Othello’s triumphant completion (in several variant director-authorised cuts) was due to Welles’s commitment, energy, technical mastery, and practical spontaneity. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952, which undoubtedly reassured Welles of the viability of the new patchwork method.5
None of Welles’s mooted films for producer Alexander Korda came to pass in Europe, although he found great popular success as an actor in Korda’s production of The Third Man. By 1953, Welles had numerous projects in the works: a Noah’s Ark movie called Capitan Noè (also known as Two by Two), Wilde’s Salomé, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and a life of Benvenuto Cellini. His original screenplays included Operation Cinderella, a comedy about the occupation of a small Italian town by a Hollywood film crew and the town’s resistance, and V.I.P., a farce about a Mediterranean island, the “last place on Earth without either a Pepsi or a Coca-Cola concession”. There was also an original thriller, Mr. Arkadin.6 Welles’s old friend and political mentor Louis Dolivet became a novice film producer. In December 1953 Dolivet incorporated Filmorsa, a Tangier-based company specifically designed to produce Welles’s future films starting with Mr. Arkadin, and also to manage his career, which included paying off the debts incurred for Othello. Welles was under exclusive contract to Filmorsa until the end of 1956. Dolivet and Welles each invested in the venture, alongside various Swiss bankers. Filmorsa obtained a Spanish co-producer in a deal that would have seen Welles produce Arkadin, two additional films, and two television programmes. When that co-producer encountered financial difficulties, Filmorsa struck a new deal for Arkadin alone with Cervantes Films, another Spanish company.7
Under these circumstances Welles became one of the first American directors to make a film in postwar fascist Spain. The regime of Francisco Franco began to welcome international filmmakers as a useful source of foreign currency, although the local filmmaking infrastructure at the time was limited.8 Nevertheless, there were considerable advantages to Spanish co-production. Arkadin was Welles’s first experience incorporating the financial and technical resources of the state film industry of a European dictatorship. It would be years before this production strategy would deliver the artistic autonomy Welles sought.
Dolivet and Welles were profound ideological enemies of the Franco dictatorship, but they were not alone on the left in finding an acceptable accommodation with its state film industry. A year after Welles worked on Arkadin at Madrid’s Sevilla Film Studios, the formerly blacklisted Robert Rossen, who had named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, directed the epic Alexander the Great. Although the bulk of co-productions made in Spain in the 1950s and 1960s were Italian genre films, there were also a number of those large-scale US historical epics epitomised by Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (1961, narrated by Welles) and 55 Days in Peking (1963) and Anthony Mann’s El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). The producer of these roadshow spectaculars, Samuel Bronston, established his own studio in Spain, was granted favours and decorations by the Franco regime, and was active in efforts to propagandise a politically useful image of the country to the world.9
A limited form of censorship was imposed upon visiting filmmakers, but Welles seems to have avoided state interference. During a 1955 British television interview, he dismissed the question of whether filming in Spain implied a tacit support for the regime, fibbed that he had used Spanish locations only for those Arkadin scenes actually set in Spain, and claimed the film had no political component.10 But later that year, in the Basque episodes of Around the World filmed on the French side of the border, he mocked the Franco regime for banning the use of the Basque language. The Basques, Welles explained, responded to the prohibition by simply speaking “a little bit more on the Spanish side”.
* * *
Upon his return to live in Italy in 1958 after losing final cut on Touch of Evil, Welles found regular employment as an actor in European productions. Years later he explained to a Yugoslavian TV audience: “I often make bad films in order to live and I’m sorry to say quite a lot of these bad films were made in your country.”11 Unsurprisingly, few of these films are of lasting artistic merit, and although Welles’s association added a measure of prestige, he rarely delivered good performances. Sometimes he blatantly mocked or sabotaged the films in which he appeared. But Welles was not merely exchanging his bankable name for lucrative paycheques. In addition to covering his considerable living expenses, he consistently diverted his fees into his own directorial projects, as he had on Othello.
