At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  When the couple arrive in town, Jim gets out at a motel bar to drink Scotch. Amparo drives on alone towards the Plaza de Toros in the town’s outskirts and is overwhelmed by traffic. The treatment focuses on Amparo’s dazed experience of the street celebrations of the feria, a ritual that had been depicted with touristic detachment in In the Land of Don Quixote.

  In F for Fake’s ‘girl-watching’ title sequence, Welles made gentle mockery of men leering at Kodar as she walked through a city during summer. That sequence was shot in Rome circa 1969 for “quite another film” – probably Orson’s Bag – but incorporated into Welles’s essay film around the same period he and Kodar wrote Crazy Weather.45

  In that ‘girl-watching’ sequence Welles turns the camera’s gaze back on the observers. By contrast, Crazy Weather’s treatment, sketchy as it is, suggests an approximation of Amparo’s subjective encounter with the spaces of a town, her encounter with its heat, dust, and crowds, while in emotional distress. Apart from George’s brief ‘last walk home’ in The Magnificent Ambersons, approximations of subjective experience are rare among Welles’s realised city sequences.

  The boy accosts Amparo outside the Plaza de Toros and insists on using Jim’s ticket. Amparo acquiesces, and then finds herself crushed by the mob. She is forced against the boy:

  F For Fake

  It takes the two in a sort of huge embrace, holding them tightly against each other… If before she’s had any thought of resisting, it’s too late… The crowd is acting as the boy’s accomplice, cutting off all possibility of retreat, forcing a prolonged physical intimacy. […] The narrow arched corridor inside the Plaza is jammed to suffocation – to near paralysis – by a steaming mass of humanity crammed so densely together that the effect is not so much of numbers as of a single heavy-breathing beast.46

  Meanwhile, Jim has a cornily macho response to his wife’s possible infidelity, which he later admits to her. His voiced-over confession presents a flashback to his meeting with a young tourist – “as dumb a female as ever came out of Germany”, the treatment notes. With “the considerable stimulant” of the “mounting allegria in the streets”, he takes her on a carousel ride. The boy appears in time to join the couple, and Jim broods with anger at how he has been made to feel middle-aged in their company. The boy, however, assumes “a certain vague air of the pimp” and leads the couple to the girl’s tent in an open hippie camp field outside the town. Then he leaves them alone.

  Later, somehow wounded by a bull’s horn – the treatment’s continuity is lost by this point – the boy criticises Jim’s Spanish fetish with a frankness that is remarkable considering Welles’s earlier television documentaries: “He’s got these picturesque notions, and a mind like a post-card. For good old Jim, Spain is granddaddy’s land. The clock stopped here somewhere in the middle of a Victorian novel…”47

  Crazy Weather joined the many other Welles projects of this period that were developed but never produced. The Other Side of the Wind, almost completely shot but not fully edited, descended into legal entanglements that were not resolved during Welles’s lifetime, and Welles’s exploration of the Hemingwayesque figure remained unseen. Yet Spain remained a setting in at least four additional works-in-progress towards the end of Welles life: early incarnations of Mercedes (aka House Party), a new essayistic conception of Don Quixote, The Dreamers, and The Big Brass Ring.

  * * *

  In 1961 Welles had gone to Seville to shoot the April feria for two episodes of In the Land of Don Quixote. In addition to more bullfighting scenes, including the graphic goring and tossing into the sand of a torero, Welles filmed the city in moving shots as the family Mercedes crawled through the narrow streets of the city (the accompanying music in the broadcast version is Bizet’s “operatic dilution” of Carmen). The family visit the Plaza de España and the Casa de Pilatos, Seville locations that would in the coming months double for parts of the Middle East in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In another scene Welles and Beatrice drive a horse-drawn cart into the Barrio de Santa Cruz, the traditional Jewish quarter, to the accompaniment of flamenco music.

  Seville returned as an imaginative setting at the end of Welles’s career in the screenplay of The Dreamers. It is a much more ambitious adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s work than The Immortal Story, which had been restricted to four speaking parts, Mr Clay’s house, and the largely empty streets and colonnaded squares of Welles’s imagined Macau. That said, The Dreamers continues Welles’s faithful embrace of Dinesen’s sombre aesthetic and her vague mid-nineteenth-century settings.

