At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  34 Monitor. The Gare had been used to receive French citizens repatriated from Nazi prison camps in 1945. See Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation, 1944–1949 (New York: Penguin, 2004 [1994]), 147.

  35 Filming ‘The Trial’.

  36 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 243.

  IMMORTAL STORIES

  CHAPTER 12

  TO ADORE THE IMPOSSIBLE

  Although Orson Welles never dropped his ambition to make films about the contemporary world, he was also frequently drawn to stories set in a mythical past free of the trappings of the twentieth century. This tendency led him to work on cinematic cities that would communicate his personal vision of an age rather than the material specifics of a precise historical moment, as he had done for Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

  For such projects Welles drew on a core group of writers. The sea tales of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, and Isak Dinesen provided adventure, moral complexity, and cosmopolitan encounters in the ports of a vanished, much larger world. Welles frequently pursued experimental adaptations of Moby Dick, including an acclaimed London stage production, ‘Moby Dick’ Rehearsed (1955), and filmed himself reading the work in the early 1970s. Welles was never able to bring Conrad’s work to the screen, but in addition to his contemporary adaptation of Heart of Darkness, he wrote screenplays based on Lord Jim and the island drama Victory (under the name Surinam).

  Many of Dinesen’s tales were located in a vague, static middle nineteenth century. In ‘The Dreamers’, which Welles adapted in the last years of his life, the narrator says: “It happened just as I tell it to you. But as to names and places, and conditions in the countries in which it all took place, and which may seem very strange to you, I will give you no explanation.”1

  In his introduction to another Dinesen adaptation, this time of the story ‘The Old Chevalier’, Welles explained:

  If these stories don’t seem to be quite true to life, it’s because they aren’t concerned with ordinary life today. They belong to a life we’ve left behind us in another century; they have to do with honour and irony … as well as love.2

  Welles departed from the twentieth-century mania for progress, disinclined to view that obsession as compatible with a civilised life. He defended his nostalgia for what he knew to be an idealised past, lamenting that “the optimists are incapable of understanding what it means to adore the impossible”.3

  Dinesen proved almost as central to Welles’s artistic sensibility as Shakespeare and Cervantes. Welles wrote:

  there is almost nothing I wouldn’t give to have spent one of those evenings on her farm at the foot of the Ngong hills. She would, she tells us, have been sitting cross-legged, like Scheherazade herself – ‘telling a long tale, from where it began, to where it ended…’4

  Dinesen’s story ‘The Old Chevalier’ was originally planned for inclusion in a Welles omnibus project, Paris by Night, in the early 1950s.5 Like all the projects he developed for Alexander Korda, it was never made, but for years afterwards Welles tried to film that tale as well as others. In the end only The Immortal Story made it to the screen. It was produced by Albina Films in collaboration with the French television station ORTF, and was intended for joint theatrical distribution and television broadcast. This chamber drama abandons itself completely to Dinesen’s elegiac, melancholy Scandinavian mood. In the late 1960s Welles began to consciously avoid his distinctive visual signatures as he shifted into colour filmmaking. A few years later The Other Side of the Wind combined a style attributed to work of the fictional director Jake Hannaford with pseudo-documentary footage; Welles also proudly boasted of F for Fake that “there isn’t a Wellesian shot in it”.6

  The scenario of The Immortal Story has the clear simplicity of a fable. Mr Clay (Welles), an elderly and wealthy merchant, employs his accountant, Levinsky (Roger Coggio), to re-stage an ‘immortal story’ frequently told among seafarers: that a rich old man hired an impoverished young sailor to impregnate his young wife. Clay wants to make this myth real. Levinsky convinces the beautiful but ageing Virginie (Jeanne Moreau) to participate in the re-enactment as the wife. Her father’s financial downfall and suicide were caused by the ruthless, money-mad Clay, who now occupies her original family home. A young virginal sailor named Paul (Norman Eshley) is selected in the streets, and the couple make love under Clay’s surveillance. But Clay’s plan is ruined when Paul falls in love with Virginie. Paul rejects the payment and refuses to share the story in the future. Clay dies with the arrival of dawn.