In Mexico through the second half of 1957, Welles had begun shooting a television version of Don Quixote starring Francisco Reiguera in the title role and the stalwart Akim Tamiroff as Sancho Panza. He ran out of money before he could obtain all the required footage. Thereafter Don Quixote became a long-term personal project, always evolving in form, funded directly from Welles’s acting fees or by diverting resources from other projects with which he was associated as an actor. A second-hand editing desk, which Welles installed in his house outside Rome, was payment for his small role in John Huston’s The Roots of Heaven (1958). Welles’s secretary, Audrey Stainton, recalled Welles deliberately contriving to slow down Emimmo Salvi’s production of David and Goliath in Rome in 1959 in order to take advantage of a contractual convenience: he was able to shoot Don Quixote by day in nearby Manziana drawing on the resources of that pompous epic for as long as it continued.12 Two years later Welles used a television commission from Italy’s RAI – the nine-part family travelogue Nella terra di Don Chisciotte (In the Land of Don Quixote) – as the financial basis for shooting more of Don Quixote on location in Spain.
In 1982, to those who chalked up Don Quixote as another unfinished film, Welles insisted:
I could finish the film whenever I want. I have financed it completely by myself. Nobody has the right to bother me about it. A novelist is not obliged to finish a book if he wants to interrupt it for awhile. It is my business and no one else had the right to meddle in it.13
He also promised on several occasions he would finally title the film When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?
Welles continued to develop film projects that never graduated to production. In December 1963 he published a story outline in Italian for an epic called Saladin: Three Crusaders, presumably as a prospectus for investors. In 1967 Welles and Oja Kodar adapted Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ for the mooted Poe omnibus film Spirits of the Dead, which was finally produced with segments directed by Federico Fellini, Louis Malle, and Roger Vadim. Two years later Welles and Kodar adapted Nicolas Freeling’s Dutch juvenile delinquency thriller Because of the Cats (1963). Around the same time Welles wrote a rollicking original pirate adventure comedy called Santo Spirito.14
As for the films that actually went into production through the 1960s and early 1970s, Welles operated on parallel tracks. He juggled personally owned ‘private projects’ like Don Quixote with work made with outside producers. In the latter category were The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, and F for Fake. In these cases Welles took advantage of the resources of film industries within dictatorships across the ideological spectrum: Tito’s Yugoslavia, Franco’s Spain, and the Shah’s Iran. For a time this proved to be a successful strategy. Sometimes Welles found it necessary to employ creative subterfuges to get the films made, such as piggybacking Chimes at Midnight onto a commercially orientated Treasure Island adaptation he never really intended to make.15 But the disasters that befell Welles in this period were merely financial, rather than due to the artistic interference of his producers. Despite low and unstable budgets – on The Trial it was necessary for Welles to pay some actors out of his own pocket – all of these films were commercially distributed in a form Welles approved. In this period he had created a viable though temporary path to completing his films his own way. This must be considered a significant achievement for a director whose films had met consist
ent commercial failure.
