Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  To this end, he had William Alland read aloud from Ben Hecht’s curious, uncharacteristic The Kingdom of Evil – A Continuation of the Journal of Fantasius Mallare, so that Welles might imaginatively connect with what his face was becoming. Pauline Kael strongly suggests that the high bald dome of the later Kane, one of the most memorable of the film’s images, may have been fashioned after Peter Lorre’s in Karl Freund’s film, Mad Love, on which the second cameraman was Gregg Toland; more to the point, as with all the ingredients of Citizen Kane, is the expressive purpose. The egg-head of Kane’s lonely old age renders him strangely frustrated, an unexploded bomb of a man, endowed with an archaic quality, out of time and out of place. He seems (as he roams the vast echoing halls of his palace) a Fairy Tale King inconsolably mourning. The spirit of Fantasius Mallare lives.

  Of great value in refining the make-ups were the screen tests. Ruth Warrick’s was played opposite Welles: his debut on film. He could neither remember the lines nor play the scene. It was all right, though; he had the part.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Shooting Kane

  THE OFFICIAL starting date for the movie was August 1st. Perry Ferguson shrewdly suggested that since they were attempting so many new things, it might be a good idea to shoot the first few scenes under the guise of screen tests. Welles can only have been relieved by the suggestion; RKO were planning to make a great to-do about the first day of shooting. So, three days earlier, the crew and Welles, with a couple of actors piled into a screening room on the RKO lot, and attempted to shoot the scene immediately following the NEWS ON THE MARCH newsreel: the crucial scene in which the editor sends Thompson out to discover the meaning of Rosebud. (Welles was always rather sniffy about Rosebud, attributing it and everything to do with it to Mankiewicz; it is, in fact, an almost perfect McGuffin in the classic definition of Hitchcock: something which greatly exercises the characters but is not crucial to the plot.)

  It was an ideal scene for their purposes: it tested Toland’s experiment with both very low and very high light, it enabled Welles (who was not in it, another advantage) to stage a group scene of no psychological complexity but some physical difficulty, it challenged the sound department to deal with the for the most part overlapping dialogue. It worked brilliantly; even the drawback to doing the scene – the absence of the newsreel itself, which had not yet, of course, been shot – turned out to be a boon: the image of the vacant screen, with light streaming out of it, is in itself highly arresting. Welles and Toland had set, in this very first clandestine day of shooting, the style for the film: they were speaking a language, with remarkable fluency. The same scene, as written, could have been shot very staidly. The newsreel would have come to an end; the lights would have come up in the projection booth, and the setup: Who Or What Was Rosebud? spelt out very clearly. Instead, at the risk of confusion, the audience is hurled from the familiar but stylised world of the newsreel into the centre of a scene of urgency and mystery. This atmosphere was the achievement of all the collaborators. The second revised final shooting script (the published script) dated 15 July 1940, two weeks before the scene was shot, says: ‘During this scene, nobody’s face is really seen. Sections of their bodies are picked out by a table light, a silhouette is thrown onto the screen and their faces and their bodies are themselves thrown into silhouette against the brilliant slanting rays of light from the projection booth.’1 It is impossible and fruitless to determine who wrote these words, Welles or Mankiewicz. The fact is that what was shot on that first, bootleg day, was what they intended to shoot. It had been imagined and planned; and it worked.

  Still claiming that what they were shooting were tests, in rapid succession they filmed three particularly challenging sequences. The first was the scene with Susan Alexander in the nightclub, backgrounds for which were appropriated from a Western set on the lot. (Welles’s ploy of ‘testing’ turned back on him when the casting department sent the actor Gino Corrado for the part of the waiter: ‘he’s the waiter in every movie ever made! And I couldn’t possibly send him away on the basis that he was too well-known a face because I was claiming to be testing.’)2 Technically, Toland was faced in this sequence with the challenge of an extreme pan down into the club, and a track to behind the telephone booth, revealing the whole of the club with figures in the middle and the full depth of the set. Depth of focus was again the challenge in the suicide scene, keeping the foreground pill bottle, the middle ground Susan and the background Kane and servants all equally sharp. With those three days under their belts, the team was ready to go public. ‘Silence! Genius At Work!’ cried the Motion Picture Herald, not without mockery, unaware that the genius had pulled a fast one, and was now fully in his stride.

  Early on, there came, as there inevitably must, a crisis of inexperience. Welles charmingly suggests that he had not realised that in a film, the cameraman is responsible for lighting, and had gone round setting the lights, while Toland quietly followed behind, readjusting them. In the theatre, Welles claims, he had always been responsible for this. Setting aside the slight to Jean Rosenthal, it is inconceivable that Welles should have thought that the lights were his responsibility. The gaffers, who are directly answerable to the cinematographer, would never have taken instruction from anyone else, and it is quite impossible on a film set to arrange the lighting apparatus without the gaffers. What does have the ring of truth is Welles’s assertion that Toland always covered up for his ignorance, taking him to one side and murmuring advice, away from the other technicians or the actors. A film crew is a daunting organisation for a first-time director: a team of experts any one of whom must, in the nature of things, have been involved in many more films than the tyro director. They’ve seen it all.

  Welles shrewdly treated them with respect, and formed a healthy relationship with them, but Toland’s attitude was the crucial one. Film crews are pack animals: if the leader extends his approval, then they follow suit. Toland, thrilled to be working with someone who trusted him absolutely and was prepared to listen to him at any time, repaid that trust with the same willingness to try anything Welles suggested. He was particularly grateful to Welles for giving him time. ‘He was willing,’ he wrote admiringly, ‘and this is very rare in Hollywood, that I take weeks to achieve a desired photographic effect.’3 Soon, however, Welles stumbled. It was the question of screen direction, a vexed and undying controversy: which way do you look when what you’re looking at is off-camera? Having, he told Leslie Megahey in his BBC interviews, watched Stagecoach forty-five times, in which all the directions are wrong, he didn’t see why it was important. Failing to understand the explanation proffered, he very wisely closed down shooting for the day; Toland took him home, and quietly made it clear. ‘I said, well, God, there’s a lot of stuff here I don’t understand and he said there’s nothing I can’t teach you here in three hours. It was his remark.’4 Lucky, lucky Welles to have a collaborator who was prepared to spend the time explaining, instead of using his ignorance as a way of dominating him. And brave Welles, for not simply soldiering on in ignorance, but getting on top of it. These things can only be learned on the floor. No amount of preparation could have taught him.

  Welles made the startling claim to Peter Bogdanovich that he knew from the first day of this, his first film, where he wanted the camera: in other words, what the frame was, and how to achieve it. ‘I think I share with Hitchcock the ability to say what lens goes in the camera and where it stands without consulting a finder or looking in the camera,’ he said. ‘I just walk over and say “There it is.” I may be dead wrong, but I’m so certain that nothing can shake it. It’s the only thing I’m certain of. But to me it seems there’s only one place the camera can be … it’s not creative, because it is an instinctive thing … the one thing I’m rock-like about is where it’s seen from, by what lens and so on. That doesn’t seem to me to be open to discussion.’ These are heart-stopping words. This ability of Welles has been attested by many of Welles’s later collaborators; if it is t
rue that he knew it already on Citizen Kane, then his understanding of film was indeed in his bones, in his blood. There is no evidence, one way or the other, but is indeed remarkable for someone who a bare year earlier had diligently swotted up Miriam Geiger’s kindergarten film primer. He was a very quick learner, without question, and film was clearly a medium for which he had both appetite and flair. The instinctive placement of the camera and choice of lens (something to which cameramen with years of experience would hesitate to lay claim) is in the realm of the mystical, and is not, perhaps, susceptible to further investigation.

  His rapport with actors, however, and his ability to vitalise them were not in question. Surrounded by old friends, and a few new ones, he spurred them on to a freshness and verve which fifty years has done nothing to diminish. Their delight in the new medium is as infectious as Welles’s. Given the decision to avoid cutting from one actor to another as much as possible, he was able to stage scenes with great theatrical vitality. Most of the scenes in Citizen Kane are what would simply be the starting point for another film: the master shot, encompassing all the action, into which all manner of details – reactions and close-ups – would be interpolated. In some films, the master shot is a mere formality, establishing the scene’s essential choreography and scarcely if at all appearing in the film; this approach calls for very different skills from both the actors and the director. In shooting Citizen Kane Welles behaved much as he would have done in the theatre: he staged the scene, then ran it a couple of times, then Toland shot it. Their technique of the endlessly dollying camera required the utmost precision from the actors in the matter of hitting marks. Welles was ruthless, as he had been in the theatre, in drilling the scenes to the point of perfection; he was equally ruthless in establishing the right mood or feeling, however long it took. In the theatre, where the actors, the stage managers and the director are alone during rehearsals, this is quite normal; in film, where nearly a hundred people are present for even the smallest shot, it is another matter. There is, too, the question of the schedule; artists are employed for restricted periods, after which they become unavailable; the same is true of technicians.

  Welles was unmoved by any of these considerations. The single most remarkable thing about Welles’s approach on his first film – beyond even his talent and imagination and leadership – is his refusal to accept anything that was unsatisfactory to him. Nor did he ever seem not to know what to do next. He always had an idea, however much he might modify it. Brady unconvincingly reports that Welles disappeared for a few days at a time during the shoot ‘always returning refreshed’. This is inconceivable; RKO would have closed the picture down, and they would have been right. The notion of the Director as Truant, odd in the theatre, is simply out of the question in movies, particularly one in which the director is also the leading actor. Just once, he was stumped, and said so. ‘I walked away, early in the morning – just quit for the day and went home,’ he told Bogdanovich. ‘Made a big scandal. I just had no idea what to do. Came back the next day.’ This is confirmed by Mark Robson, the assistant editor. ‘He had a huge set of Xanadu built on Stage 9 at RKO and then he didn’t know what to do with it. He feigned sickness and stayed home until he figured out how to use the set. What he finally decided was brilliant. Meanwhile the entire cast and crew remained idle.’5 This is staggeringly brave.

  It is a measure of his almost inhuman confidence that he was prepared to shoot a scene, as Paul Stewart reports, as often as it took to get it right. ‘He shot more film than anyone in the history of the cinema. One day he shot more than three thousand metres of film. He got up to the hundredth take, then started again at five, so the studio wouldn’t know. He printed nothing from that day’s work, then the next day he got the shot in two takes.’6 In the case of Joseph Cotten, when Welles simply had to release him so that he could start his tour of The Philadelphia Story, he worked him (and the crew, and himself) for twenty-four hours without sleep. This had the advantage of making Cotten’s drunkenness uncommonly convincing; when he stumbled over his lines, saying crimitism instead of criticism, it is a spontaneous mistake, one with which Welles was delighted, and which he incorporated into the scene. Stewart made some interesting observations to François Thomas about Welles’s approach: ‘My first line in Citizen Kane is “Rosebud? I’ll tell you about Rosebud. How much is it worth to you?” We rehearsed that for two and a half hours: just that line. And he’d say, Again, again.’

  Often it was to make the actor relax, to forget that he was acting, to get from him something only he knew was there. So much so that the result was something which in its final form belonged entirely to the actor. His character note to Stewart is typical: ‘You’ve made more money running Xanadu than Kane ever did … you’ve been stealing for years. You’ve ordered tomatoes and stolen half of them. You’ve ordered hundreds of crates of champagne and sold them. That’s your character; that’s all you need to know. No one has the slightest idea how you do what you do.’ Welles always referred to his old radio colleague, a sophisticated, elegant man, as the Godfather, or the Mafioso, and he cast him in this film and others, quite openly, for a sinister quality he saw in him.

  He carried this life-into-art approach painfully far with Dorothy Comingore. Having cast her as Susan Alexander, he cultivated her socially, building up her confidence and self-esteem. The moment the film started shooting he changed his entire attitude, harassing and abusing her. Ruth Warrick, appalled at what she took to be his schizophrenic behaviour, drew him aside and reproached him. ‘Oh,’ he said, airily, ‘it’s good for the character.’ The terrible fact is, he may have been right. Certainly her performance in the film is outstanding; equally certainly, she never did anything to match it. Welles’s method (one common to many film directors) was to secure the result that satisfied him – and he was never sure in advance what that might be – by any means that seemed appropriate. He was not interested in psychology. His notes to actors, as to Paul Stewart as Raymond, were based on a notion of character which expressed itself in paradoxical types (the butler who steals). This approach can best be described as anecdotal; its impact is cerebral, not visceral. The audience feels that they’ve got the point of the character, not that they’ve experienced him in all his richness. Welles’s real concern was not with the essence of the character but his tempo, pitch and rhythm: his texture. This is as true of his own performance as those of his fellow actors. It is a curious fact that whenever Welles spoke of films that he admired, he cited the great neo-realists: Rossellini, de Sica and so on. Their warmth, richness, and sense of life lived transcended, he said, any technical limitations. Stagecoach itself is suffused with humanity, and this was his textbook. And yet in his own films, his own performances and those of his actors rarely touch a human core. The shining exception, in Citizen Kane and even more strikingly in The Magnificent Ambersons, is Agnes Moorhead, whom Welles, interestingly, described as ‘the best actor I’ve ever known’. He was drawn to her work, but he could neither touch his own centre in the way she touched hers, nor bring it out in the other actors. What he gave them was fun, energy, intelligence, and, as Vincent Price had said of him at the Mercury, ‘wonderful things to do’.

  As far as his own performance is concerned, he takes his keynote from Hearst’s life: a high-spirited young radical becomes an angry old reactionary. He plays straight down that line, finding the appropriate texture at every point. The performance amounts to a series of statements about each of the phases of Kane’s life. Even in the scenes of Kane’s young manhood, there is about the performance a stiffness (partly the result of the corsets and the fish-skin, the arch supports for deportment and the steel brace for a flat stomach), a lack of spontaneity which is undoubtedly highly appropriate for Charles Foster Kane: the performance, like Kane’s life, is a triumph of will. It is a triumph of another sort, of course: simply logistically, it is staggering to have undertaken the leading part in your first film as a director which is also your first performance in front of
the cameras, especially in a role like that of Kane, where you age over fifty years. The disadvantage is that, however intelligent and sympathetic your colleagues, and no matter what excellent advice they may give you, there can never be a moment in which you are alone, able simply to dwell in the character, to let it flow mysteriously through the underground chambers of your own personality. The character will never have an independent existence, will simply be a creature of the film itself. You will never, however egotistical and imposing a personality you may be, have the opportunity of being properly selfish as an actor must be, demanding time for yourself, giving yourself over wholly to your intuition and letting your mind rest. Unless you have a defined star persona (such as Welles only acquired during his later, fatter years) you are condemned to linearity. There is no more linear performance in the history of film than that of Welles in Citizen Kane. And what is wrong with that? Nothing; except that what comes only from the mind, reaches only to the mind. Nothing more is stirred.