  The screenplay, written in collaboration with Kodar in the late 1970s, combines ‘The Dreamers’ and ‘Echoes’, two Dinesen tales about the character Pellegrina Leoni. With its frame story set off the coast of Africa, ‘The Dreamers’ has been described as “a curious cultural inversion of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” in which European events are related as an exotic tale to its African and Arabic listeners. The cinematic potential had already been recognised: Truman Capote had wanted to make it with Greta Garbo.48

  Dinesen established a structure of flashbacks within flashbacks. In the Welles-Kodar adaptation, a man named Lincoln tells the Pellegrina story on “a full moon night in 1870” on a dhow headed for Zanzibar. He recalls how in 1863 he met two other abandoned lovers of Pellegrina by coincidence at an inn on a high mountain pass in winter. They each tell the others a story of their obsession for a vanished lover. They conclude they have all loved the same woman. What’s more, Pellegrina promptly arrives at the inn with her Jewish “shadow”, Marcus Kleek – a breathtaking moment of dreamy illogic anticipated by one of the lovers. They chase after her through a snowstorm. She leaps from a cliff. As Pellegrina lies on her deathbed at a nearby monastery, Kleek recalls her history: she had been an opera star who had lost her voice when a theatre in Milan caught fire during a performance. Presumed dead, she abandoned her identity. The loyal Kleek followed, watched, and provided for her when it was necessary. She moved to a village in the mountains, and fell slowly in love with a young boy, Emanuele, her singing student, until cast out as a suspected witch (this village episode is the plot of ‘Echoes’). Pellegrina then set out to wander into “the great world of cities and men”. Changing her name as she pleased, she took and abandoned many lovers. And then we learn that one of the young monks in the monastery where she lies dying is Emanuele.

  Welles in Seville, 1961 (In the Land of Don Quixote)

  The screenplay relocates parts of the Pellegrina story to cities of autobiographical significance to Welles, personalising what is an otherwise faithful adaptation of the two tales. In Dinesen’s story, Lincoln’s hunt for Pellegrina takes him from Rome to Basel, Amsterdam, and finally the Alps. The screenplay makes this a brisk Arkadinesque journey through Santiago de Compostela, to Amsterdam, Dresden, Odessa, Prague, and then the Venice Carnival, where Lincoln encounters Donna Lucetta Boscari, “notorious from Vienna to Palermo, expert in poisons and aphrodisiacs, procuress to the higher clergy”. According to Kodar, Jeanne Moreau might have starred as Donna Lucetta.49 Welles had filmed documentary footage of the Venice Carnival back in 1969, possibly for incorporation into Orson’s Bag, but his interest in Venetian masques dates back to his attendance of the Beistegui ball in 1951.

  The Roman scenes in Dinesen’s story, where Lincoln first meets Pellegrina, are moved to Triana in Seville. Welles stirred in a sizeable helping of Merimee’s Carmen. Welles makes Pellegrina’s character the daughter of a Spanish baker whom one character describes as having “a little bit of gypsy phosphorescence”.50 In the sierras of Andalucía, Pellegrina wears riding clothes “still unchanged since Goya”.51 Dinesen, however, who felt a kinship with Pellegrina, once described her in terms of another Spanish archetype long familiar to Welles – she was a “Donna Quixote”.52

  In the Land of Don Quixote had presented several panoramic shots of Seville, and Welles evidently intended to return to this vantage to film the cityscape for The Dreamers. Lincoln is
said to observe Seville “as though all of Spain were laid out under his feet”. His narration remarks: “It seemed to me that I might lift the very tower of the great Cathedral in Seville between my two fingers.”53 In the Dinesen story he fantasises it is St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. A Carmenesque version of mid-nineteenth-century Seville is palpably evoked by the script, with occasionally specific ideas for visuals. The first image was to have been the naked silhouette of Pellegrina through the window of a Triana brothel, juxtaposed ironically with a male voice singing a saeta to a Madonna in a Holy Week procession. Lincoln remembers “the many smells there in that street… If ever I were to smell them again, I’d feel that I’d come home.”54 But as their romance progresses, he glimpses the ever-observant Kleek “at the far end of the street … a tall figure all in black [who] stands motionless in the shadows”55 – a very Wellesian image. Pellegrina soon vanishes.

