Given Welles’s position in Hollywood in the mid-forties, however, it would seem his romantic struggle against the studios should have come to an end. After his contract with RKO terminated, he worked infrequently, always in the sort of genre projects that might theoretically have put restraints on his style; even when he ventured into Shakespeare, it was under severe limitations of time and budget under a boss whose biggest star was Roy Rogers. And yet, by staying within genres or B-budgets, Welles managed to retain more individuality than if he had been allowed into the more culturally ambitious, expensive productions. At the level of filmed biographies or adaptations of big novels, Hollywood was devoted entirely to the same conservative “tradition of quality” that Truffaut once attacked so vigorously in France. Conversely, the degree of convention in the standard Hollywood melodrama sometimes worked in the director’s favor; producers took less personal interest in the texture of the film so long as the basic plot ingredients were satisfied. Thus the Hollywood movie of this period was at its most exciting when it operated under obvious constraints of money or content, at a moderately low level of respectability. Its meaning lay not in the manifest content of the script, which was usually based on potboiler novels or magazine stories, but in the almost libidinal warfare between a good director’s style and the pressures of convention.
I say “libidinal” partly because the Freudian model of id versus superego provides a good analogue to the system, and partly because the most interesting aspects of Hollywood movies in the late forties and fifties tended to be sexual. The fetishistic, overheated romanticism of the film noir became one of the few sources of rebellious energy in the movies, although admittedly it was a fairly timid rebellion. Welles, of course, was especially suited to work in this vein, bringing to it an intelligence and integrity of purpose that kept his films from becoming, like so many others, merely lurid or clichéd.
And despite the fact that he was seldom able to choose his own topics, he managed to keep his ethical and political themes virtually intact; even the familiar character types recur, sometimes adapted to fit the requirements for “glamor and charm.” When he worked at all now, his films became more radically stylized than ever, as if the limitations in subject matter and budget had to be overcome by an utter strangeness of mise-en-scène. From The Lady from Shanghai through Touch of Evil, Welles’s style became more bizarre and circus-like; his films during this period reflect some of the chaos and uncertainty of his own career, becoming increasingly satiric, charged with self-conscious manipulation of popular sexual stereotypes and visual references to that most private of all Hollywood individualists, Josef von Sternberg. In one sense, therefore, these films were as “personal” as any of his others, and as one might expect, producers and audiences became increasingly unsympathetic.
II The Stranger
The one exception to the trend I’ve just described is The Stranger (1945), about which I shall make only brief comments. (This film is discussed further in chapter 11.) An atmospheric and entertaining picture, it was praised by James Agee for being a “tidy, engaging thriller . . . much more graceful, intelligent, and enjoyable than most other movies.” In fact, however, Agee was being consistent in his dislike for Welles’s style, which he had always found pretentious. He had singled out the most uncharacteristic of Welles’s films, a picture that barely deviates from industry habits; significantly also, he had chosen a film that was scripted by John Huston, writing without credit with Anthony Veiller.
Actually, The Stranger owes more to Hitchcock than to its real writer or director. The themes are ostensibly political, but the dramatic tensions are purely sexual, arising out of a confrontation between a sweet, repressed female (Loretta Young) and a sexually threatening male (Welles). The script borrows heavily from Shadow of a Doubt (1942), transforming Hitchcock’s psychotic Uncle Charlie into Franz Kindler, an escaped Nazi war criminal who poses as a history teacher in a New England college. Huston and producer Sam Spiegel took most of the crucial elements from the earlier film, down to a scene where the villain sits at a family dining table and behaves oddly (in The Stranger, Kindler betrays himself when he remarks that Karl Marx was not a German but a Jew). They even include a lush musical score by Bronislaw Kaper and a vertiginous climax atop a bell tower. The only new elements were a dogged war crimes investigator (Edward G. Robinson), who manages to charm audiences despite the relative colorlessness of his role (Welles wanted Agnes Moorehead for this part), and a veneer of topical politics in line with Welles’s own interests. Thus when Welles takes his protagonists to a high place at the conclusion of the film, he is as much interested in showing the Nazi will to power as in depicting a moral and psychological vertigo: Franz Kindler stands in the clock belfry, looks out over Connecticut, and refers to the people below as “ants”—a foreshadowing of Harry Lime’s big speech in The Third Man.
