At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  The San Francisco of The Lady from Shanghai is a similar cocktail. Mike is framed for Grisby’s murder and falls victim to a farcically unjust court that is the province of exhibitionists and voyeurs. The judge, as played by Erskine Sanford, is a flustered buffoon. There were very few images of Mike in the trial scene as it stood in late February, the better to emphasise his lack of agency under the law.30 A number of additional reaction shots of Mike were inserted into the final cut to push the scene back towards conventionality. Welles later acknowledged that the shot of the judge playing chess in front of the San Francisco cityscape, which is juxtaposed with an extreme high angle of the chessboard of the court, was “right on the jagged edge of symbolism”.31

  Mike’s escape into Chinatown does not seek to represent his drugged subjectivity as did its earlier incarnation as the New York subway hallucination. The editing of the chase in the final cut represents the neighbourhood’s geography with reasonable spatial coherence. The continuity notes that the location shots had been made with hidden cameras and lays out plans for the special-effects shots still to be interpolated. Some of these shots were filmed from inside plate-glass shop windows looking onto process plates of the Chinatown streets.32

  Chinatown location shots

  Elsa’s knowledge of Chinese allows her to successfully navigate the neighbourhood in pursuit of Mike, although in the release version of the film her early Chinese background has only been cursorily established. Mike hides out in the audience of a musical play at the Mandarin Theatre, shot in its location and featuring an unusually authentic musical performance for a Hollywood film of the era. Elsa goes backstage to phone her servant Li, whose apartment improbably shares the same panoramic view of San Francisco as the judge’s chambers (both were really the view from the Fairmont Hotel). We are given a brief glimpse of the communication network binding the Chinese community of San Francisco: the Chinese Telephone Exchange, shot inside its real location at 743 Washington Street.33 Li’s men mobilise to remove Mike from the theatre, killing the lights to flummox the police.

  Special effects shots

  Harry Cohn insisted on cutting Elsa and Mike’s discussion of the supposed plot of the Chinese play, which they use as an allegory of their own drama.34

  The Chinese Telephone Exchange and Li’s Apartment

  * * *

  The Lady from Shanghai as it survives represents Columbia’s comprehensive rejection of Welles’s visual and aural aesthetics in favour of the conventional. Making Shanghai resembled his experience making The Stranger the previous year – unavoidable compromises throughout the process of production from scripting to editing. Nevertheless, making Shanghai on location allowed some breakthroughs in Welles’s work as an urban filmmaker, at least in his use of extended moving takes, even as he was about to return to Hollywood to make an entirely studio-bound film.

  Welles’s low-budget adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a brilliantly expressionist film set in an eleventh-century Scottish landscape, was a departure from the modern world into the theatrically medieval. The filming took a mere twenty-three days in the summer of 1947, but post-production was prolonged into 1948, by which time Welles was no longer living in the United States. He returned briefly to Hollywood to finalise the editing, scoring, and sound mixing. A Welles-authorised 107-minute version premiered at the 1948 Venice Film Festival and was briefly distributed in the United States. In 1950 Welles was asked to reedit and redub the film for rerelease. This 86-minute version also survives.

  Welles had left the United States in November 1947. There were many reasons to leave. He had hopes for independent control over the production of his films in Italy. His recent divorce from Rita Hayworth may have contributed to the desire for a fresh start. There were tax problems due to Around the World in Eighty Days.35 Nevertheless, the anti-leftist purge of Hollywood, which began with the House Un-American Activities Committee’s hearings in October 1947, cannot be ignored. Louis Dolivet was named an agent of the Comintern in 1947 by the Washington Evening Star, was denounced by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949, and was thereafter unable to re-enter the United States, even on the occasion of the drowning of his daughter in 1952.36

  Joseph McBride makes a strong case for Welles as a victim of the blacklist,37 although Welles refused to take on the role of ideological martyr. His fearless anti-fascism and cosmopolitan one-worldism, useful to his role as Good Will Ambassador during wartime, would have made him a problem figure amid the McCarthyist hysteria and revived provincialism of the Cold War. The very forces of ideological persecution that made the United States uncongenial to Welles’s political activism pushed him towards the fulfilment of what would become his emblematic self: Orson Welles the endlessly wandering player, cosmopolitan citizen of the world, rumoured rather than known, everywhere-at-once and nowhere-to-be-found.

  NOTES

  1 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 508–9.

  2 Heylin, Despite the System, 205–6.

  3 Spicer, Historical Dictionary of Film Noir, 238.

  4 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 191.

  5 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 131, 137, 141.

  6 Uncredited [Orson Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’ (provisional editing continuity) (16 November 1946 – 25 February 1947). Box 22, folder 4, Lilly Library.

  7 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 194–6.

  8 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 142.

  9 Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 133.

  10 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, unpaginated (cover page).

  11 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 135.

  12 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 4.

  13 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 8.

  14 Interview with Orson Welles on Press Conference (UK: BBC TV, 1955), part I at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOmhLouJVuw; part II at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQDStxPSaWU (accessed 8 August 2015).

