In fact, Welles seems to have been quite willing to make studio close-ups that disrupt his elaborate blocking of the actors and his fine sense of movement within a frame. Consider, for example, the scene where Grisby calls O’Hara aside to offer a “proposition,” and the two men stroll along a hillside above Acapulco Bay. The long shots filmed on location are held on the screen only briefly, but they suggest a conception that is nearly as impressive as the party scene in Ambersons or the elaborate track at the beginning of Touch of Evil. As Grisby and O’Hara climb the hillside, the whole social structure of Acapulco passes them by, from the impoverished peasants at the bottom of the hill to the American tourists and their Latin retinue at the top. The atmosphere at the bottom is dirty, crowded, and hot, but at the parapet above, a sea breeze is blowing and Acapulco sparkles in the sun like a “bright, guilty world.”
Welles apparently planned this episode as a series of elaborately choreographed traveling shots that express O’Hara’s state of mind while at the same time showing the effects of Yankee capital. As usual, he employs a wide-angle lens, which gives the movement of the camera and actors a dramatic sweep, and he fills the screen with several layers of action; the camera spirals up the hill, picking up additional people moving past at different angles, creating a busy, swirling effect. Most of these location scenes are cut on an actor’s movement in order to preserve the flow of action and dialogue; Welles tries to evoke a subtly dizzying sensation, which culminates in the final shot—a high-angle, fish-eye view of Grisby and O’Hara standing over the sea. When Grisby steps out of the screen, O’Hara seems to be hanging vertiginously in midair, his image twisted out of shape by the camera to a degree few Hollywood films of the period had attempted.
In the completed film, however, the episode has been substantially revised. Charles Higham has suggested that some of the Acapulco scenes were filmed so clumsily that they “would not cut.” This is nonsense. Welles knew what he was doing, but the studio thought it was too complicated. Studio shots have been introduced, consisting chiefly of close-ups of Welles and Glenn Anders. The lighting in these shots does not match Charles Lawton’s strikingly naturalistic photography, and when the close-ups are inserted all the restless movement ceases; the two actors are shown as big, static heads, isolated against an artificial backdrop.
Figure 5.7: Grisby and O’Hara above Acapulco Bay.
Figure 5.8: Studio-shot close-up of Welles.
A similar intrusion can be seen in the courtroom sequence, which remains one of the funniest in the film. The defendant, O’Hara, who by this time has been made the fall guy for the villains, is supposed to be completely ignored by everybody; in fact Welles purposely keeps the camera off himself, shooting from a bewildering variety of angles and thus contributing to the maelstrom of activity. The camera leaps back and forth from harshly lit close-ups to equally harsh wide-angle views of the room, showing Bannister, the “world’s greatest criminal lawyer,” parading before the jury on crutches or the audience breaking into spasms. Dialogue overlaps, a juror sneezes, the judge cracks jokes, and nearly everybody deliberately overacts. Now and then, however, the sequence is interrupted by shots of Welles and Rita Hayworth, done in a style that is utterly conventional and radically different from the surrounding imagery. Perhaps someone at the studio felt the trial would make no sense without “reactions” from the protagonists; whatever the cause, the movie seems to have been made by two different hands, or by a director who, out of weariness, contempt, or sheer practical jokery, chose to deface his own work.
I raise the possibility of Welles’s contempt because certain defects in the film could have been repaired by any competent technician. For example, after the cataclysm in the Magic Mirror Maze we are given a shot of Everett Sloane fallen to the floor, curled up, and dying, viewed through jagged edges of glass at the corners of the frame. As Elsa dashes from the room, the camera pans and the “glass” moves with it. The shards in the extreme foreground are revealed as a painting on the front of the camera, and the decision to use a panning movement is clearly a director’s error. On the other hand, there is no way of knowing what opportunities Welles had for retakes, and it is obvious that the studio interfered with his more ambitious efforts. Some of his characteristic long takes have been cut to pieces, including the carriage ride through Central Park that opens the film. The long takes that do remain are especially witty moments, indications of what Welles might have accomplished elsewhere. The scene in Grisby’s office, for instance, is filmed with a moving camera that snakes around the room, now and then catching O’Hara’s bewilderment or Grisby’s leer. Later, a complicated and extremely funny shot shows O’Hara learning that he has been framed for a murder; he drives up in Grisby’s car, climbs out, and is met by the zaniest swarm of policemen since Buster Keaton’s Cops. In a lightning succession heightened by the continuity of the shot, the police discover a murder weapon and a signed confession; Officer Peters reads the confession aloud, Arthur Bannister limps into the picture, Grisby’s corpse is wheeled under O’Hara’s nose, and Elsa drives up in her convertible. The only cut is here at the end, where we are given a soft-focus close-up of Hayworth, surely intended as a parody of the femme fatale (as the earlier shot of her pinned to the deck of a yacht is a parody of cheesecake).