Welles was just one of many American filmmakers who took advantage of the opportunities offered by the film industries of autocratic governments. This kind of filmmaking for Welles coincided with a retreat from heedless political commentary. From 1963 to 1968 Welles and his family were based in Madrid. Despite Welles’s now quiet ideological opposition to Franco, the Spanish film industry proved most consistently amenable to his projects, although he continued to move about the continent as a vagabond actor and director. A draft narration for Orson’s Bag in 1969 reads:
I made this show all over the world – because that’s where I live, and because I tend to do a lot of different jobs all more or less at the same time, and in a lot of different places… Just movie-making keeps me on the jump all over the globe… We’re like fruit pickers, we have to go where the work is.16
In 1967 Welles ventured beyond the Iron Curtain to attempt to work with Hungary’s state film industry for an adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s The Heroine, which would have formed an omnibus of Dinesen adaptations with The Immortal Story and the never-made Full Moon. But he lost faith in his financiers and aborted the film after a day’s shooting in the Budapest Opera House.17
By the late 1960s Welles worked increasingly on the margins of independent European filmmaking, often taking seed money or other resources from unlikely sectors of the international film and television industries to allow him to commence shooting new projects without any locked-in funds for completion. The Deep, based on the 1963 thriller Dead Calm by Charles Williams, was shot on the Dalmatian Coast in 1967 and 1968. It was never quite finished. Welles began filming with very moderate support from the Yugoslavian state film industry in lieu of payment for outstanding work he had provided, including, he recalled, an otherwise unknown screenplay about the history of Sarajevo. The Deep was particularly small-scale for the usually ambitious Welles: five actors, two yachts, a drama set on water – his least urban film. Probably the key reason for its non-completion was that, as with Don Quixote, Welles was not facing external pressure to recoup the investments of other financiers. He was also dissatisfied with the result. Nevertheless, Welles kept promoting the film as an almost-finished product to producers well into the 1970s. Later, he admitted, “we just ran out of money” and the film “shows its poverty, and it looks like a TV movie”.18
Despite frequent financial duplicity, Welles was a long-term beneficiary of the Yugoslavian film industry until the death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980. On Yugoslavian television in the late 1970s, he described Tito as “the greatest man in the world today”.19 Whether this was sincere admiration, deplorable cynicism, or a nuanced appraisal of Tito’s 35-year rule of Yugoslavia between the pressures of the USSR and the West, the statement reflects badly on Welles in light of Tito’s repression of Yugoslavian filmmakers. Back in 1969, just a month after Welles shot parts of Orson’s Bag in Zagreb and attended the Belgrade premiere of the patriotic war film The Battle of Neretva, Tito had begun a round of cultural censorship, a ‘counter-offensive’, that included the banning of films and the exile (and even imprisonment) of filmmakers of the Yugoslavian ‘Black Wave’.20
Welles ventured into even more dubious alliances in order to finance his films. His energy at the beginning of the 1970s focused on two radically new experiments: The Other Side of the Wind and F for Fake. Both films were produced and partly financed in a deal with Les Films de l’Astrophore, a French-based Iranian film company headed by Mehdi Boushehri, the brother-in-law of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Welles also found it politically palatable to narrate a documentary celebrating the Shah in 1972.
F for Fake was completed quickly, although its worldwide release was staggered across several years and it failed to find commercial success or critical acclaim. The Other Side of the Wind began as one of Welles’s private projects, its film-within-a-film shot piecemeal from 1970, and then became a commercial project when Welles signed up with Astrophore and a Spanish co-producer. Managing the American-based project from a great distance, Astrophore was initially far less insistent than previous producers that Welles conform to a rigid production schedule or professional accounting. The association gave Welles a freedom and relative financial security that he hadn’t known for years. This freedom and Welles’s elaborate innovations in shooting and editing, in addition to major budgetary embezzlement and personal tax problems, meant work on The Other Side of the Wind dragged on until 1976. With the breakdown of his relationship with his producers, and finally the Iranian revolution, the film was never completed.21
Despite many efforts, Welles was unable to find workable financing in Hollywood. The only film to see release in the last ten years of Welles’s life was the low-budget essay Filming ‘Othello’, financed by West German television. He died in Los Angeles on 10 October 1985, still working on new projects in cinema.
NOTES
1 From Jeanne Moreau’s untitled poem on Orson Welles, 1975, reprinted at http://www.wellesnet.com/jeanne-moreau-on-a-free-man (accessed 11 August 2015).
2 Press Conference (1955), part I.
3 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 169–75.
4 Filming ‘Othello’.
5 I’m grateful to Stefan Drössler, director of the Munich Film Museum, for sharing with me his thoughts on this period of Welles’s career.
6 Anile, Orson Welles in Italy, 267; Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 412–13.
7 François Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’.
8 Neal M. Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America: Hollywood, Tourism and Public Relations as Postwar Spanish Soft Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 54.
9 See Rosendorf, Franco Sells Spain to America, 48–50, 56, 60–74.
10 Press Conference (1955), part I.
11 Welles quoted in the documentary Druga strana Wellesa (The Other Side of Welles, Daniel Rafaelic and Leon Rizmaul, 2005).
12 Audrey Stainton, ‘Orson Welles’ Secret’, Sight and Sound, autumn 1988, reprinted at http://www.wellesnet.com/don-quixote-orson-welles-secret (accessed 11 August 2015).
13 Welles quoted in Esteve Riambau, ‘Don Quixote: The Adventures and Misadventures of an Essay on Spain’, in Drössler (ed.), The Unknown Orson Welles, 75.
14 Scripts and treatments survive in the Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
15 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 254.
16 In Orson’s Bag (1968–70) (subseries), Draft pages (various scenes) (typescript, carbon, and photocopy, annotated), 10 April – 11 September 1969 (folder 1). Box 17, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.
17 Drössler, ‘Oja as a Gift’, 42–3; Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 282–3.
18 Bill Krohn, ‘My Favourite Mask Is Myself: An Interview with Orson Welles’, in Drössler (ed.), The Unknown Orson Welles, 54.
19 Welles quoted in Cinema Komunisto (Mila Turajlic, 2010).
20 Anonymous, Cinema Komunisto (electronic press kit) (n.d.), 21, at http://www.cinema-komunisto.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Cinema-Komunisto-EPK-ENGdec2011.pdf (accessed 11 August 2015).
21 See Josh Karp, Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Making of the Other Side of the Wind (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015).
POSTWAR EUROPE
CHAPTER 10
SKIES AND RUBBLESCAPE
Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report (1955)
I am, have been, and will be only one thing – an American.
– Charles Foster Kane
I do not know who I am.
– Gregory Arkadin
Through the 1950s and 1960s Welles was intensely interested in the operation of power, the problems of nationalism, and the meanings of freedom and justice in Europe. For a time Welles claimed to be writing a book on international government, possibly a collaboration with Louis Dolivet.1 Although the book never materialised, his current political ideas found their idiosyncratic way into Mr. Arkadin,
which was Pan-European in both its themes and its innovative mode of production. Any sort of coherence was lost, however, because once again Welles was unable to complete editing the film. It finally emerged in a set of bizarre variations seen by a limited audience.
The production of Arkadin began without a conventionally rigid shooting schedule and budget. Filming began in January 1954 and continued far beyond expectations, requiring Dolivet to repeatedly seek new funds. The production used Sevilla Film Studios in Madrid and locations in other parts of Spain, on the French Riviera, in Munich (on location and at Bavaria Studios), and in Paris (on location and at Photosonar studios in Courbevoie). Many of these locations doubled for international settings from Tangier to Acapulco.2 Welles had shot and edited what became the largely self-financed Othello on two continents over a period of more than three years; on Arkadin he seems to have shifted his approach during filming towards the same multi-national patchwork method. This time he failed to find satisfaction. Welles remembered the shoot as “just anguish from beginning to end”.3 He and Dolivet quickly realised they were not suited to working together in the film business and agreed to wind up their joint business ventures after the completion of Arkadin.4
Even before all the necessary footage had been shot, a Spanish-language version of Mr. Arkadin had been assembled by August 1954 for finance-raising purposes. Presumably to qualify for the advantages of Spanish co-production status, two Spanish actresses, Amparo Rivelles and Irene López Heredia, gave performances that were later replaced in non-Spanish versions by Suzanne Flon and Katina Paxinou, respectively. Welles missed a September 1954 deadline to complete the English-language version of the film for a premiere at the Venice Film Festival; sporadic shooting was still going on in France as late as October.5 A major falling out between Welles and Dolivet over the prolonged editing process – according to editor Renzo Lucidi, Welles was locking in a mere two minutes per week6 – led to Welles’s departure in January 1955. The editing continued under Lucidi, with some external input from Welles, who planned to return to make a final revision; as it turned out, he did not participate further. Even under these strained conditions, Filmorsa continued to work with Welles and insist he honour his exclusive contract. The company funded test material for Don Quixote in Paris and worked alongside a British company, Associated-Rediffusion, to produce Welles’s documentary series Around the World with Orson Welles for ITV television. Welles eventually broke his contracts and returned to the United States in October 1955. He left behind incomplete film materials for only seven of the planned twenty-six episodes of Around the World.7
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