  Struggling to find funding for this ambitious project, Welles shot several scenes at his home in Los Angeles between 1980 and 1982. He played Kleek and cast Kodar in the role of Pellegrina. Gary Graver, a young and selfless collaborator in this period, was the cinematographer. The scenes have survived and have been posthumously assembled for screening by the Munich Film Museum.56 Despite the poverty of their making, they are beautiful fragments of one of Welles’s final unfinished works.

  * * *

  By 1974 Welles was despairing of the modernisation of Spain:

  In the last six months it’s joined the glory of the present world to such an extent that you don’t know whether you’re in Los Angeles or not in half the streets in Madrid. And a great deal of the grace and the pleasure of life, at least in the big cities, is gone.57

  Franco would die the next year, clearing the way to Spanish democracy. But rather than celebrate the fall of a regime he had opposed ideologically from its very beginning, Welles was ambivalent about the change. In 1982 he reflected, “in a curious way the liberation of Spain and the fragile democracy has rather done away with both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and it’s a sad point I’ve got to make… Spain is losing its Spanishness.”58

  Welles spoke of transforming the ever-evolving Don Quixote into an essay film on this very subject called When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? It was never made, but thoughts on post-Franco Spain found their way into another project called The Big Brass Ring, which he wrote at the urging of filmmaker Henry Jaglom in 1981 and 1982. Material from a story by Oja Kodar called ‘Ivanka’ was incorporated into the original concept. Welles and Jaglom set up a deal with producer Arnon Milchan but were unable to find a star actor willing to play the lead role for a fee of two million dollars.59

  The Big Brass Ring is both a half-serious political thriller and another Arkadinesque romp. It concerns the friendship between Blake Pellarin, a US senator and as-yet failed presidential contender, and his political mentor, Kimball Menaker, a former Roosevelt advisor and Harvard professor whose homosexuality has been publicly exposed.

  Recovering after the election of Ronald Reagan, Pellarin is letting his beard grow while sailing off the coast of North Africa with his wealthy wife, Diana. When he catches Tina, a Brazilian manicurist, stealing his wife’s emerald necklace, he decides in a rash moment to help her fence it. He vanishes into Africa to seek Menaker’s help. Diana, who desperately wants to be First Lady, marshals a team of flunkeys and intelligence operatives to track down her husband and keep tabs on his activities. At the airport in Tangier Pellarin is accosted by the famous journalist Cela Brandini, who has just interviewed Menaker as background research on a story about the senator.

  Menaker’s present situation is even more absurd than that of the exiled Polish crooks of Arkadin. He lives in virtual captivity as an advisor to an African despot in the fictional Republic of Batunga, is guarded by two beautiful “mother-naked” black lesbians, and cares for an incontinent monkey. After securing Menaker’s help, Pellarin takes the monkey out of Batunga and onboard his yacht, which is docked in Barcelona. Alas, the monkey leaps overboard with the emerald necklace in its paws, disappearing forever into the depths and leaving Pellarin with the bizarre responsibility of finding cash to pay off the manicurist. But he persists. “I think the craziest promise is the sacred one,” Pellarin explains to Menaker, who joins him in Madrid.

  Spain is marching into European modernity. Menaker hears that the “paint [is] peeling off the Goyas” at the Prado because of the smog. Old cafés have become banks, even as the Gran Via’s “nineteenth century eccentricities” still show “their silhouettes against its pallid sky”.60

  Menaker’s romantic history is recalled in the memory-haunted spaces of the Retiro park. There the men will pay off Tina through her brother (Tina has not been allowed to enter Spain). Pellarin arrives at the park with a briefcase of cash. In an unpublished alternative version of the script in the form of a novella, Menaker instructs Pellarin to meet him at “the equestrian statue of some forgotten Spanish hero”. Pellarin doesn’t find it, and only after enquiries does he discover that “the statue has been gone for almost forty years”.61 In the script, Menaker is hiding behind a bush, captivated by the sight of a homeless young man asleep on a park bench. The man reminds Menaker of his crippled lover Vanni, who “caught it not far from here” more than forty years earlier in the Civil War.62 Vanni was seriously wounded but lived on for decades in Florida as an invalid.