  Filming began in Paris in September 1966 and then moved to Spain. Welles changed Dinesen’s setting of Canton to the old Portuguese colony of Macau – the “wickedest city in the world”, according to The Lady from Shanghai’s Mike O’Hara, another wandering, impoverished sailor hired by a rich man. This nineteen-century incarnation of Macau is rather more sedate, a quiet port city. Welles created it by transforming parts of several medieval Spanish villages. In Brihüega he created the illusion of a harbour without depicting water, simply by filming tattered sails in false perspective against an ancient stone wall – a trick he’d invented on Othello. The village of Pedraza, previously used for the London of Chimes at Midnight, furnished him with a main square and that favoured architectural form, colonnades, which he painted with Chinese characters.

  Shot by Willy Kurant, The Immortal Story was Welles’s first completed film in colour. Welles edited the film at Jean-Pierre Melville’s Jenner studios in Paris and again overran his deadline. There were financial problems as the relationship between the production company and the distributors broke down, and Welles attempted to film additional Dinesen adaptations to expand the hour-long film into a more marketable feature-length omnibus. One segment was to be ‘The Heroine’, which he began shooting in Budapest in April 1967 but abandoned immediately.7 The Immortal Story’s scheduled premiere at Cannes was cancelled due to the protests of May 1968. It finally premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in June and for many years remained in obscurity.

  * * *

  While Dinesen’s static past allowed Welles to indulge in pure storytelling, he found more profound resonance in depicting change, the ruthless shedding of old values, the obliteration of the spirit of an age for a modernity that was somehow smaller in human terms – what Welles described as a “moral takeover”.8 Early on he’d found the theme in Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, but in later years he explored the idea of this “takeover” in the more distant European past. In several cases he used contrasting models of urban spaces to emphasise the transition.

  Welles declared himself a “Man of the Middle Ages, with implications due to the barbarity of America”.9 One of his most powerful sequences is the meditation in F for Fake on Chartres Cathedral, emblem of anonymous medieval ingenuity, “the premier work of man perhaps in the whole western world”:

  You know it might be just this one anonymous glory of all things, this rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose when all our cities are dust, to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.

  An idealised conception of the Middle Ages had emerged in Marxist circles in postwar America, particularly through revivals of early community-based music and liturgical drama.10 But Orson Welles’s medieval enthusiasms were of a different, much more personal order. Bill Krohn has argued for the profound importance of the period to the filmmaker. The culture of the Middle Ages offered favoured artistic forms including the carnivalesque and the types of storytelling that were forged in encounters between the sailor and the farmer in medieval trading cities.11

  Welles was fascinated by the concept of chivalry. “What interests me is the idea of these dated old virtues,” he said, “and why they still seem to speak to us when, by all logic, they’re so hopelessly irrelevant.” The obsessions of Welles’s middle period were two characters representative of a romanticised medieval past
who have somehow washed up, comically and tragically, into a period of bitter obsolescence. Don Quixote is a lunatic self-styled model of romantic chivalry who sets forth not into Cervantes’s brutal and fallen seventeenth century of brigands, unchaste ladies, and windmills, but into the brutal and fallen twentieth, encountering the urban junkyard, women on Vespas, and the lies of the cinema screen. Welles explained that “the anachronism of Don Quixote’s knightly armor in what was Cervantes’ own modern time doesn’t show up very sharply now. I’ve simply translated the anachronism.”12

  The other figure was Shakespeare’s Falstaff, to Welles “the greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in all drama. […] His goodness is like bread, like wine.”13 This relic of medieval ‘Merrie England’ is rendered obsolete by a colder epoch creeping over London around 1400 following the usurpation of the crown by Henry Bolingbroke. Welles believed “When the last of the Plantagenets was gone that magic was gone out of England. Chivalry died with it. The very moment of the death of chivalry is the death of Hotspur – the last of the true knights.”14

