At the End of the Street in the Shadow
Page 21
Welles and Kodar also made changes to the ethnic backgrounds of the principal characters. As with Welles’s changes to Touch of Evil, the shifted ethnicities create different dramatic nuances. Doctor Plarr becomes Doctor Farrel. The name change is for cinematic reasons. The script explains:
The emphasis in this country is on the last syllable. In England where – until his father’s imprisonment (and the collapse of the family fortune) Farrel was educated – the accent is on the first part of the name. We’ll hear both versions and see both sides of a personality at once Latin American and Anglo-Saxon.
Farrel has an English mother and a Spanish father, “for long years a political prisoner”, who “broods over his life like a ghost”26 (in Greene’s novel the nationalities of the doctor’s parents are reversed). Farrel’s father, who is presumed still in prison in a neighbouring country, was once a “distinguished governor” – and also “a direct descendent” of “the Farrel who was the Liberator”,27 embedding Doctor Farrel rather murkily in this fictional nation’s history.
The “old estancia” of the family, vanished in Greene’s novel, is still standing for a scene in Welles’s Santa Cruz, albeit “deserted and boarded-up … in a state of grandiose and melancholy decay. The garden is a jungle.”28 Decayed buildings, reminders of a long-vanished grandeur, are the rule: the Italian Club, where Farrel dines with the elderly English expatriate Humphries, has “a crumbling 19th Century facade … and a few tables where one can eat cheaply without paying a subscription”.29 Likewise described is the British embassy in the unnamed capital, its “old Imperial pretensions gone to seed”.30
Greene’s honorary consul, Charlie Fortnum, becomes Charlie Fineman, a British Jew, in the Welles-Kodar revision. Joseph McBride notes that this change “heightens [the consul’s] outsider status”,31 which is certainly one consequence. Lady Belfrage at the British embassy in the capital mistakenly refers to him as “poor Mr. Fineburg”,32 and there seems even less chance of official intervention on his behalf. But the effect is also to add nuance to the claustrophobic Catholic drama of Greene’s novel, which in its later stages becomes bogged down in theological discussions between the doctor and the priest-turned-revolutionary Father Rivas. Fineman tells Jewish-themed jokes to lighten the mood throughout Welles and Kodar’s script, including one to his kidnappers about a priest delivering the last rites to a Jewish man dying in an Irish boarding house: “The priest says, ‘Do you believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?’… The old guy turns around. ‘I’m a dying man!’ he says, ‘and he asks me riddles.’”33
This is not only a weak joke from Welles’s own repertoire,34 but also an eerie foreshadowing of what will actually happen in the script’s climactic sequence, transported directly from Greene’s novel but disturbingly altered by the fact of Fineman’s Jewishness. Rivas comes across as a different kind of monster when he proposes the blameless Jew confess his sins to him, an act of “contrition”, before this ideologically warped former priest proceeds to murder the man for mere political expediency.35
Another Welles-Kodar addition is the character of Asunta, one of the revolutionary kidnappers, who would likely have been played by Oja Kodar herself. Asunta wounds the consul as he tries to escape (in the novel, it is the revolutionary Aquino who shoots the consul). Asunta has a dramatic role in one long sequence and comes to a violent end.
In this collaborative script Welles returns to the impoverished periphery of a Latin American city thirty-five years after his botched attempt to put Rio de Janeiro’s favelas on screen in It’s All True. As in the novel, the consul is held hostage in a shantytown on the outskirts of the city. Throughout the script Welles and Kodar adopt the French term bidonville, used only once by Greene. Greene describes the bidonville lying “between the city and the bend in the river”. Welles and Kodar rework this evocatively as “beyond the bend in the river and the Coca-Cola bottling works … a place where the land sinks into a small valley mostly filled with stagnant water”. They recast Greene’s description of the landscape as dialogue by Father Rivas: “The mud is permanent. There’s no place for anything to drain, yet the people who live here have to walk more than a mile for their water.”36
Significantly, the revolutionaries have not emerged from the underclass. The bidonville market, Aquino tells Asunta, is “a market for the poor, beautiful – the very poor. You’ve only read about that kind of poor.”37
Greene’s novel features a tense scene in which an old blind villager, José, having heard rumours of the presence of a priest, comes to the hut of the kidnappers to ask Father Rivas to bless the body of his dead wife. José is suspicious when he hears the foreign voice of the consul, but he is distracted by the novelty of a radio. Although the old man seems persuaded that Rivas is not, in fact, a priest, the kidnappers worry the old man is a spy or may blow their cover. They contemplate murdering him but do not follow through with the task.
Welles and Kodar expand this germ of a situation into a violently macabre sequence that marries the shantytown setting with the kind of murderous chase sequences through claustrophobic urban environments seen in The Lady from Shanghai’s Chinatown, the Naples docks in Mr. Arkadin, and the oil derricks and river in Touch of Evil.
The old blind man, unnamed in the script, is given the distracting radio as a present. Asunta trails the man through the bidonville as “the day is fading and the sky, under heavy clouds, is blood red”.38 She wears a shawl to blend in with the villagers; underneath she conceals a revolver. She intends to kill the old man, who is accompanied by two dogs and seems to suspect being followed. Asunta removes her shoes to muffle her approach.
Aquino tries to follow Asunta, but is lost in the bidonville, disorientated amid the maze of poverty:
He runs frantically through the maze of narrow alleys winding between the shacks… Faces peer out at him from doorways and windows… Realizing that he’s attracting undue attention, he forces himself to slow up. The trouble is, he has no idea in what direction he should be heading. He is deep in the shantytown and Asunta is following the old man through what amounts to open country.39
The sound of a radio momentarily promises spatial reorientation. As it turns out, Aquino has discovered not the old man but instead a policeman’s radio mounted on a bicycle outside a cantina. He steals it.
The “city-bred” Asunta is now on the rural edge of the bidonville. She is close to killing the old man either by gunshot or by bashing a stone against his head, but the old man temporarily eludes death by hiding on the back of a passing truck.
The dogs of the old man linger, and one savages Asunta’s shoes. Darkness is coming. Asunta watches one of the dogs walk to a hut, clearly the old man’s home. A police helicopter appears and noisily surveys the bidonville from above. Aquino, hiding behind an automobile in another part of the shantytown, seizes on the moment of confusion to rush back through the “maze of narrow alleys”. Asunta enters the old man’s hut, which has “scarcely nothing in it except an old wooden bench and a few dishes stuck in holes meant to serve as cupboards in the mud wall”. She sees the dead body of his wife, “very thin and looking more like a wrinkled little child”. A scarf is tied around the woman’s head to keep her mouth closed, and a candle burns between her dead hands. A truck pulls up outside the hut, and Asunta in panic inadvertently moves another candle dangerously near to the ceiling, with its “hanging wisps of straw”.
The old man enters his hut and “the candle in the dead woman’s hand goes out”. As he lights a new candle, he is attacked by Asunta, who strangles him with a “thin leather rope” in a horrifying and animalistic fight to the death. In the struggle the door is flung open and one of the dogs enters and “immediately leaps on Asunta, tearing at her blouse and shoulder”. She fights off the dog, finally by shooting the animal “at close range between the eyes”. The dead dog is left on top of the corpse of the old man. Asunta is wounded, and strips off her ruined blouse. She is now “naked to the waist; even her trousers ar
en’t much like trousers anymore”. She uses the scarf clamping the dead woman’s jaw to bandage her own arm; crouching, “almost on all fours”, she strips the corpse’s clothes for her own use, and “close under her face she sees the gaping toothless mouth yawning at her” – a moment of horror that may have played like the distorted dead face of ‘Uncle Joe’ Grandi in a flash of neon in Touch of Evil. Asunta now “forces herself to her feet and starts putting on the blouse. It’s too small and she can hardly button it across her breasts.” The hut has caught fire; outside, “it seems that all the dogs from the barrio are there”. With her bare hands she retrieves her revolver from the flames and runs out as the hut incinerates. She momentarily holds off the dogs with gunshots, but the scene ends as “the dogs leap forward looking to her as though they were on fire themselves”.40
This sequence recalls the previously discussed offscreen killing of Señora Marvales by vicious dogs in scenes cut from Welles’s Puerto Indio sequence in The Stranger. There were thirty years between the two projects, but the motif is remarkably consistent – a fictionalised city not officially in Argentina; the vicious killing of a beautiful woman by wild dogs.
Welles and Kodar invented other violent scenes that were not in the Greene novel. The script’s opening sequence shows the massacre by guards of escaping political prisoners as well as innocents in a wedding procession. And Welles and Kodar apparently intended a much more violent end to the siege in the bidonville. Paramilitary police, who the novel reveals are trained by the United States in Panama, close in on the revolutionaries with automatic rifles: “The carnage is terrible … they finish only when nothing moves.”41
The Other Man would have made a disillusioned counterpart to It’s All True’s propagandist approach to Pan-American solidarity and its optimism about progressive urban development to erase the property of the slums. The never-made script takes us to the seemingly eternal favela on the periphery of another noirish Puerto Indio, to a “wasteland of garbage” with a view to the “distant skyline of tin shacks”,42 to another Latin American city gone to the dogs.
NOTES
1 Welles quoted in Peter Biskind (ed.), My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 214.
2 See Stefan Drössler, ‘Oja as a Gift: An Interview with Oja Kodar’, in Drössler (ed.), The Unknown Orson Welles (Munich: Belleville Verlag/Filmmuseum München, 2004), 22–44; the approximate date for Crazy Weather is based on textual evidence within the treatment: Uncredited [Orson Welles and Oja Kodar], Crazy Weather, Draft (1972?) (photocopy of annotated typescript, 143 pages, n.d.) (3 folders), 44. Box 7, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
3 See my two-part history of this project: Matthew Asprey Gear, ‘Orson Welles and the Death of Sirhan Sirhan: Part I: The Conspirators’, Bright Lights Film Journal, 20 February 2015, at http://brightlightsfilm.com/orson-welles-and-the-death-of-sirhan-sirhan-part-i-the-conspirators; and ‘Orson Welles and the Death of Sirhan Sirhan: Part II: The Safe House’, Bright Lights Film Journal, 26 February 2015, at http://brightlightsfilm.com/orson-welles-and-the-death-of-sirhan-sirhan-part-ii-the-safe-house (accessed 26 February 2015).
4 Drössler, ‘Oja as a Gift’, 43.
5 Welles’s lawyer Arnold Weissberger sent a $1,000 cheque to Greene’s agent Monica McCall covering a two-month option commencing 11 April 1977. Greene’s editor at Simon & Schuster, Michael Korda, claims Greene expressed his pleasure that Welles had optioned the novel because “there was no danger of him actually making the film”. At least one draft had already been completed by Welles and Kodar by mid-May 1977, the speed of which “certainly startled” Greene’s agent Monica McCall. See Arnold Weissberger, letter to Monica McCall, 26 April 1977, in The Other Man / Honorary Consul (1977) ‘Development Materials, 1977’, Box 11, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan; Michael Korda, Another Life: A Memoir of Other People (New York: Delta, 2000), 321; Monica McCall, letter to Arnold Weissberger, 20 May 1977, in The Other Man / Honorary Consul (1977) ‘Development materials, 1977’.
6 See Donald W. Brodsky, letter to Orson Welles, 29 December 1977, in The Other Man / Honorary Consul (1977) ‘Development materials, 1977’.
7 Arnold Weissberger, letter to Orson Welles, 20 August 1979, in The Other Man / Honorary Consul (1977) ‘Development materials, 1977’.
8 Orson Welles and Oja Kodar, The Other Man [Final?] Draft (photocopy of typescript, copy 1, n.d.) (4 folders). Box 10, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
9 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 20.
10 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 54.
11 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 141.
12 Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul (London: Vintage, 2004 [1973]), 127.
13 See Ernesto Capello, ‘Latin America Encounters Nelson Rockefeller: Imagining the Gringo Patrón in 1969’, in Jessica Stites Mor (ed.), Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 48–73.
14 Greene, The Honorary Consul, 219.
15 Greene, The Honorary Consul, 5.
16 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 94.
17 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 133.
18 Gloria Emerson, ‘Our Man in Antibes: Graham Greene’, in Graham Greene, Conversations with Graham Greene, ed. Henry J. Donaghy (Jackson; London: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 129.
19 Greene, The Honorary Consul, xxii.
20 Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (London: Vintage, 1999 [1980]), 292.
21 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 40.
22 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 133.
23 Greene, The Honorary Consul, 4.
24 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 60.
25 Welles quoted in Biskind (ed.), My Lunches with Orson, 264.
26 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 14.
27 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 64.
28 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 11.
29 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 15.
30 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 60.
31 McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, 271.
32 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 63.
33 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 57.
34 See Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 278.
35 This change is all the more interesting as Welles was himself raised Catholic, a fact not revealed, as Rosenbaum notes, until the Bogdanovich interviews published as This Is Orson Welles. See Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 183.
36 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 23–4.
37 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 73.
38 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 117.
39 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 119.
40 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 129–31.
41 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 163.
42 Welles and Kodar, The Other Man, 29.
INTERLUDE
A FREE MAN IS EVERYWHERE1
Europe & Beyond: 1947–55, 1958–85
In the 1950s Orson Welles described Europe as “a kind of frontier for us in films… It’s a less organised, more anarchistic, and freer atmosphere because it isn’t organised on an industrial basis.” He said he favoured
a touch of anarchy in a business which is as difficult and as complicated as the films … the kind of freedom that can’t go with a really superb organisation, an assembly line. I don’t happen to be a good assembly line filmmaker – but it’s possible to make very good films on the assembly line. I’m not temperamentally adapted to it.2
From late 1947 Welles attempted to direct his projects in Europe under conditions of editorial authority previously available to him only on Citizen Kane. After Italian film producer Michele Scalera went bankrupt, the already in-progress Othello was largely funded by Welles himself through fees earned for appearances in The Th
ird Man (Carol Reed, 1949), Prince of Foxes (Henry King, 1949), and The Black Rose (Henry Hathaway, 1950). The production was unable to afford at the outset even the luxury of an adequate stockpile of consistent film negative. Because of the periodic need for Welles to raise additional funds, the shoot was repeatedly postponed and resumed. Principal shooting extended from July 1949 to March 1950 in various parts of Morocco and Italy. Welles prioritised obtaining the necessary shots of actors with limited availability, leaving his own close-ups as Othello to much later stages of production.3 Welles became more reliant on editing to transform this technically, temporally, and geographically disparate footage into a cohesive assembly.
He later described the process in his essay film Filming ‘Othello’:
Iago steps from the portico of a church in Torcello, an island in the Venetian lagoon, into a Portuguese cistern off the coast of Africa. He’s crossed the world and moved between two continents in the middle of a single spoken phrase. […] A Tuscan stairway and a Moorish battlement are both parts of what in the film is a single room. Roderigo kicks Cassio in Mazagan, and gets punched back in Orvieto, a thousand miles away. Pieces were separated not just by plane trips but by breaks in time. Nothing was in continuity, I had no script girl, there was no way for the jigsaw picture to be put together except in my mind. Over a span sometimes of months I had to hold each detail in my memory, not just from sequence to sequence, but from cut to cut. And I had no cutter.4
Welles’s new piecemeal method of multi-national filmmaking, variously described as ‘patchwork’ or ‘jigsaw’, would become his preferred modus operandi. The method was cheaper and gave Welles more flexibility and control. Sometimes it meant a significant sacrifice of the technical standards expected by Hollywood, particularly in synchronised sound. From this point Welles would himself dub the speaking parts of many of his minor (and sometimes major) cast members, which allowed him to rewrite the dialogue in the editing room.