  15 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 27A.

  16 Orson Welles, Take This Woman ‘Final Draft (for Estimating Purposes)’ (17 August 1946), 102–3. American Film Scripts Online (database) (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press), at http://alexanderstreet.com/products/american-film-scripts (accessed 30 September 2013).

  17 The cash is Broome’s; in this draft, Mike’s early comment about thinking it “very sanitary to be broke” is given an ironic payoff. The dying Broome had demanded five thousand dollars in cash for handing over Mike’s confession letter. Mike pays him then takes back the “precious garbage”, “moist and dripping” with blood, seconds later when Broome is dead. Welles, Take This Woman ‘Final Draft (for Estimating Purposes)’, 109.

  18 Welles, Take This Woman ‘Final Draft (for Estimating Purposes)’, 151.

  19 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 198.

  20 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 47b.

  21 Studio synopsis of the 20 September ‘First Estimating Script’, 3. Box 22, folder 6, Lilly Library.

  22 Adrienne L. McLean, Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 154.

  23 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 131.

  24 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 53–7 (a single page numbered as such).

  25 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 135.

  26 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 72–4.

  27 No complete script survives in the Welles archive at the Lilly Library. A composite typed text of about sixty pages contains pencilled annotations probably in Welles’s own handwriting. There are redundancies and repetitions, and the structure is not fully worked out. Some of the text is in treatment form.

  28 Uncredited, Fully
Dressed and In His Right Mind, 18. Box 22, folder 22, Lilly Library.

  29 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 242.

  30 See Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 209; the provisional editing continuity records a single close-up of Mike. Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 108–24.

  31 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 198.

  32 Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 132A.

  33 See CitySleuth, ‘The Lady from Shanghai’, Reel SF, at http://reelsf.com/the-lady-from-shanghai-1947 (accessed 30 August 2015).

  34 Memo by Harry Cohn reproduced in Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 140; see also Uncredited [Welles], Lady from Shanghai ‘Scenes as Shot’, 135–8.

  35 Alberto Anile (translated by Marcus Perryman), Orson Welles in Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 10.

  36 Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 184.

  37 See McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, 99–104.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE BORDER

  Touch of Evil (1958)

  There was no attempt to approximate reality; the film’s entire ‘world’ being the director’s invention.

  – Orson Welles, 19581

  Quinlan’s entourage: Representatives of U.S. law in Mexican territory

  Touch of Evil, made during Welles’s two-year return to the United States after nearly a decade in Europe, was the (almost) triumphant culmination of Welles’s anti-fascist Pan-American thrillers. After two independent Pan-European films (Othello and Mr. Arkadin) and various British and American television projects, all of which demanded the invention of radical low-budget methods, Welles returned one final time to the relatively ample financial and technical facilities of a Hollywood studio. He exploited these resources to create ‘Los Robles’, a stunning noir city filmed in the streets of Venice Beach, Los Angeles.

  Touch of Evil expresses a number of Welles’s political concerns, most obviously the racial discrimination against Mexicans inside the American policing and legal system. It was a long-term concern: back in 1942 Welles had joined the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee to defend falsely accused Mexican-American youths in a notorious California trial.2 Mike O’Hara’s dislike of the police in The Lady from Shanghai had been a stance of revolutionary anti-authoritarianism; Touch of Evil centred its drama on the racism, corruption, and violence of a police captain and his entrenched position within the legal bureaucracy.

  Another palpable political context of Touch of Evil is Welles’s hostility not just to nationalism, which he had long argued was the seed of fascism, but more radically to the bureaucratic accoutrements of the modern nation state (which included the police). In 1955 Welles had filmed a monologue for the UK’s BBC television on the subject of ‘The Police’. He began by recalling his involvement in the Isaac Woodard case, and went on to say:

  I’m willing to admit that the policeman has a difficult job … but it’s the essence of our society that the policeman’s job should be hard. He’s there to protect the free citizen, not to chase criminals. That’s an incidental part of his job. The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the police than the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal.

  Welles also denounced customs officials, the necessity of passports, “red tapism and bureaucracy, particularly as it applies to freedom of movement”. “[Travel is not what it was in] our fathers’ day”, before passports, because now “we’re treated like demented or delinquent children and the eyes are always on us.” He told an anecdote about a European experience in which he sarcastically informed humourless police inspectors he was carrying an atomic bomb in his bag.

  Welles lumped police and bureaucrats together as “one great big monstrous thing” and said

  the bureaucrat is really like a blackmailer. You can never pay him off. The more you give him, the more he’ll demand… I’m not an anarchist, I don’t want to overthrow the rule of law. On the contrary, I want to bring the policeman to law.

  Welles’s sketches of his European police encounter in Orson Welles’ Sketchbook (1955)

  Welles suggested the formation of the International Association for the Protection of the Individual Against Officialdom. “If any such outfit is ever organized, you can put me down as a charter member.”3

  In his 1950s work Welles frequently mocked the modern nation state itself as a political fiction. Mr. Arkadin and his television documentaries frequently expressed saudade for antiquated cultural unities – the Austro-Hungarian Empire and interwar Eastern Europe – now obliterated and divided by the postwar political order. In his television series Around the World with Orson Welles, he celebrated Pentecost because it was the one day of the year when the border dividing the ancient Basque country between Spain and France was open to free human passage. Welles goes on to say:

  It’s not only the Basques. Nobody really likes an international border. The nations it divides always want to push the border back a bit in their favor, and I rather think the people it divides would just as soon do away with it altogether.4

  Touch of Evil provided Welles with the opportunity to explore the cinematic possibilities of a border setting in the Americas after reimagining the American small town and the Pan-American port city in his mid-1940s noirs. Only a few contemporary thrillers had used the border setting, including Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1948). Touch of Evil particularises Welles’s political insights into the operation of power on the border, and illustrates the ways racism thrives in such an ideologically divided space. A racist American detective’s long-term abuse of his position has been protected by a network of institutional, personal, and criminal associates on both sides of arbitrarily divided Los Robles, as well as by the myths of his investigative ‘intuition’ and self-sacrifice for the law. The arrival of a conflicting liberal and international vision of law leads to the detective’s downfall. The film frequently upsets the clichés of the 1950s police procedural.

  In any of the several versions of Touch of Evil, Los Robles is Welles’s most palpably realised cinematic city; in his original conception, it would have been the culmination of the director’s career-long innovations in mise-en-scène, mobile tracking shots, editing, and sound. Moreover, Welles uses the spaces of the cinematic city itself to illustrate his ideas.

  In the tradition of leftist spatial theory, Iván Zatz offers a political reading of how power is enforced in the “abstract space” of Welles’s Los Robles, which is “not broken by any natural or physically obvious obstacle, [but] by the sheer presence of authority”. He writes:

  Inequality would be a lot harder to maintain without the protected and policed exclusivity of fenced communities – borders, as this film makes clear […] Space, at this level, can be said to be abstracted precisely because there is no reason, other than an ideologically constructed one, to divide this space [with the border except] in order to prevent a natural movement of human beings through it.5

  * * *

  There are several contradictory accounts of how Welles was promoted from supporting actor to the job of rewriting and directing Touch of Evil, which was produced by Albert Zugsmith for Universal Pictures. The lead actor, Charlton Heston, supported Welles’s employment as director. Welles had performed a supporting role in Zugsmith’s similarly themed contemporary western The Man in the Shadow (Jack Arnold, 1957), and Zugsmith later claimed that Welles had offered to rewrite and direct Zugsmith’s worst story property.6

  The source was the 1956 novel Badge of Evil by ‘Whit Masterson’, a joint pseudonym for Robert Wade and William Miller. A first-draft screenplay was written by Paul Monash before Welles signed on. In a short time Welles completely rewrote the Monash script and drew additional material from the source novel. Welles’s shooting script is further proof of his exemplary talent at reconceiving and personalising existing material. He altered the setting and the races of various characters to upset conventions, and reset the fi
lm on the tense American-Mexican border.7

  Touch of Evil dramatises the exposure and death of Hank Quinlan (Welles), the corrupt Los Robles police detective. The trigger for his downfall is the investigation of the assassination by car bomb of local businessman Rudy Linnekar and a striptease dancer, Zita. Quinlan is discovered planting evidence in a suspect’s apartment by Ramon Miguel ‘Mike’ Vargas (Charlton Heston), a high-ranking Mexican narcotics official engaged in the prosecution of the criminal Grandi family in Mexico City. Vargas attempts to find evidence that will convince the local American authorities to bring Quinlan to justice. Meanwhile Quinlan, slipping back into alcoholism, agrees to conspire with the local Grandi boss, ‘Uncle Joe’ (Akim Tamiroff), to smear the reputation of Vargas and his American wife, Susan (Janet Leigh), by framing them in a drug conspiracy. The Grandi gang attack Susan at the Mirador Motel in the desert, (probably) sexually assault her, and leave her drugged in a skid row hotel room as a gift to the vice squad. Quinlan murders Uncle Joe at the skid row hotel to cover his tracks and sits out an alcoholic bender at a brothel run by a woman called Tana (Marlene Dietrich) on the Mexican side of the border. When Quinlan’s partner, Menzies (Joseph Calleia), discovers Quinlan’s cane at the Grandi murder scene, he goes to Vargas, who convinces him to secretly record Quinlan’s confession. Discovering the wire, Quinlan shoots Menzies; ailing, Menzies shoots Quinlan to protect Vargas. Quinlan falls into the river and dies.

  Once again, the studio removed Welles from oversight of the editing and sound mix. After his departure in July 1957, additional expository or replacement scenes were directed by Harry Keller; they are inferior in every way to Welles’s material. Welles was shown a rough cut in early December, and immediately wrote a long memo to studio executive Edward Muhl suggesting improvements in editing and sound.8 Only some of his suggestions were adopted for a version of 108 minutes that was previewed in January 1958.9 The 95-minute film as released in February was an abridged version of that preview cut and lost several dramatically essential scenes, rendering other parts confusing.10