  Welles never went long without returning to Shakespeare, whether on stage, on radio, or in film.15 Simon Callow assesses that Welles had “no interest … in Elizabethan stage conventions, but was increasingly gripped by the Elizabethan lived experience”.16 Welles recognised Shakespeare as

  close to the origins of his own culture: the language he wrote had just been formed; the old England, the old Europe of the Middle Ages, still lived in the memory of the people of Stratford. He was very close, you understand, to quite another epoch, and yet he stood in the doorway of our ‘modern’ world. His lyricism, his comic zest, his humanity came from those ties with the past.17

  Chimes at Midnight, at the peak of Welles’s achievements in cinema, was the final stage of his long-evolving Falstaff project. Welles created a new play by reworking both parts of Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II, and Henry V, re-structuring the material around Falstaff and Prince Hal.18 Welles produced a version of this project in 1939 with the Mercury Theatre as Five Kings (Part One). He revived the concept as Chimes at Midnight in 1960 at the Dublin Gate Theatre. By 1964 Welles had managed to cobble together a small budget working with producers Emiliano Piedra and Ángel Escolano in a Spanish co-production. He sold the project on the promise of concurrently making a version of Treasure Island, but after a few weeks plundered that production’s resources and finished only Chimes at Midnight.19

  The drama of Chimes at Midnight: Sir John Falstaff (Welles) is an ageing glutton, a drunkard, a casual conman, and a petty thief. Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) is his willing companion in debauched revelry, to the disapproval of his austere father, King Henry IV (John Gielgud). The drama, set at the commencement of the fifteenth century, centres on Hal’s wavering between the life-loving hedonism represented by Falstaff and his father’s call to royal duty. War comes between the King and the Percys, led by Hotspur (Norman Rodway). Falstaff drafts a pathetic army. Many die in the bloody Battle of Shrewsbury, but the King prevails. Hal kills Hotspur on the field of battle; Falstaff makes a mockery of Hotspur’s death by claiming, in the presence of the King, that he was Hotspur’s killer. Upon the death of his father, Hal assumes the crown and publicly renounces Falstaff – “I know thee not, old man” – and banishes him. Falstaff, grief-stricken, dies.

  A completely fictional London of 1400 was created by a patchwork of shots from various locations around Spain, the type of composite cinematic city that had by now become Welles’s trademark. Welles once nominated the Spanish city of Ávila as his favourite place in the world; he found it a “very strange, tragic place”.20 The walls of Ávila stand in for the ramparts of the King’s castle. Welles found further useful locations in the villages of Calatañazor and Pedraza outside Madrid.21

  The medieval streets of ‘London’

  The dying spirit of Merrie England is embodied most corpulently by Falstaff, and Welles’s imagined London is an earthy city of material contrasts that symbolise the “moral takeover” on the cusp of the Renaissance. The two principal settings – the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap and the King’s castle – reflect this contrast and face off across a field that Prince Hal must cross on several occasions.

  Many critics have observed the symbolic contrast between the wood of the tavern and the cold stone of the castle. Andrew Davies writes:

  The interaction throughout the film of wood and stone as seminal spatial elements sustains the central conflict between the waning world of organic spontaneity on the one hand, and the emerging world which is to be rational, detached, opportunistic and essentially inorganic, on the other.22

  Falstaff in the Boar’s Head Tavern, watching Hal walk towards the ramparts of the castle

  The Boar’s Head Tavern set was built inside a warehouse in Carabanchel, a suburban district of Madrid.23 This “bawdy house” is the centre of the Falstaffian community, of mischief and fun, of play acting and practical jokes, of drunkenness and fornication. Welles does not idealise the setting but immerses his characters in its earthiness. To James Naremore, the tavern is not an unambiguously warm environment but rather “a bare, rough, excremental atmosphere filled with pansexual displays of affection, where, in the latter parts of the film, imagery of disease and death predominates”.24

