At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 15
In 1945 Welles edited a daily newspaper and made broadcasts from the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco. Around this time his utopian hopes for postwar world government dimmed. Welles later reflected to his former school master Roger Hill:
I remember driving to the airport after witnessing and reporting on the founding charter of the United Nations that established “equal rights for large and small nations,” thinking that the starry-eyed days were over. Even then you could see that the lines were drawn between the east and west. You could see from the Russians that there was no hope of a dialogue. I went to San Francisco starry-eyed as you say, but I left pretty much the realist I’ve remained ever since.15
Welles’s postwar anti-fascism increasingly focused on race issues. Unlike many of his peers, Welles directly equated racism with fascism, and was more fearlessly outspoken on civil rights than probably any other white American of his celebrity. His campaign for justice over the blinding of black veteran Isaac Woodard, Jr, by the Georgia policeman Linwood Shull was a particular passion in mid-1946.
In the midst of this consuming political life, Welles produced an ambitious stage adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, with original songs by Cole Porter. He also continued to try to make films. He had fruitlessly pursued new dramatic ideas to make use of the Rio Carnaval footage and worked on editing ‘My Friend Bonito’ with Jose Noriega. He bought the rights to Don’t Catch Me and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and developed their screenplay adaptations. He developed projects for independent producer Alexander Korda, including War and Peace, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Oscar Wilde’s Salome.16 None of these films were made, but Welles was able to return to cinema with two thrillers that responded to the postwar political order.
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Leftist filmmakers such as Edward Dmytryk, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, and Robert Rossen enjoyed a short-lived prominence in Hollywood after the war. These particular directors were active in the production of those crime melodramas retrospectively categorised as film noir. Noir came to be defined by mythical character types, dark and fatalistic narratives, and bleak urban settings, and drew on a visual language indebted to German Expressionism but which could nevertheless extend to semi-documentary realism. The cinematography of Citizen Kane (and its complicated flashback structure) had also been a seminal influence. Noir proved to be a language to express the moral and political darkness beneath the supposed tranquillity of the postwar years, and was briefly a venue for a politically radical perspective on big business, political corruption, and crime.17
This brief opportunity for left-wing filmmakers coincided with labour unrest and mass strikes across the nation – and also at Hollywood’s film studios. American workers had long postponed demands for improved working conditions and pay during the war (Welles began directing his independently produced noir The Stranger at the Universal Studios lot in October 1945, just after the national strikes began). But the reactionary backlash was swift. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 effectively outlawed strikes and the House Un-American Activities Committee began to purge leftists and labour organisers from various industries under the banner of anti-communism.18 In the film business, left-wing filmmakers were intimidated into allegory or silence. Some were imprisoned, others blacklisted, exiled, or pushed into betraying others. Welles all but vanished into a long European exile.
Dennis Broe’s political historiography of film noir traces a consequent shift away from the immediate postwar period’s “outside-the-law fugitive protagonist” – the sympathetic working-class character, often a war veteran, forced into crime, usually by someone in a dominant class position. Key examples include the protagonists of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946) and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). By contrast, the heroes of noirs from 1950 to 1955 tended to be authoritative law enforcement protagonists.19
Welles more or less fits into this political historiography of noir. The trajectory of his Pan-American thrillers from the late 1930s to the late 1950s reflects his growing sophistication as a political thinker alongside his expanding cinematic virtuosity. During the Roosevelt era Welles scripted variations on the fascist infiltration plot, presenting fascism as an alien ideology that would be crushed by strong democratic institutions and international support for the war effort. Welles’s role as an ambassador for the Good Neighbor Policy and a campaigner for Roosevelt was compatible with this view. In his wartime screenplays and in his activism he endorsed the progressive anti-fascism of official intentions from a position within the political establishment, even if this demanded some overly generous – or even disingenuous – interpretations of Allied policy.
But The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, his back-to-back postwar noirs, straddle a pivotal shift in Welles’s political identification from the centre of power to the periphery after the death of Roosevelt. The Stranger revives the infiltration plot and presents an American Nazi-hunter protagonist as the heroic embodiment of postwar internationalist justice.20 But soon after making that film Welles abruptly abandoned his optimistic depiction of American officialdom. Moreover, fascism ceased to be an alien force infiltrating democratic society; it was now a danger arising from within the institutions of power.
Perhaps inevitably, the heroic anti-fascist crusader was pushed into the margins. Welles described Michael ‘Black Irish’ O’Hara, the near-penniless drifter hero of The Lady from Shanghai, as “a poet and a victim” who “represents an aristocratic point of view” as had Jedediah Leland in Kane. In Welles’s terms, ‘aristocratic’ was a superior moral quality rather than a class position, “something connected to the old ideas of chivalry, with very ancient European roots”. The aristocratic figure lives outside “sentimental bourgeois morality”.21 Mike’s naive medieval chivalry leads him to be compared to Don Quixote, but he is the only character with a shred of real conscience in the cynical world of the rich. He is unimpressed by their wealth and believes it “very sanitary to be broke”. He has impeccable anti-fascist credentials as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. A legendary rabble-rouser to his fellow sailors, the radio labels him a “notorious waterfront agitator”. He is an anti-authoritarian with good reason to distrust the police. The wealthy frame him in a labyrinthine plot and use the institutions of American law to railroad him to the gas chamber. The studio’s heavy post-production control of Shanghai only somewhat dulled the film’s anti-authoritarianism.
Why this sudden change in political identification? Welles wrote the Lady from Shanghai script through the summer and early autumn of 1946, exactly the time he was engaged in a public crusade against racist police brutality in the Isaac Woodard case. The following year he left the United States as reactionary forces abused the power of American political institutions to crush left-wing activism in the name of anti-communism. Welles’s subsequent antifascist projects abandoned the infiltration plot in favour of vastly more nuanced illustrations of institutionalised corruption. In fact, his politics became more deeply radical.
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Film noir is overwhelmingly an urban mode of cinema, situating its melodrama in the alienation, violence, sex, and corruption of the mid-century city. Noir’s cinematic cities draw on many sources, including the traditions of hardboiled crime fiction, German Expressionism and the related Kammerspiel and street film of the 1920s, Hollywood gangster films, documentary street photography, and existentialism.22 Within the cycle are cinematic reimaginings of actual cities, most commonly the distinct locales of New York and Los Angeles. There are also fictional cities that exist more in the realm of myth, such as the comprehensively corrupt and isolated small industrial city, an archetype descended from Dashiell Hammett’s Poisonville in his novel Red Harvest (1928).
The noir worldview – bleak, violent, fatalistic – bridges these diverse urban settings and stylistic modes. What Richard Slotkin writes about the imaginary landscape of the western is equally applicable to the cities of n
oir:
The history of a movie genre is the story of the conception, elaboration, and acceptance of a special kind of space: an imaged [sic] landscape which evokes authentic places and times, but which becomes, in the end, completely identified with the fictions created about it. […] The genre setting contains not only a set of objects signifying a certain time, place, and milieu; it invokes a set of fundamental assumptions and expectations about the kinds of events that can occur in the setting, the kinds of motive that will operate, the sort of outcome one can predict.23
The settings of The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai are in fact rather atypical for the noir cycle, but they served Welles’s themes in a rapidly disintegrating political climate. After an early sequence in a dangerous South American port city, The Stranger is set in a mythical American small town with pastoral fringes. Port cities – New York, Acapulco, San Francisco – dominate the settings of The Lady from Shanghai. The port city, already a key setting in the Heart of Darkness screenplay and in Journey into Fear, provided an aptly cosmopolitan milieu for Welles’s political melodrama as anti-fascism was squeezed from its place in the wartime political establishment out to the periphery and soon into exile. These are crossroad cities whose spaces occasion the meeting of characters of different nationalities and classes in the postwar upheaval. In these cities everybody is under surveillance, but Ambleresque anxiety over identity documents is offset by the prospect of wiping clean the slate of identity and thereby dodging responsibility for the horrors of history.
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The Stranger is probably Welles’s least admired film. Independently produced by Sam Spiegel and International Pictures, The Stranger evolved from a story treatment called ‘Date with Destiny’ by Victor Travis and Decla Dunning (an earlier version of the story by Travis dated back more than ten years).24 John Huston and Anthony Veiller, who had recently worked on the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s story ‘The Killers’ for the eponymous 1946 film directed by Robert Siodmak – a noir masterpiece indebted to Citizen Kane – developed the adaptation of The Stranger before Welles was invited to star and direct. The story concerns the exposure of a German Nazi posing as a respectable American citizen in a small town shortly after the end of World War II. Welles’s performance as the Nazi is relatively weak.
Welles worked on a ‘Temporary Draft’ of the script dated 9 August 1945, co-credited with Huston; it reflects Welles’s provisional ideas for the film before officially signing his contract. But that temporary script was subject to pre-production cuts on the order of editor Edward Nims, who favoured retaining only what he deemed to be essential to the plot. A particular casualty was the long sequence in South America. About twenty-five pages of material from the ‘Temporary Draft’ was lost.25
Welles’s working copy of his subsequent 24 September shooting script, as it survives in the Mercury files, was embellished with coloured replacement pages until after the start of shooting on 1 October. This copy also contains Welles’s pencilled rewrites and crossed-out sequences. Researchers have had trouble establishing exactly what was dropped from the shooting schedule and never filmed, and what was filmed but eliminated in the editing room by Nims without Welles’s participation.26 Some of the pencilled-out sequences in the shooting script actually survive in the final cut of the film, which suggests Welles may have been using his script to prepare an edit he was never able to realise himself. In any case, the shooting script sketches a more psychologically complex and visually interesting version of what ultimately made the producer’s final cut.
It begins one night in the fictional town of Harper, Connecticut. Mary Longstreet is drawn from her bed in a dreamlike state to cross town to the church clock tower. The church is soon surrounded by a mob of armed townsfolk; a scream announces a fight at the top of the tower, and two unidentifiable figures fall. Then we flashback to Wilson, a pipe-smoking American with the Allied War Crimes Commission, who decides that war criminal Conrad Meinike should be allowed to escape from prison in a risky gambit to lay a trail to a Nazi mastermind.27 Wilson tracks Meinike by ship to a South American city, where Meinike reconnects with the Nazi underground, is provided with a new identity and passport, and learns the present whereabouts of Franz Kindler. One of Wilson’s South American agents, Señora Marvales, is murdered by dogs during the surveillance of Meinike.
The story shifts to Harper, where Kindler is posing as a history teacher with a passion for antique clocks named Charles Rankin. Rankin meets and romances Mary, the naive daughter of a Supreme Court judge.
Meinike arrives in Harper by bus and lures Wilson, who has followed him without much discretion, to a brutal ambush in the local high school gymnasium. Meinike tracks down Kindler-Rankin and preaches spiritual redemption. Rankin leads him into the woods and strangles him. He then proceeds to church to marry Mary as scheduled.
Meanwhile, Wilson has recovered from the attack and remains in town under cover as an antiques dealer. On that pretence he meets the Longstreets and, soon after, Rankin himself. Wilson comes to believe that Rankin is really Kindler after he expresses the bizarre opinion that Karl Marx was not German because he was Jewish. Wilson confronts Mary’s brother and father with the truth and begins to close in on Rankin. After Meinike’s body is found, Wilson shows Mary footage of the liberation of a Nazi death camp. Meinike is shown in the film under arrest. Mary, however, continues to believe her husband’s explanation that Meinike was merely a blackmailer he’d been forced to kill and that Wilson is laying a trap.
Rankin plots to kill Mary by beckoning her to the top of the church clock tower; the ladder has been booby-trapped. However, she is prevented from arriving by her housekeeper, and in her place Noah and Wilson are almost killed. Rankin goes into hiding and Mary unravels psychologically (there is an “impressionistic montage” or dream sequence). We return to the opening sequence: Mary crosses town at night, seeking to kill Rankin in his hideout in the clock tower. Wilson intervenes. During a gun battle, Rankin is impaled on a sword brandished by an angel statue in the gothic clock mechanism. He and the statue fall to the ground as a mob of the townsfolk gather at the foot of the church.28
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A handwritten correction in Welles’s copy of the shooting script names the South American port city ‘Puerto Indio’, although the name is not mentioned in the final cut of the film. There are a few indications to suggest this fictional city is based on Buenos Aires, including a reference in the script to tango. Welles had visited that city in 1942 on his Good Will tour.29 In January 1945, Welles called for direct Allied involvement in Argentina’s affairs, due to the Nazi wealth invested in the country.30 Nazi influence in Argentina was topical: Edward Dmytryk’s Cornered (1945) cast Dick Powell as a Canadian war veteran hunting a Nazi in Argentina to avenge his wife’s death. That film created its Buenos Aires in Hollywood. Welles’s Puerto Indio is similarly a studio creation, and what survives is stunning. Later Welles described the South American section as “the only chance to be interesting visually in the story”.31
Following the incompletion of It’s All True, Welles indeed re-emerged with a Latin American story, but instead of an uplifting celebration of Pan-American unity, Welles created a dark and murderous South American port city devoid of the appealingly exotic. Puerto Indio is the end of a ratline for escaping Nazis. Here war criminals change their names and nationalities, and go underground.
The shooting script, while cut down from the more expansive Welles–Huston temporary draft, nevertheless covers more spaces of this imagined city than the final cut.32
After the S.S. Bolivar docks in Puerto Indio, an immigration official and ship’s purser check through a Romanian man, a Dutch woman, and Konrad Meinike (under the Polish passport of one ‘Stefan Podowski’). The mentally disturbed Meinike rehearses his explanation: “I am travelling for my health”. He is waved through the border check. The camera cranes up to Wilson observing from an overhead ramp. He confers with local agents Señor and Señora Marvales, who will
trail Meinike through the city. During filming, Welles apparently extended the crane shot to take in Señora Marvales’s pursuit of Meinike beyond the border post, but the shot was pointlessly abridged in the release version by a clumsy slow dissolve. It is the only crane shot of this South American section to make the release version of the film, although several others are noted in the shooting script.
Three surviving frames of the abridged crane shot: Meinike at immigration, observed from above by Señora Marvales, and followed
As Meinike crosses a “rustic bridge” he is compared to a “small, scuttling spider”. Once again, Welles sketches a scheme to use diegetic music to help enhance the illusion of a city’s space. When Meinike passes the door of a “cheap nightclub” we hear a “slow, sad tango”. Further on, “through a group of archways”, Meinike passes another bar, where we hear “hot exciting rhythm played by a small, corny band” (only a murmur of Latin American dance music underlines this scene as it survives in the film, in shortened form).
All the while Meinike is under almost omniscient surveillance: the Marvales have access to private telephones in bizarrely convenient buildings around the city. The silhouette of Señor Marvales observes Meinike from a window as he telephones a report to Wilson at the Hotel Nacionale.
At this point the shooting script presents a number of powerfully evocative Puerto Indio scenes that did not make the final cut. The first setting is terrifying, even on the page: the Farbright Kennels, a warren of dog cages adjoining a multi-storey building. Fierce German police dogs are kept in order by a whip-brandishing trainer in a wire face mask. A vertiginous crane shot was to have moved from the dog cages to track up the side of the building, where Meinike observes from a ramp. He then ascends to the top of a circular staircase to meet Farbright, another Nazi fugitive. Meinike seeks the current whereabouts of Franz Kindler. Inside “a shabby room” at the top of the building, Farbright and a seedy doctor drug Meinike and interrogate him to confirm his loyalty. Farbright is sufficiently convinced to direct Meinike to a contact who will provide a new passport. Señora Marvales observes the meeting from ground level beside the cages. As the dogs growl, she can see light escape from the fringes of the burlap sack that covers the shabby room’s window.