  The Civil War comes back to life with this memory trigger. Menaker recalls to Pellarin that Madrid was the “first city that was ever bombed. And how the world was shocked. In those days we were innocent. We still believed mass murder from the skies was quite a sin.” During the war “you could take a street car to the front line. But not the subway – on the subway you could end up on the wrong side.” Menaker was staying at the Gran Via Hotel alongside “Malraux, Ehrenberg, Dos Passos”, waiting for his fighting lover to return. He pointedly notes twice that “Hemingway wasn’t there that year.”63

  Menaker and Pellarin take pity on the sleeping homeless man and stuff money into his shoes. Shortly after three “tough-looking sailors” approach, but rather than make off with the cash, they wake up the young man and insist he take better care of his money. “Where on earth could that happen except here in this dumb country?” says Menaker.64

  Pellarin’s romantic past comes to light in another part of the city. Nine years earlier, after a tour of duty in Vietnam, he had temporarily abandoned Diana to live with a French-Cambodian woman in Paris. The woman mysteriously vanished, and although Pellarin returned to Diana, he has obsessively searched for her ever since. But Menaker reveals he has kept in contact with the woman, and leads Pellarin to a rendezvous with her in a house, “once the home of some prosperous merchant in another century”,65 in the vicinity of the celebrations of the Verbena de San Juan.

  The screenplay provides a vivid visual and aural sketch of the setting. Pellarin and Menaker’s cab passes through “canned music, loud and various, blaring out… there’s a great yelping of barkers, the clatter of shooting galleries, the clickety rattle of the wheels of fortune … the cab has moved into the glare of many lights.”

  When they turn a corner, the “large, dark house blots out much of the light and baffles much of the sound … the muted growl and clatter of the Verbena Fair” is “weirdly echoed from the other side of the dark house”.66 As Pellarin prepares to enter the house, recalling his obsessive search for the woman, “the noises of the feria are muted now, melting together, like the murmur of some crazy ocean”.67 A dreamlike encounter awaits.

  Pellarin enters the house and finds the woman waiting naked for him. The script is vague as to specific visual ideas: “The scene is strange, almost surreal … (the action must be given in synopsis … The climax of this sequence is strong erotic: to spell out its specific details would be to risk pornography).”68

  Menaker walks to the feria and rides a Ferris wheel. His passenger car passes a window of the house and he spies the couple making love. When the Ferris wheel
stops its motion, Menaker’s eyes meet the naked Pellarin’s.

  The mysterious French-Cambodian woman vanishes immediately after the love-making. Pellarin searches the house for her. By now he has figured out Menaker sabotaged the adulterous relationship in Paris to protect Pellarin’s presidential chances. He promptly renounces the old man to his face. Then he has another run-in with Cela Brandini, who reveals that Menaker has for years been harbouring a sexual obsession for Pellarin, which involved a semen-stained handkerchief he had sent to Vanni in Florida. In rather opaque plotting, this causes Pellarin to utter “a sudden, terrible groan” and “wander through the dark streets of the city, searching … for his friend”.69 In a state of despair, Pellarin beats a helpless blind beggar to death under a concrete overpass in a wasteland of late-Franco Modernist architecture.

  In an outrageous dénouement at the Madrid railway station, the inspector of police returns the briefcase full of money Pellarin left at the murder scene and refuses to implicate this American VIP in the case. Pellarin is then unexpectedly reunited with Menaker on the rapid train. There will be no stops for six hours until they reach the French frontier. Pellarin buys a bottle of brandy and the men sing cheerfully together as the train departs.

  It’s a dark and strange conclusion to one of Welles’s final projects in cinema, yet another that would not be realised beyond the page. Perhaps by way of explanation Welles ends his script with: