the 1942 Carnaval, both documentary and re-staged, suggests a celebratory vision of racially integrated urban life rarely, if ever, seen in Hollywood films of the era.3