The film has a superficially Hitchcockian sense of the absurd, and many of Welles’s best moments derive from his ironic treatment of Americana, as if Norman Rockwell were being retouched by Charles Addams. Indeed, given the essentially patriotic tone of the movie, Welles is particularly skilled at avoiding a sentimentalized portrait of the townspeople. Billy House, as the checker-playing proprietor of a local drugstore, is slowly transformed from an unpleasant New England eccentric into the leader of a virtual lynch mob; Richard Long, who specialized in the sort of antiseptic kid-brother role he plays here, is at one point photographed in a harsh light that shows pock-marks on his face; Philip Merivale portrays a rather vapid, silver-haired state supreme court judge who is completely fooled by the fascist at his dinner table; and Loretta Young, giving one of the best performances in the film, suggests a woman driven almost mad by the conflict between her sexuality, her complacent puritanism, and her dawning moral awareness.
The Stranger is quite good at these satiric touches, and it skillfully suggests the class structure of a Connecticut village. (This village, and the school where the Nazi teaches, is modeled on the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, where the young Welles was a student; indeed the film contains several inside jokes about that school.) Occasionally, too, it rises to a truly Wellesian intensity of style—especially in the scenes involving the drugstore-cum-soda-fountain run by House, where extreme naturalism coexists with suggestions of madness. The store is recreated in loving detail and is usually photographed in long takes and subtly distorting deep-focus compositions that emphasize clutter on the shelves. Along the walls Welles has posted mirrors and scrawled notices done in his own hand: “No slugs,” says a note in the phone booth. Matrons and shrill adolescent types wander in and out, helping themselves while the proprietor watches carefully from his table near the entrance. Here, and in the brief opening scenes involving the journey of a mad Nazi to Connecticut (scenes that were severely cut by Spiegel), we have all the earmarks of Welles’s technique. In several other places the film could have been directed by anybody.
Like the Welles-Foster Journey into Fear, The Stranger is a patchwork, but in this case the reasons for the disharmony are not easy to determine. Charles Higham has written that Ernest Nims, the editor, had planned a cutting continuity in advance and that Welles’s contract ordered him to follow Nims’s design to the letter. But this does not explain why a number of scenes—including the long, extraordinarily difficult tracking shot of a murder in the woods—are clearly inventions of the director. Probably the film looks the way it does because Welles was suppressing his style to some degree in order to prove that he, too, could do ordinary good work. “I did it to prove that I could put out a movie as well as anyone else,” he said. “I did not do it with cynicism, however.” In any case the film was completed under budget and under time and did fairly well at the box office. It was not until his next project, a vehicle for Rita Hayworth done in return for Harry Cohn’s investment in a failing stage show, that Welles was able to follow his own instincts. As a result he produced one of the most radically stylized films of his career in Hollywood.
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III The Lady from Shanghai
By many standards The Lady from Shanghai is more unorthodox than Welles’s previous work, but its strangeness did not result from an early, deliberate plan. The idea for the film originated when Welles entered into an agreement with Columbia Pictures to help save the foundering Mercury production of Around the World. This latter show had been initiated by Welles and Mike Todd and was a fairly expensive musical extravaganza featuring old-time movies, a magic show, and a “slide for life” down a rope from the theater balcony. When Todd withdrew from the partnership early on, Welles enlisted the help of Richard Wilson and continued as producer/director, feeling a certain obligation to Cole Porter, whom he had persuaded to write the score. (Welles later recalled wryly that Porter, who was born with twenty million dollars, who made another twenty million from his music, and who then married a woman worth fifty million, never contributed money for the production.) With the shakiest financial backing, Around the World opened in the dog days of August in New York, just when wartime gas rationing had been lifted and everyone had left town to escape the heat. The show received mixed reviews and was plagued by one financial disaster after another; ultimately Welles persuaded Harry Cohn to advance him money for doing a movie, in the hope that he could keep the play running until audiences returned in September. His original plan was to film a thriller on a low budget, entirely in the streets of New York, at the same time that Around the World was continuing its run. The film would be made in the manner of Castle’s When Strangers Marry, using no big stars or major studio paraphernalia. Almost immediately, however, Around the World plunged deeper into debt and was closed. Welles found himself back in Hollywood, where his plans for an offbeat potboiler were transformed into a big-budget vehicle for Rita Hayworth.
The resulting film (originally titled Take This Woman and then Black Irish) tells the story of how Michael O’Hara (Welles), a naïve vagabond, is seduced by the moneyed glamour of Elsa Bannister (Hayworth), allowing himself to become a duped accomplice in murder. First O’Hara takes a job as captain of Arthur Bannister’s yacht on a cruise to San Francisco and is then persuaded by Bannister’s mad law partner, George Grisby, to participate in a supposedly phony murder scheme. Grisby claims that he wants to collect money from his own faked demise and then hide out on a South Sea island, where he can be safe from the atomic bomb. As O’Hara commits himself to this deceitful group, the film becomes increasingly farcical and demonic; from the fantastic love scene with Rita Hayworth in the San Francisco aquarium until the Magic Mirror Maze at the conclusion, the world around O’Hara turns utterly lunatic, with no release until he walks out of an amusement park Crazy House across a pier in morning light. The complex but conventional plot machinations are delivered through hallucinatory visuals, the whole movie becoming a satiric dream work or magic show based on a standard thriller. (This method was natural to Welles, but it was suggested by the repeated references to dreams in Sherwood King’s If I Die Before I Wake, the novel that was his source; it also has some interesting parallels with Robert Siodmak’s less brilliant but highly expressionistic film, Phantom Lady.)
The movie was substantially reedited after the second preview and long held from release, becoming a victim of Columbia’s desperate attempt to “save” a story Harry Cohn said he could not understand. (The earlier version is described in chapter 11.) The cutting was turned over to Viola Lawrence, a friend of Cohn’s but an enemy of Welles’s, and a musical score was added without the director’s approval. (Welles later complained in a letter to the studio that the music used for Rita Hayworth’s dive into a lagoon resembled “a Disney picture when Pluto falls into the pool.”) Like The Stranger the film is a patchwork, but it is far more energetic and dazzling, its very confusions a part of its fascination. The acting ranges from Welles’s phony and inconsistent interpretation of an Irish sailor fallen among the right-wing American rich to the sublimely grotesque performances of Everett Sloane and Glenn Anders, a pair of unscrupulous lawyers who are scorpions personified. The dialogue oscillates between the bathetic (“Give my love to the sunrise”), the tautological (“One who follows his nature will keep his original nature in the end”), and the downright opaque (“I want you to live as long as possible before you die”), but this goofiness remains somehow in keeping with the general atmosphere of comic delirium. Everywhere the movie is filled with bizarre visual dissonances, Welles’s imagery coexisting with scenes or sequences that serve to mock Hollywood. Again and again a brilliant moment is interrupted with gauzy close-ups or over-the-shoulder editing, awkwardly composed and badly acted. The real locales of Acapulco and San Francisco are intercut with retakes containing obvious studio settings or process screens, and the film student can actually make a game of distinguishing shots that are authentically Wellesian from the ones that are deliberate kitsch. It is a game worth playing, partly because the radical shifts of style in this film take on meaningful implications.
A logical place to begin is with Welles’s habit of animating the environment, using it to express the emotions of his players or to comment on their behavior. As we have seen, Welles seldom does one thing on the screen when he can do three or four. Typically he gives as much information as possible, playing off the most subtle exchanges between characters against two or more levels of action. Even the kitchen dinner scene in The Magnificent Ambersons is not so restrained as is commonly supposed: the camera barely moves, but Tim Holt wolfs down strawberry shortcake, a gothic storm rattles outside the windows of the big kitchen, and the actors keep stepping on one another’s lines. Welles depends heavily on this multiplication of artistic stimuli so that he not only expresses psychology through the settings but also gives us the feeling of many actions, visual and aural, occurring simultaneously. It is this richness, this seven-layer-cake profusion, that most distinguishes his work in Hollywood.