  * * *

  Welles had earlier tapped into the conflict between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance for his cinematic interpretation of Othello. In his essay film Filming ‘Othello’, Welles agreed with critic Jack J. Jorgens that he had “tried to depict a whole world in collapse, a world that is a metaphor not just for Othello’s mind but for an epic, pre-Modern age”.25

  The play is split between two locations symbolic of this division. The first act takes place in Renaissance Venice and the rest in wild Cyprus. Paraphrasing the critical judgments of Jorgens and André Bazin, Welles explained:

  In Venice, Iago’s attempts to sow discord are frustrated, he’s but a shadow on the canal, or a lurking whisperer, a threat, a possibility. The civilized order of Venice is embodied in rich harmonious architecture, placid canals, and in the symmetrical altar at which Othello and Desdemona are married. In Cyprus, at the frontier of the civilized world, the restraints of Venice are lifted – art, luxury, and institutions are taken away, and the longer we’re in Cyprus, the more the involuted Iago style triumphs over the heroic and lyrical Othello style in the film.

  Welles drew on the Renaissance paintings of Vittore Carpaccio as “the source for the costumes and the general aesthetic of the movie”. But the final realisation of the two settings was the result of Welles’s creative responses to the production’s financial problems. In 1948/49, when Othello was still to be a French-Italian co-production by Michele Scalera, Welles planned totally different cityscapes with the Hungarian art director Alexandre Trauner. According to Welles, Trauner designed Cyprus as “a grimly handsome fortress of a place, starkly poised between Veneto and Byzantium, and for our movie much more right than anything real which might still be standing in this century”.26 It would have been built at the Victorine Studios in Nice, along with Venice itself.27 Welles reasoned that

  if for three fourths of our film we were to inhabit an invented world [Cyprus] rather than a series of real locations, then our version of reality would have been merely mocked by those famous and familiar old stones of Venice. There could be no stylistic integrity unless Venice too would be a Venice by Trauner, a city totally undeveloped by the tourist industry.

  But Scalera soon withdrew and Welles had to rely on his own resources to fund the film. Thereafter “nothing was designed; everything had to be found, hence all that globe-trotting”.28 He used real locations in Venice, and elsewhere. Welles not only avoided the cinematic clichés of Venice, but was totally unfaithful to the city’s real geographic layout, making his own city out of disparate found elements. Welles began to deprioritise typical editing continuity, welding the film together by the force of his vision.29 In t
his mishmash, Welles created a Venice almost as fictional as Trauner’s unrealised studio version.

  The Venice of Othello

  * * *

  Welles reimagined Venice again – an eighteenth-century version – for another radical Shakespearean adaptation that he shot in 1969.30 An unfinished and much-abridged version of The Merchant of Venice, which his script calls ‘The Shylock Story’, was to be part of the Orson’s Bag television special.31 For decades most of the edited workprint was thought stolen, but it eventually turned up in a cache of lost Welles films in Pordenone, Italy, enabling a reconstruction from the original negative by Cinemazero and the Munich Film Museum in 2015.32

  Welles again canvased the European palimpsest to find a variety of urban locations, which were combined into the cinematic Venice of ‘The Shylock Story’. He filmed in Italy and Yugoslavia. Peter Bogdanovich writes that Welles believed “the Dalmation coast, having once been part of the Venetian Empire, is full of the right sort of architecture”.33

  Welles’s scripted introduction defines this Venice as a “light-hearted, cold-hearted city … something hard and cruel lurking under the brilliant carnival facade”.34 The film contains haunting scenes of a near-empty city. Welles again uses colonnades as an architectural element. The colonnades hide masked figures who track Shylock’s slow progress.

  In Filming ‘Othello’, again paraphrasing critical commentary, Welles explained the use of a key motif in his earlier Shakespeare film: