Though Welles repeatedly commented on domestic affairs, his chief concern from the first column to the last was American foreign policy. The San Francisco assembly was his major preoccupation, and he also attended the Pan American War and Peace conference in Mexico City, writing for several days about the meeting. (It is an interesting coincidence that in the next year The Lady from Shanghai would be filmed partly on location in San Francisco and Mexico.) At the conference, which was sponsored by Welles’s old patron Nelson Rockefeller and which has been described by historians as one of the first symptoms of Cold War politics, speakers rose again and again to utter revolutionary slogans and discuss economic reform; nevertheless, Welles noted a reluctance to get down to “brass tacks.” He remarked on the dark history of pseudo-revolutions in these countries (“Very few of them succeeded without the help of a couple of North American companies you could name”) and was struck by the blatant ironies of the conference itself, where the US “State Department millionaires” made official deals with so-called revolutionary heads of state, many of whom were also millionaires. Most of all he was troubled by divided feelings about the true progressives; he wanted the South Americans to join the war against the European fascists, but he knew that US economic colonialism had made the Latin left as naturally suspicious of the States as the Irish were suspicious of England.
The difficulties Welles found at Mexico City were symptomatic of conflicts he saw everywhere, especially inside the United States. Always there had been a disparity between American ideals expressed abroad and the actual treatment of minorities at home, but toward the end of the war this disparity was becoming especially acute:
Internationalism [Welles wrote] can’t be preached in a new government level and practiced on the old states’ rights basis. The inconsistencies are just too glaring. . . . Thus, an Atlantic Charter is perused by foreigners with one eye on a lynching in Arkansas. A Crimea communique is studied in reference to a Detroit race riot. A declaration at Mexico City stirs memories of a place called Sleepy Lagoon. . . . That’s the connection between the hand of American friendship extended to Haile Selassie, to Farouk of Egypt, to the leader of Saudi Arabia—and the noose around a Negro’s neck in Alabama.
Such inconsistencies were enough to belie the country’s claim to “moral leadership” at international meetings:
No moral position taken by us against Col. Perón has any meaning for Spanish-speaking America until we break with Gen. Franco. . . . Our attitude towards the policy of the good neighbor matches the rest of our foreign policy. But it doesn’t match at all the high principles by which we would justify our leadership in the Americas. We have armed dictators, strengthened unnecessarily the political hand of high churchmen, and everywhere underrated the Democratic aspirations of the people.
The new, more liberalized economic arrangements being made for the world were also being threatened by official hypocrisies. Welles was especially concerned about the fate of the Bretton Woods proposals, which would slash interest rates and allow all countries to borrow from a world bank “without secret, war-breeding deals.” The Bretton Woods idea was aimed at preventing the rise of speculators like the “match king” Ivar Kruger, who had grown rich after the first world war, but it was being opposed in this country by Senator Taft and the Republican right wing—or, as Welles put it, by “that little Wall St. camarilla who once did so very well by floating foreign loans at fat fees.” Taft had wanted to substitute another plan, whereby the United States and Great Britain would reach an agreement on the dollar and the pound, extending credits to other countries. What they offered, Welles remarked, was “the old ‘key’ notion and currency gag—and behind this gaudily altruistic façade one notices that something is missing. Something called the Soviet Union.” Even the British, Welles noted, were to become “junior partners in the firm, playing an emphatically minor role, and one bound to get smaller through the years.” Welles shuddered at what might result:
We are the world’s greatest production plant and the largest creditor nation. Without sensible economic agreements between England and the U.S., Mr. Luce’s prediction of the American century will come true, and God help us all. We’ll make Germany’s bid for world supremacy look like amateur night, and the inevitable retribution will be on a comparable scale.
The mounting anger one senses in Welles’s comments about reactionary politics is reflected also in his remarks on current literature and the arts. For example, he wrote at length in praise of Mexico’s three famous muralists, Diego Rivera, José Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, but of the three he much preferred Siqueiros because of his manifestly committed, revolutionary subject matter: “It would be easy to denounce Siqueiros as a blind slave, but he is doing the most adventurous and independent work in the world of art. As for his unshackled comrades, Rivera is decorating night clubs, and Orozco is depicting democracy as raddled and bedizened.” Somewhat later, in a brief note on John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano (about to be filmed by 20th Century-Fox), Welles wrote that the popularity of the book was disturbing because of the way it ministered to America’s complacent moral superiority: “For those who thought Mussolini was only funny, and who never heard of Mazzini or Garibaldi, for those who like to think that America has a monopoly on the democratic faith, ‘A Bell for Adano,’ I’m afraid, will be most reassuring.” On the other hand, Richard Wright’s Black Boy needed more readers. White citizens who claimed to “understand the Negro” should be “tied down with banjo strings, gagged with bandannas, their eyes propped open with watermelon seeds, and made to read ‘Black Boy’ word for word.” (Coincidentally, about a year later Welles became involved in a controversy with these same white citizens. On his New York radio show in late July 1946, he reported that black army veteran Isaac Woodward had been taken from a Greyhound bus in Aiken, South Carolina, beaten by police, and blinded. The mayor of Aiken and the local Lions Club denied any knowledge of the incident and threatened to sue, but the issue was never joined.)
By June 1945, Welles was writing from San Francisco, where it was becoming increasingly apparent that the UN would become a battleground of Cold War animosities. The American government was already extending official courtesies to known fascists like Nicholas Horthy of Hungary, and the conference itself was rife with backstage politics. Welles could sense a growing propaganda effort against the Russians:
We are still building our Bulwarks against Bolshevism. The phony fear of Communism is smoke-screening the real menace of renascent Fascism. The red bogey haunts the hotel lobbies and the committee rooms. Near the cigar stand at the Fairmont, Senator Vandenberg growls sarcastically about the ‘benediction of Yalta.’ . . . Averell Harriman has been talking up the Polish problem to selected groups of reporters in off-the-record cocktail parties. . . . The [anti-Stalin] gossip mill works full time . . . and Rep. Clare Luce declares war on the Soviet Union by radio.
There is a fatalistic note to these lines, which appeared very close to the end of Welles’s tenure as a columnist. He had begun his first column by writing about FDR’s inaugural and expressing hope for the UN, but within six months Roosevelt was dead, liberalism was on the wane, and the new international organization seemed doomed by internecine conflict.
I
If I have dealt at length with such matters, it is because Welles’s tendency to become involved in controversy, together with his repeated criticism of public life in 1945, has an interesting relationship to his subsequent films. I do not mean that his movies became mere vehicles for ideas, although it is true that his thrillers are filled with topical political references and moral arguments. I mean, rather, that the mood and style of his later projects were indirectly affected by his alienation from the movie colony and society at large; that the frenzy and unorthodox form of his work for the next ten years may be seen as partly a response to the growth of reactionary politics in the country and can be related not only to Welles’s working conditions but to his growing dissatisfaction with American life.
The continuity between Welles’s politics and his situation in Hollywood is fairly easy to detect if one simply considers the few remarks about movies in his columns. “I love movies,” he says at one point. “But don’t get me wrong. I hate Hollywood.” Clearly it had become impossible for him to continue working as an independent, and his sense of dislocation from the industry had coincided with a rise of conservatism in the nation. Welles pointed out that the same money-men who were undermining a liberal foreign policy and arguing for an “acceptable” rate of unemployment were also consolidating their hold on the entertainment business; very soon, he suggested, they would control television communications: “Receiving sets in New York are so adjusted that you can get only ten television broadcasting studios instead of being able to dial anything you want. . . . It’s a neat trick, but it shouldn’t fool anybody.” As for the movies, they had long been dominated by a handful of big operators, in roughly the same way as legitimate theater had been dominated in the years before the Depression. “I think Jack Warner makes the best movies in town,” Welles declared. “But the views of Jack and Harry Warner towards distribution are a good deal less liberal than those expressed in their product. . . . Jack claims that one of his theatres will play one of my pictures as quickly and cheerfully as it will give the time to one of his. I say that’s spinach, and I say to hell with it anyway.”