The Lady from Shanghai offers many examples of such density, the most obvious being the Magic Mirror Maze sequence, which is also the grandest example of Welles’s delight in movie illusionism. The gun battle among the mirrors functions beautifully within the plot, compactly expressing the ruthless ambition and the self-destructive mania that has been evoked verbally in the hero’s account of hungry sharks; indeed it is such a brilliant moment that it almost transcends its fictional content, turning Rita Hayworth into a series of insubstantial images that symbolize the gaudy unreality and fascination of movie stars. More to the point, however, is the way the sequence shows Welles’s love of baroque dynamics; it produces an infinite depth of field and more information than we can absorb in a single viewing.
Not satisfied with the simple phenomenon of reflections in mirrors, Welles complicates the spectacle with a split screen; for example, we see two images of Arthur Bannister (Sloane) and his cane at either side of the frame, in between them two gigantic pictures of Elsa’s blonde head. In another shot, two Bannisters are superimposed over Elsa’s eyeball. Toward the climax, Bannister lurches to the left and produces three images of himself; the camera then pans and three more Bannisters approach from the opposite direction, the two converging groups separated by a single image of Elsa holding a gun; Bannister now takes out his own pistol, and as he points it, his “real” hand enters the foreground from offscreen right. All this time the actors are delivering crucial speeches that are intended to unravel the mystery plot—in fact so much happens so rapidly that only a lengthy analysis can lead to a full understanding of the sequence.
Perhaps the images reproduced in figures 5.1–5.6 will illustrate some of Welles’s methods. These stills indicate how the sequence has been designed to create a montage of conflicts between Everett Sloane and Rita Hayworth. If the ugly, crippled male is reflected many times in a single shot, the unreal sex goddess is usually seen alone; if both characters are multiplied, one is larger than the other. Each image has the disturbing quality of surrealist art, and yet each is motivated by the plot and the psychology of the characters. In the penultimate shot illustr
ated here, Bannister tells Elsa that in killing her he will be killing himself, and the hallucinatory image is perfectly expressive of the way the mind can become a hall of mirrors, a distorted, paranoid vision.
Figures 5.1–5.6: Montage of conflicts and reflections in The Lady from Shanghai.
The audience does not have to make this sort of analysis in order to appreciate the power of the images, but most viewers feel they have to “meet the film at least half-way,” as Herman G. Weinberg once said, in an effort to assimilate all the information. Thus, one of the pervasive qualities of this sequence and of Welles’s movies in general is wit, which means not only a sense of humor but also what the OED defines as an appeal to the mental faculties, especially to “memory and attention.” Of course the typical studio film does not have much to do with wit; its chief desiderata are clarity and simplicity, and that is perhaps one reason why the scenes in The Lady from Shanghai waver between a complex satire of manners and a familiar Hollywood gloss.
Keeping to his original intention, Welles shot parts of the film on location, following a practice that was becoming increasingly popular just after the war. Even the interiors, including the sailor’s hiring hall; the pier-side café; the dusty, oppressive courtroom; and the Chinatown theater, have a harsh surface realism overlaid with a busy, expressive shooting style. In the finished movie, however, many individual shots undercut Welles’s expressionism; we catch only occasional glimpses of a startling mise-en-scène, usually shot in a real locale. What one recalls most vividly, aside from the trick effects in the Crazy House, are the huge close-ups of the four principals: Sloane and Anders are photographed with a mercilessly sharp lens, the camera highlighting every pockmark and bead of sweat on their faces; Welles and Hayworth, on the other hand, become gigantic, romantically blurred movie stars—as fantastic and disturbing in their own way as the ugly characters, so that a glamorous studio portrait photography contributes to the film’s aura of surrealism.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 19