Orson Welles, Vol I

by Simon Callow

  HG: This new picture of yours – you’re the producer, the art director, you’re EVERYTHING.

  OW: It’s a new sort of a motion picture with a new method of presentation and a few new technical experiments and a few new methods of telling a picture.

  HG: If I don’t misunderstand you completely there’ll be a lot of jolly good new noises in it.

  OW: I hope there will be a lot of jolly good noises in it … it’s just what the motion pictures need these days. They could well afford these days, some jolly good new noises … I can think of nothing more desirable. I’m all for it.

  It was to implement those jolly new noises that Welles returned to Hollywood (somewhat richer, though large amounts of his earnings had already been disbursed in advances). The shoot had been hugely successful, but it was only the beginning.

  It is easy for an inexperienced director to use up all his energy on the dramatic activity of actually shooting the film; not Welles. He instinctively knew the importance of sound and music, and had planned both carefully in advance. He may not, on the other hand, have immediately realised what he could do with optical technology, but when he did, there was no holding him back. RKO had one of the most advanced special effects departments in the industry, headed by Vernon Walker (whose speciality was back projection) but effectively dominated by the brilliant innovator Linwood Dunn, pioneer of optical printing. The methods he developed lent themselves to many more purposes than would normally be understood by the phrase ‘special effects’. They did not necessarily concern themselves with the extraordinary or the extra-terrestrial. Their essence was their invisibility to the naked eye. Almost everything concerning the leopard in Hawks’s Bringing up Baby, shot for RKO in 1938, for example, was achieved by superimposing the scenes containing the stars onto previously shot footage containing the leopard and its handler who had been blotted out; all this was Dunn’s work. Welles and he applied their combined brilliance to the footage of Citizen Kane, transforming it to a quite unheard of degree.

  A great deal of celluloid wizardry had already been achieved in the camera, things that would normally be achieved optically. Toland was an inventive man, and he was proud of what his camera could do. Many of the remarkable compositions in Citizen Kane had been shot by means of double exposures: a foreground figure would be shot, the film would be threaded through the camera again, and then the background figures would be shot on the same film. Many of the fade-ins and fade-outs were actually created on the set, using controlled dimmers. Observing Toland at work, Dunn, a forthright man, told Toland that a lot of the effects he was labouring to achieve could much more easily be accomplished by optical printing. Toland loathed the technique because of the deterioration of the image, and said so. By a strange irony, however, thanks partly to Welles’s passionate embrace of the optical printer, a large number of the scenes Toland shot (up to 50 per cent of the entire film; in some reels 80 to 90 per cent) were modified by Dunn. Some of the elements most espoused by Toland were in fact created optically. ‘Many of Citizen Kane’s deep-focus effects had been created by [Vernon] Walker’s unit,’21 writes David Bordwell in a remarkable account of Toland’s achievements in the cinema of the thirties and forties. ‘Several of the Xanadu shots, ceilings included, were mattes. The shot of Kane firing Leland was done in back-projection … many normally looking scenes were optical composites of units photographed separately.’

  ‘Telling Orson about the optical printer was the kiss of death,’22 said Dunn. He might have said ‘kiss of life’. Welles had discovered a means of introducing almost limitless improvements to what he had shot. Dunn told him that he could do ‘anything at all’ with optical printing; the only obstacles were time and money. The processes involved are slow and complex. Robert Carringer cites a memo from Vernon Walker to the front office, explaining that the delays in completing its share of work are due to Welles’s intransigence and his habit of coming up with new ideas after the fact. One of the most extraordinary of these is in the sequence at the Thatcher Memorial Library. The camera pans down a monumental statue of Thatcher onto the female guard. Both the statue and the pan are entirely the work of Dunn. As Toland shot it, the scene started on the guard. Dunn made a miniature model of Thatcher (George Colouris, who was paid for sitting for it) and perfectly matched the base of the statue with what had been shot. This is breathtaking, and it accounts for scene after scene: the famous crane shot over the roof and into Susan Alexander’s night-club is two separate shots linked by an apparent flash of lightning; the pan up into the wings during the opera sequence is another.

  Welles the conjuror delighted in the informal name of optical effects: ‘trick shots’. Dunn was a sorcerer, to be sure, (if a slightly grumpy one) and Welles, enchanted by the process, wanted to join in. Dunn acknowledged his apprentice’s talent, revealed in ‘flashes of inspiration’: when confronted with the blurred effect of shooting closer and closer, optically, on the glass globe containing the snow scene, Welles suggested superimposing more snow onto it. The result was a triumph. As his own producer, of course, Welles was able to authorise all the extra work. Again, what is striking is his insistence on his complete satisfaction with the results. This is the ‘intransigence’ noted by Vernon Walker. ‘I was months and months and months turning down versions of them, day after day, until they got good enough,’23 Welles told Bogdanovich. ‘Trick work can be good enough, but you must be brutal about it. Just refuse it, refuse it till it gets better.’ For a tyro to deal so surely and uncompromisingly with a seasoned pro like Dunn is remarkable; he, and many of his colleagues, while neither specially liking nor admiring Welles, acknowledged that they had learned a great deal from him. He pushed them further than they knew they could go. Not that he knew where he was going; he just knew it could be better. As far as Dunn’s and Walker’s department is concerned, their contribution to the film is immeasurable. It also explains, as David Bordwell points out, why Toland’s other films (in which he didn’t use optical effects) lack such extreme depth of focus. A lot of the film as it stands is a kind of trompe-l’oeil, a visual conjuring trick. Even more than most films, Citizen Kane is not quite all it seems to be.

  Special effects thus proved more important to the film than editing in the formal sense. Welles started filming with a senior editor, George Crone, at his side, but it soon became apparent that he was too slow for Welles, and was replaced by whizz kid Robert Wise, only a year older than Welles, hotfoot from working on The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, RKO’s blockbuster of the previous year, where he had equal editing credit with Robert Hamilton. He brought with him his assistant, Mark Robson. Both men became directors in their own right within a couple of years of their work on Citizen Kane. Though, as Welles said, there was, because of the way he shot it, ‘nothing to cut in Citizen Kane’ by comparison with many movies, the all-important question of rhythm exercised the department for many weeks under Welles’s ruthless if erratic guidance. One frame more or less can transform a sequence; Welles would not rest until he was perfectly satisfied with the results.

  The flashiest piece of editing in the film, the pastiche News on the March newsreel was, by another brilliant directorial decision, farmed out to actual newsreel editors with their idiosyncratic cutting style; the music came from RKO’s stock library. In further pursuit of authenticity, he had tried to hire Van Vorhees, the actual voice of The March of Time, but his fee was prohibitive, so the cry of Vakhtangov! was heard again. Bill Alland did a creditable impersonation, aided by Houseman’s wickedly parodistic text (which is not far from Wolcott Gibbs’s celebrated send-up of Time-ese: ‘Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind!’).24 Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael reports, had wanted to use the News on the March sequence as a summary of the transformation of popular journalism: pre-Hearst, Hearst, and then Luce; Hearst’s own Hearst-Metrodome news film, News of the Day is mocked in the title, as much as Luce’s March of Time. Formally speaking, it is interesting to note that the newsreel within the film offers a synopsis of t
he story in advance, in the Greek manner; this was scarcely in the authors’ minds at the time. As Houseman says: ‘if you’re going to do a chronicle picture about a great man, you almost inevitably were going to use The March of Time.’ The crucial thing, private parodistic jokes apart, was to make it convincing. Toland’s Realism was the criterion. It was Wise and Robson, in pursuit of that realism, who shocked their colleagues by dragging the completed sequence across the studio floor and trampling on it, in order to create the authentically grainy and battered effect. The result of all this was the single most impressive, most spoken-of element in the movie.

  The integration of the optical elements was another crucial and painstaking task, but Wise was most struck by Welles’s approach to sound. ‘He overwhelmed me with his radio background and his masterful use of sound, stretching the boundaries of how I thought sound could be used.’25 Citizen Kane represents a real leap forward in the use of sound in motion pictures. It really was a ‘radio picture’, the first RKO film that could be so described since Sarnoff had invented his slogan. The function of sound in a movie is surprising, contributing enormously but generally subliminally. Ambient sound and sound effects can transform a sequence with the simplest of means: a clock ticking, a distant dog barking, the wind, the laughter of children. Any or all of these radically alter the sense of time or place in what is perceived by the eye; most of them are only subconsciously registered. For Welles with his acute awareness of selection and manipulation of sounds, this was only a beginning. His greatest innovation on radio had been the creation of a melos in which he dared to mingle voices (often overlapping) with effects and music; equally striking was his strong sense of the value of silence – not something of which a lot was heard in movies of the thirties. Applying all of this experience to his new medium, he used sound to lead the eye.

  Hitherto, in film, what you heard was what you saw. In Citizen Kane, for the first time, you heard something – a line, a sound – and then saw where it was coming from. The audience’s mind is thus kept in a state of continuous curiosity and alertness. There is, further, no pretence that you are not watching a film (pace Toland). What’s the next shot? Where is the next scene? the audience wants to know. It is one step further away from the beau idéal of film-makers of the thirties, the illusion of reality. The implications for the editors were considerable, as, of course, for the sound engineers. Welles’s slavish attention to the precise quality of the sound effects, often requiring them to be made and remade, was exactly the same as that with which he had tormented his radio engineers. James G. Stewart, dubbing mixer on Kane, later an Oscar winner, and an old radio hand, told Carringer that much of what he knows aesthetically about sound came from Welles. Again, he felt little personal warmth for the man: ‘I’d work all day. He’d make an appointment for 8 o’clock to run rushes,’26 Stewart told Richard Meryman. ‘He’d show up at midnight. No apologies. Just “let’s get going now.” And we’d work to 3 or 4 a.m. He’d have a jug of whiskey, but no offering it to anybody else in the room. Just for Orson. I don’t remember asking him a favor. And I don’t think it would have occurred to anyone else.’ None the less, he described his work with Welles (he later worked on The Magnificent Ambersons) as one of the most significant experiences of his working life.

  The film’s musical score was crucial for the editors, too. Bernard Herrmann, Welles’s musical director on most of his radio shows, composed a substantial amount of the music before editing began so that scenes could be cut to its rhythms. ‘I was given twelve weeks to do my job. I worked on the film reel by reel, as it was being shot and cut. In this way I had a sense of the picture being built and of my own music being part of that building.’27 The breakfast sequence for which Herrmann wrote a cunning Theme and Variations in which the Waldteufel-like waltz becomes increasingly fragmented and sourer as the marriage falls apart is a famous instance; another the arrival of Kane at the newspaper office for the first time done to 1890’s dance forms. Calling it the Chronicle Scherzo, Herrmann says ‘this whole section in itself contains a kind of a ballet suite in miniature.’ Though Welles was no musician himself – ‘his ear was not for music,’ said Virgil Thomson – he was uniquely aware of the value of music. His entire approach to film (and to the theatre, for that matter) could be described as musical. He knew from the outset that the composer’s contribution to Citizen Kane would be enormous. Long before shooting began, Welles sent Herrmann a telegram which must have made his mouth water: ‘in second scene we cut to kane in audience during which time full act or scene is supposed to have been sung since curtain comes down following susies aria which opens act never mind logic please stop camera and composer must make this seem logical by ingenuity … here is chance for you to do something witty and amusing dash and now is the time for you to do it stop I love you dearly stop orson’.28

  Herrmann made brilliant use of his ‘chance’, creating something that is indeed witty and amusing, but something else, too. A parody but also a homage, the aria he wrote for Susan Alexander Kane is almost superior to its models, the French romantic operas with which Welles was so familiar from his nights at Ravinia: Hérodiade, Thaïs and the rest. Using a massive orchestra, he adds a Straussian dimension to the palette of Massenet, horns whooping, trumpets braying, flutes skirling, over which the soprano hurls herself, surfing over the cascades of glissandi, finally leaping up to a lurid top D. That, at any rate, is what Herrmann wrote, and what has subsequently been performed by Eileen Farrell in the concert hall and the young Kiri Te Kanawa on disc. For the film, Herrmann found the sixteen-year-old Jean Forward, her voice true but tiny, and set her adrift in a sea of instrumental activity; like Susan Alexander Kane, she sinks. The Salambo aria is one of the few occasions in the film where Herrmann deploys a regular (if augmented) symphonic band; as in his radio work, he took the opportunity of being able to employ as many musicians as he wanted to create ‘unorthodox instrumental combinations … sound effects blended with music, music used in place of soundtrack’.

  Radio had been his training ground as much as Welles’s: he found that in films ‘cues of a few seconds were often overlooked: on radio every scene must be bridged by some sort of sound device … I felt that in this film, where the photographic contrasts were often so sharp and sudden, a brief cue – even two or three chords – might heighten the effect immeasurably.’29 Many of the most striking effects in the film are perfectly complemented by just such brief musical accompaniments: Kane’s light being switched out as he dies, for example, where Herrmann’s sudden brass sforzando gives the moment a chilling finality. This is a fundamentally different approach to writing film music from the prevailing ethos, represented by Steinei and Korngold, both of whom, Viennese in background, were intent on creating operas without words, symphonic tapestries under, over and around the film itself. In Citizen Kane, Herrmann does use leitmotivs (their essential method) though it was not something he was generally to employ in his film music. It helps to integrate the film still further: the Rheingold-like four-note descending Power theme, heard right at the beginning on low brass and strings with bassoon overtones, undergoes extraordinary transformations, becoming now a ragtime, now a hornpipe, finally a massive maestoso statement for full orchestra. That final statement is for the last sequence of the film; the music was pre-recorded and played on the set, Toland moving his camera to it.

  Herrmann had unprecedented involvement in every stage of the work on the film. He was closely involved in the dubbing: in a radical departure from normal practice, all his music for the film was actually recorded at the level at which it was to be used in picture, not artificially made louder or softer. It was often re-recorded six or seven times before the proper dynamic level was achieved. Welles supported him at every turn in his quest for perfection. In the Souvenir Booklet for Citizen Kane, it is excitedly reported that ‘Welles even supervised the score.’ While it is unlikely that he ever prised the baton out of Herrmann’s hand, or altered the instrumentation, it is true t
hat he expected, as a theatre director, to be more involved at every level than a regular Hollywood director would, and that included the music. He had, naturally and properly, an opinion about everything, which is one definition of being a director. He and Herrmann had a notoriously fractious relationship, Herrmann sensitive and explosive, Welles insensitive and explosive, but their respect for each other’s work was deeply grounded. James Stewart, the sound recordist, tells a story of Herrmann inveighing bitterly against Welles’s methods and manners for close on half an hour, finally stalking out of the room and slamming the door behind him. Immediately afterwards, he returned saying: ‘I want to make it absolutely clear that everything that I have just said refers to Orson the man, not Orson the Artist.’30

  The music was the last element of the film to be completed; it wasn’t finally added until January of 1941. Welles, in rising high spirits, had been planning his cinematic future: the top of his list for development was a Life of Christ to be set in New Mexico, at the turn of the last century ‘as a kind of primitive Western’. He carefully explained to the dozens of heads of churches whom he approached for advice and endorsement that he meant no impiety: he was simply following the precedent of painters through the ages who had painted biblical scenes ‘in their own epoch’. He gained a surprising amount of support for the project; the following year he, Toland and Ferguson scouted locations. He was also eager to find a film in which he could direct Dolores del Rio, with whom he was still closely and passionately involved. A project that he had first discussed in 1939 was reconsidered (Mexican Melodrama, loosely based on Arthur Calder-Marshall’s The Way to Santiago); more immediately engaging was a screenplay that del Rio had been sent by the Mexican director Chano Uruta, an adaptation of the already twice-filmed classic of Mexican realist literature, Frederico Gambao’s Santa. Welles became fascinated by its story of the corruption and destruction of a young girl, and wrote a treatment of his own, in consultation with Toland. It shows the beginnings of a highly personal style, an advance in this regard on Citizen Kane. Welles restructured the novel, starting with Santa’s funeral, to which the film returns at the end; it is, in effect, an enormous flashback, introduced by the dead woman as narrator. ‘Don’t think me a saint because Santa was my name. I was a number – a thing to be rented. When I laughed, I was scolded. When I cried, no one believed in my tears. I died miserably and left nothing. I will tell you my story, and although I was guilty, you will pardon me I am sure – as sure as I am that God has pardoned me.’31 Silence. Darkness. ‘As the picture opens, we fade in to the door of the brothel.’ Santa, new to the brothel, watches her first client fall asleep, having failed to make love. In another flashback, her past floats into her consciousness.