Welles had comparatively few observations about the industry product, but on the few occasions when he did turn to specific films, he heaped scorn on Hollywood’s establishment. Several times he voiced support for “little” films, and twice he used space in the column to recommend William Castle’s When Strangers Marry. (Within a year Castle himself became Welles’s associate producer on The Lady from Shanghai.) Welles liked the film because it had the gritty, unpretentious virtues of an intelligent B production, making it a perfect foil to the middlebrow sanctimoniousness of Hollywood’s award-winning movies:
Did you ever hear of a “B” picture getting one of the prizes or even a nomination? “The Informer” doesn’t count as a “B” in spite of its low budget because its director was famous and successful and well-paid. A real “B” is produced for half the money and is twice as hard to make worthy of attention. . . .
Gold statuettes for score and photography aren’t enough. The movie industry is the only big business I know of which spends no money on real research. A valid Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would be a laboratory for experiment, a studio—by which I do not mean a factory building for the manufacture of a product—but a place removed from the commercial standard and reserved for study, for honest creative effort.
Of course Welles’s notion of an Academy “removed from the commercial standard” was somewhat naïve, because unless one contemplated revolution, such an Academy would always be influenced at long distance by commerce. Just as the Mercury could not long remain an independent theater, free of both government dictates and the pressures of a “free” market, so a research unit funded by Hollywood would inevitably face compromises; nevertheless, Welles continued to imagine an ideal setting for the performing arts, a place uninhibited by capitalists or commissars.
Welles’s suspicion of these twin evils is apparent in his discussion of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (part one), which he and Rita Hayworth had seen in May 1945 at the United Nations Theatre in San Francisco. He devoted two entire columns to the film, developing a fascinating comparison between it and 20th Century-Fox’s Woodrow Wilson, which had also recently opened in San Francisco. Here were two major productions by the two postwar Leviathans; both claimed to be portraits of historical figures and both had specific political implications. “The man in the Kremlin,” Welles wrote, “is remembered for a certain ruthlessness of action and the man in the White House for a certain chilliness of personality. Eisenstein and Zanuck try to show how their heroes got that way, surrounding them respectively with scheming politicians and scheming courtiers. The Boyars, it seems, did it to the Tsar, and the Republican Senators did it to the President.” Of course there were certain important differences between the two subjects; because Eisenstein was dealing with a remote historical period, his unorthodox historical interpretations were easier to accept, whereas Darryl Zanuck had problems with even the most discreet adjustments of the facts. In both cases, however, Welles felt the heroes were sentimentalized: “Maybe Ivan and Wilson were good family men, but the scenes to this effect are curiously lacking in significance.” Zanuck had attempted to make Wilson a hail-fellow, “but when his impersonator harmonizes ‘Down by the Old Mill Stream’ we are not persuaded. . . . And as for Ivan, he is still ‘The Terrible’ no matter how many times in a movie he slaps his friends on the back and chucks his wife under the chin.”
Welles implied that both films were propagandistic, suffused with establishment patriotism. The real interest and superiority of Ivan as against the American work lay not in its interpretation of history or in its implicit ideology, but in its extravagant, stylized approach to cinema, an approach the Russian audience had apparently been willing to accept:
Critics and audiences in the English-speaking world, accustomed as they are to the pallid stylelessness of the “realistic” school, are likely to be impatient, even moved to giggles by the antics of Ivan and his friends. This is because the arts and artists of our theatre have been so busy for so long now teaching the public to reject anything larger than life unless it be stated in the special language of glamor and charm that I’m afraid many good citizens who read the comic strips with utmost solemnity will laugh out loud at Eisenstein’s best moments. Our culture has conditioned us to take Dick Tracy with a straight face. But nothing prepared us for “Ivan the Terrible.”
Welles must have had his own practice in mind as he wrote those lines. From infancy he had been fascinated with Shakespeare, with the European tradition of grand opera, and with the theatrical grandiloquence of large-scale magic shows; the bizarre imagery and deliberately anti-naturalistic acting in the Eisenstein film spoke to his own tastes, but they were doubly attractive because they ran against the grain of studio cinema, giving full expression to the director’s personality. Welles praised the Russian film for its “courageously radical stylization,” noting how sharply it differed from American movies: “The Wilson picture, of course, has its own stylization and its own conventions. But these are Hollywood habits, not the conscious creation of Director Henry King.” In other words, the American film was conservative, built out of a narrow visual and literary code from which the director was not expected to deviate. The Eisenstein film was liberating, allowing the director to make stylistic choices free of a culturally predetermined idea as to what constituted truth to nature.
Both traditions, Welles recognized, had their own peculiar strengths and weaknesses:
When the American movie-maker becomes aware of a discrepancy between his film and the appearance of life, he corrects the difference in favor of “realism.” This search for the direct and literal produces some of our best effects. The Russians go out for the effect itself—and when they find what they’re after—they manage moments of an exclamatory and resonant beauty on the level of eloquence to which our school cannot aspire. When the Russian method fails it is funny; it falls flat on its bottom, and we laugh. When Hollywood fails, it falls flat, the result is merely dull, and we yawn.
Welles did not want to choose between these approaches. “We have much to learn from each other,” he said, and the learning process, as he saw it, extended especially to matters of technique. Even the medium-distance, long-take photography that Welles had helped popularize (and had justified in the name of “realism”) made an interesting contrast with the Russian montage school: “Because of the inferiority of Russian film stock, lenses, and other equipment, the camera must assert itself by what it selects, and by the manner of selection.” The less obtrusive Hollywood camera, Welles said, “has a merchant’s eye” and devotes itself to “star-hogging closeup
s,” or to “lovingly evaluating texture, the screen being filled as a window is dressed in a swank department store.”
Hence, just as Welles’s politics were progressive and liberal, seeking a middle ground between the White House and the Kremlin, so his aesthetics attempted to find a happy synthesis of two cultures. Where his own work was concerned, he had tried from the beginning to combine what he calls “moments of exclamatory and resonant beauty on the level of eloquence” with the dominant tradition of psychological realism. In both Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons he had chosen subjects that had many precedents in the tradition of “well-made” Hollywood films. What was relatively different about Welles was not his subject matter nor even his sophistication, but the degree to which he had brought unorthodox style and autobiography to the fore. In this respect he had attempted to import something “larger than life” into the mainstream of American movies, a force to countervail what he called the “pallid stylelessness” of studio realism.
Looked at today, the artificial conventions of American movies in the forties are quite apparent, but Welles was correct to say that these films were striving for the “direct and literal.” In costume films or in expressionist genres such as the thriller, there was indeed a degree of license, a “special language of glamor and charm,” but the tendency of the industry as a whole was toward aesthetic minimalism. Anglo-Saxon critics helped perpetuate this tendency, because they grumbled when they encountered anything unrestrained. It was precisely this quality that made certain reviewers unhappy with Kane and that caused Welles’s detractors to portray him as a ham. Certainly he took greater risks than most with convention, and when his work failed, it failed on the side of histrionics and silliness, never on the side of dullness. Nevertheless, Welles’s strengths came from the same sources as his weaknesses—namely, what he had called, in speaking of Eisenstein, a “courageously radical stylization,” which in his case meant a willingness to challenge not only the habits of the studio system but also the limits of popular taste.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 18