At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 20
To Iván Zatz, the Mexican Vargas and American Jew Schwartz are “transnational technocrats” who overcome the jurisdictional challenges of an ideologically divided space to impose international, United Nations-style justice and defeat Quinlan’s corruption.29 Vargas introduces himself to Quinlan as “what the United Nations would merely call an observer”, but he quickly angles for a stronger role on US soil in the name of justice. International governance remained Welles’s preferred antidote to fascism.
As the night wears on towards a grim dawn, Pancho harasses Susie in her hotel room by shining a flashlight on her from a window across the way. Soon Risto, who threw acid at Vargas on his own initiative, is chased by Uncle Joe and Sal (another Grandi nephew) from the intersection outside the St Marks across the street to the parking lot beside and behind Grandi’s Rancho Grande. During this chase the camera angles are canted, and spatial coherence is momentarily disjointed; also, improbably, the sands of Venice Beach seem to be glimpsed for a moment during the scuffle.
By the conclusion of the film’s opening act, Quinlan’s deeply entrenched position in the legal and social structure of Los Robles is established. Quinlan’s habit of planting evidence will soon be discovered by Vargas during the investigation of the car bomb, but Vargas’s insistent attempts to bring Quinlan to justice have to break through the defensive clique of local legal and police authorities, with their mythical narratives of Quinlan’s past exploits, and finally Quinlan’s employment of his criminal associate Uncle Joe Grandi. In the best version, the 1998 edition, Touch of Evil is a stunning product of Welles’s career-long cinematic innovations in service of his mature insights into the operation of power in an American border city.
NOTES
1 Orson Welles letter to New Statesman (24 May 1958), reprinted at http://wellesnet.com/touch_memo2.htm (accessed 1 September 2015).
2 Benamou, It’s All True, 261.
3 ‘The Police’, Orson Welles’ Sketchbook (Orson Welles, 1955). Original broadcast: 7 May (UK: BBC TV).
4 ‘Pays Basque I (The Basque Countries)’, Around the World with Orson Welles (Orson Welles, 1955). Original broadcast: 7 October.
5 Iván Zatz, ‘Tan lejos de Dios: The Production of Space and the Meaning of Power in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil’, Found Object, No. 10, spring 2001, 65–6.
6 John C. Stubbs, ‘The Evolution of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil from Novel to Film’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2, winter 1985, 20.
7 See Stubbs, ‘The Evolution of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil from Novel to Film’, for an analysis of the step-by-step process of the novel’s screen adaptation.
8 The 1998 reedited version of Touch of Evil attempted to incorporate Welles’s requests. The restored version does not feature previously unseen footage, but instead restructures some sequences and remixes the soundtrack of the opening shot.
9 This version was rediscovered in 1975.
10 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 219.
11 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 211; Laurent Bouzereau, Bringing Evil to Life (documentary), included in Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition (USA: Universal Studios Home Video, 2008).
12 Welles quoted in Terry Comito, ‘Welles’s Labyrinths: An Introduction to Touch of Evil’, in Comito (ed.), Touch of Evil: Orson Welles, Director (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 10.
13 This definition is from Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Owl Books, 1997), 16–17.
14 Vincent Brook, Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 53.
15 Siegfried Kracauer summarised in Brook, Driven to Darkness, 54.
16 Brook, Driven to Darkness 53–4.
17 See Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 29.
18 See Love, ‘“Architectural jungle” or the “sum of its people”?’
19 Paul Arthur, ‘In the Labyrinth’ (DVD notes), Night and the City (New York: Criterion Collection, 2005).
20 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 115.
21 Comito, ‘Welles’s Labyrinths: An Introduction to Touch of Evil’, 9–11.
22 For example, in 1972 Eric M. Kruger wrote that “the constant criss-crossing of the border by most of the major characters in the film tends to confuse one’s sense of location. This only adds to the ambiguous, crazed atmosphere of the film by heightening a certain feeling of dislocation and by undermining any search for surety.” Consequently, “the film viewed once is a manic vortex of time, space, and energy; no structure or logic of any type appears until it is seen three or four times.” Krueger, ‘“Touch of Evil”: Style Expressing Content’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1, autumn 1972, 58.
23 See 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.
24 Lawrence French, ‘Orson Welles’ Memo on Touch of Evil’, Wellesnet, n.d., at http://wellesnet.com/touch_memo1.htm (accessed 1 August 2015).
25 Walter Murch, who was responsible for remixing and reediting the 1998 version, claims that Welles’s intended sound scheme anticipates a technique he pioneered working on George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973). Murch named the technique ‘worldizing’. To remix the soundtrack to Welles’s specifications, Murch replaced Henry Mancini’s original main title cue with a succession of other Mancini tracks (from the original scoring sessions) replayed through various low-quality car and nightclub loudspeakers to simulate movement through the ambient environment of the Los Robles streets. The original location sound elements were also integrated back into the mix. See Michael Jarrett, ‘Sound Doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch’, Film Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3, spring 2000, 2–11; and Rick Schmidlin’s second commentary track on Touch of Evil: 50th Anniversary Edition.
26 Although the producers of the 1998 version chose not to run the credits over the opening shot, the Welles memo merely questions rather than specifically rules out using them at this point; indeed, his shooting script positions the credits at this point. See Orson Welles, Badge of Evil ‘Revised Final Screenplay’ (5 February 1957), 1, at http://www.scribd.com/doc/201288667/Touch-of-Evil (accessed 1 August 2015).
27 Krueger says in Los Robles “the truth is what people believe to be true. Quinlan had the power to create truth – the power to fashion his own reality and have others make it theirs as well. It is precisely this power of Quinlan’s that had contributed so much to his identity and had enabled his workable compromise with the evil of Welles’s world.” Krueger, ‘“Touch of Evil”: Style Expressing Content’, 62.
28 Krueger, ‘“Touch of Evil”: Style Expressing Content’, 57.
29 Zatz, ‘Tan lejos de Dios’, 75, 80.
CHAPTER 9
RETURN TO THE PERIPHERY
The Other Man (unproduced, 1977)
America has missed absolutely no opportunity, not only during the Reagan administration, but in my lifetime, to render it impossible for us to be anything but the deathly enemy of all Arabs, and, of course, all Latin Americans. We can never polish that image. I don’t care how much money we pour into it.
– Orson Welles in conversation, circa 1984–851
A final project to consider in this survey of Welles’s Pan-American cities is The Other Man, an unmade thriller based on Graham Greene’s novel The Honorary Consul (1973). The screenplay was written in 1977, around the time Welles permanently relocated his filmmaking operations back to the United States.
From the late 1960s until his death Welles worked in frequent collaboration with the Croatian actress Oja Kodar. They worked together scripting The Other Side of the Wind, which Welles shot in the United States between 1970 and 1976 but was never able to finish editing. Kodar was a featured actress and the uncredited source for a tall tale about Picasso in F for Fake. In the 1970s the pair wrote other un
made projects including the supernatural Spanish period piece Mercedes (based on a story by Kodar called Blind Window; the script was also known as House Party and, in a later American version, Mercy) and the Spanish bullfighting drama Crazy Weather (circa late 1973).2
In 1975 Welles was approached to act in a film that would dramatise a supposed conspiracy behind the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. He and Kodar quickly reconceived Sirhan Sirhan, the original script by Donald Freed, into a joint starring vehicle called Assassin. The Welles-Kodar changes amount to about one half of the script. The pair did not much tamper with Freed’s urban conspiracy plot set in various cities of the United States; their work was restricted to an original narrative about the sexually tense relationship of a wheelchair-bound intelligence conspirator and the mysterious ‘girl in the polka dot dress’ inside a ‘safe house’. Welles became deeply involved in the film’s pre-production, obtaining cast, script, and director approval, but the independent producers were unable to complete financing of this radical project.3
The Other Man screenplay gives joint credit to Kodar, who about that project recalled, “I really was fifty percent his partner.”4 The principal reason Welles never brought his version to production was financial: although he purchased a two-month option from Greene’s agent in April 1977 for $1,000, and immediately co-wrote a script with Kodar, he was unable to buy the rights to the property outright for its price of $150,000 (including $100,000 upfront).5 Despite the lapse of the option, Welles continued to seek investors for the project at least as late as October 1977.6 Screen rights to the novel were bought by British producer John Heyman, and although Welles remained hopeful that Heyman’s rights would lapse, it was not to be.7 Heyman’s wife, Norma, ultimately produced the film, directed by John Mackenzie, from a screenplay by Christopher Hampton. That 1983 production, also known as Beyond the Limit, was poorly received – and a sadly wasted opportunity, because the unmade Welles-Kodar adaptation is superb and illustrates Welles’s enduring interest in Latin American politics.
Greene’s novel, set in contemporary Argentina, concerns the love affair between Doctor Eduardo Plarr and Clara, a former prostitute and the wife of Charley Fortnum, an alcoholic ‘honorary’ British consul. Marxist revolutionaries led by a former priest, Leon Rivas, plan to kidnap the US ambassador in a bid to force the release of political prisoners in Paraguay. Because Plarr’s father is said to be among those prisoners, Plarr cooperates with the revolutionaries. They mistakenly kidnap Fortnum and hold him in a shantytown outside the city. The British refuse to negotiate for a mere honorary consul, and Plarr’s efforts to convince Rivas to free Fortnum are frustrated. Finally Plarr and the kidnappers are killed as the police storm the shantytown. Fortnum survives.
Apart from the usual caveats regarding the provisional nature of Welles’s screenplays, The Other Man warrants another type of critical caution. Professionally typed and billed as “based on the best-selling novel”, the Welles-Kodar script was clearly designed to attract investors. That said, the script indicates that had the film been made it would have avoided the carnivalesque qualities of Welles’s previous thrillers.8
Welles prefaces the script with a note stating that “all technical verbiage including indications for camera have been avoided in this script”. There are only occasional indications of a shadowy, noirish mise-en-scène: next to the city’s Italian Club is a “dark side street … where the shadows are deepest, a car. The headlights flick on and off” over the figure of the doctor.9 The consul’s wife, standing outside her house, “seems a melancholy little ghost there in the shadows”.10 Later, during the stand-off in the shantytown, “the doctor’s shadow shoots back into the hut and lies stretched out there like a dead man on the floor”.11
The new title, The Other Man, alludes to both the love triangle at the centre of the drama and Welles’s previous, very successful project associated with Graham Greene, The Third Man. It seems fitting that Welles would finally turn to adapting the fiction of Greene, decades after he had adapted Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler, the other important writer in the establishment of the left-wing serious thriller back in the 1930s. Moreover, The Honorary Consul was strikingly relevant to international progressive concerns of the 1970s, set in the context of the United States’ disastrous long-term interference in Latin American politics. The fictional British ambassador, Sir Henry Belfrage, makes fun of his US counterpart’s bragging about the popularity of the USA in Paraguay – “Nelson Rockefeller’s tour proved that. No one threw stones in Paraguay or set fire to any offices. It was as quiet as it was in Haiti.”12 Rockefeller’s 1969 tours of Latin America at the request of President Nixon had been met by mass protests against US influence in Latin American affairs.13 Present Governor of New York State and former Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs – the very man who had sent Welles south of the equator as a Good Will Ambassador in 1942 – Nelson Rockefeller is not mentioned in the Welles-Kodar script.
Another possibly appealing theme was Greene’s very British rejection of the idiocies of Latin machismo. In his novel, Doctor Plarr asks rhetorically: “Who invented machismo? A gang of ruffians like Pizarro and Cortés. Can’t any of you for a moment escape your bloody history? You haven’t learned a thing, have you, from Cervantes. He had his fill of machismo at Lepanto.”14
The ultimate invisibility of most of Welles’s work in his later years has obscured his late critical interest in the theme. Greene’s novel provides satire in the ridiculous figure of Jorge Julio Saavedra, fictitious author of The Taciturn Heart, which was “full of the spirit of machismo”.15 Welles and Kodar eliminated the Saavedra subplot from their adaptation, but Greene’s theme endures in other places. Colonel Perez, the local police authority, insists: “When there is no machismo, doctor, a man is dead.”16 The kidnappers refuse to release the consul, even when all is lost, because to Aquino it would be an admission of failure. “It isn’t macho enough for you, is that it?” suggests the doctor.17
One of Welles and Kodar’s major changes to the novel is an intentional blurring of the setting. The international settings of Greene’s novels had become known collectively as Greeneland. One critic had described it as “a seedy world of relics of happier times, of thin men in frayed shirts, of hungers that cannot be blunted, of bad beds and drinks made of pink gin, doomed departures, tyrants and bullies – and, always, victims.”18 Greene prefaced The Honorary Consul with the disclaimer:
The province and the city in Argentina where the scene is principally set bear, of course, resemblance to a real city and a real province. I have left them nameless because I wished to take certain liberties and not to be tied down to the street plan of a particular city or the map of a particular province.19
Greene’s lightly fictionalised and unnamed city is based on Corrientes, close to the Rio Paraná, which separates Argentina from Paraguay.20 The river is an important element in Greene’s novel, symbolic of Plarr’s division from his missing father. In his previous Pan-American thrillers Welles had shown how powerfully he could use both port cities and border towns, but in this screenplay the river border dividing the two countries is not featured. Welles and Kodar chose to set their drama in the fictional ‘Santa Cruz’, “only the third largest city in one of the dimmest and most poverty stricken of all the dictatorships in Latin America”. Traces of Corrientes remain: Clara listens to the same “sad Guaraní song”21 heard on the radio in Greene’s novel, leaving no doubt as to the city’s proximity to Paraguay. But late in the script one of the kidnappers says, “we lost the football game today with Argentina”,22 which seems to be the same sort of intentional obfuscation as Citizen Kane’s newsreel director wondering why the life of Charles Foster Kane was different to William Randolph Hearst’s – or Shakespeare disclaiming Falstaff’s debt to the historical John Oldcastle: “for Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man”.
Although the relative geographical relation of the provincial city to the capital is retained – Santa Cruz is “up t
here” – Welles and Kodar are careful not to identify the capital as Buenos Aires, which Greene describes as “the great sprawling muddled capital with its fantástica arquitectura of skyscrapers in mean streets rising haphazardly and covered for twenty floors by Pepsi-Cola advertisements”.23 Welles and Kodar’s unnamed capital is an apparently smaller city where “the international wire services maintained no full-time representatives”.24 They also changed the famous Confitería Richmond in Bueno Aires’s Calle Florida – where the doctor’s mother gorges on éclairs – to ‘Dressler’s Tea Shop & Patiserie’.
These changes were necessary to reflect the developments in Argentina in the four years since the publication of Greene’s novel: Juan Peron’s return from exile to assume the presidency in 1973–74 and then the onset of the ‘Dirty War’. The aim of these practical changes was probably to make it possible for Welles to shoot a contemporary thriller, rather than make a period piece set earlier in the decade. Several years later, when pitching a doomed drama about a Central American resort to an HBO television producer, Welles insisted,
I’m not interested in real history, because I know Latin American politics to an unbelievable degree. I’m an expert on it. And you cannot tell that story using any individual country. You must combine them to do it properly, and it must be fictional.25