But these interesting moments might have become mere curiosities if the film itself did not retain a certain integrity of purpose. What is surprising about The Lady from Shanghai is the degree to which it remains thematically unified, despite the confusing plot turns and the many revisions it appears to have gone through during production. Even as it stands, it is based on some interesting formal ideas. O’Hara’s voyage as captain of the Bannister yacht takes him around the continent, beginning with a shot of the New York harbor and ending at San Francisco Bay, as if he were a tourist taking a panoramic view of US corruption. As William Johnson has pointed out, the whole adventure is filled with images of the sea. The lady of the title is of course a shanghaier of sailors, a Sternbergian Circe who lures an Irish Ulysses onto the rocks with her wet swimsuit, or who sings an incredibly bad song that turns O’Hara into a zombie. Again and again Welles combines images of madness with images of water—even the long take in Grisby’s office is played off against South Sea island music coming from a radio.
Furthermore, there is a sense in which all of Columbia’s tampering with the film has not been as disruptive as, say, RKO’s revisions of The Magnificent Ambersons. The reason is that The Lady from Shanghai is characterized by a sort of inspired silliness, a grotesquely comic stylization that has moved beyond expressionism toward absurdity. (In one of his best exit lines, Glenn Anders steps close to the camera and whines, “Silly, isn’t it?” He then moves out of the frame, leaving Welles sitting there looking as bewildered as usual.) The performances are deliberately exaggerated so that the sinister moments keep verging on farce—an effect similar to the motel scenes in Touch of Evil and K.’s interviews in The Trial. Hence the vulgarity of the movie-star imagery only adds to the feeling of satire; for example, the many bad close-ups of Rita Hayworth, which seem to have been forced on Welles, often serve as a comment on Hollywood’s synthetic sexuality. Welles has added to this feeling by dyeing her hair a fluorescent blonde and dressing her in near-parodies of calendar-girl fashion, such as her little yachtsman’s suit with white shorts, clog heels, and officer’s cap. He poses her rather like a figure in an advertisement—a smiling woman in a bathing suit, reclining on a rock, her toes nicely pointed and the wind blowing her hair. He deliberately cuts from her awful siren song to a “Glosso Lusto” hair-treatment commercial, or he views her through Grisby’s telescope, suddenly lowering the glass and confronting the audience with a full close-up of Grisby himself, who is sweating and leering voyeuristically back at the camera.
These touches are not out of keeping with the mood of the film as a whole. In fact, one could argue that Welles’s career during this period had begun to move more and more away from realism to fant
asy, from consciousness to subconsciousness, from ports to Crazy Houses. His style, with its fantastic distortions, its complex play of light and shadow, its many levels of activity, had always been suited to the depiction of corruption and madness. But The Lady from Shanghai, probably out of sheer necessity, combines the extremes of this style with the extremes of Hollywood convention; in the process it becomes one of Welles’s most hyperkinetic films and his most misanthropic treatment of American life. In a sense it is a dream about typical movie dreams and can almost be read as an allegory about Welles’s adventures in Hollywood, showing his simultaneous fascination with and nausea over the movie industry. Hiding behind a phony Irish brogue instead of the putty nose he would later adopt, Welles enters the film as a wanderer from another country (the very country from which he entered the American theater) and finds himself in a world of shark-eat-shark individualism (his monologue about sharks off the coast of Brazil is a clear reference to something he experienced while filming It’s All True). In such a world, which is ruled by what a shipmate calls an “edge,” the good characters are powerless; at best they philosophize while the bad destroy each other.
Figures 5.9–5.10: The distant Elsa viewed through Grisby’s telescope is immediately followed by a giant close-up of Grisby.
This doomed world is of course basic to the film noir and to most other pictures by Welles; the only difference is that he has cast himself as a naïve idealist instead of a tyrant, a vaguely working-class Jed Leland instead of a Kane. To some extent he is purveying the same left-wing, macho romanticism that characterizes all movies derived from The Maltese Falcon; thus his villains are deformed and effeminate men with an unscrupulous woman, and his hero is a proletarian who is trying to write a novel. (Welles was in fact a major contributor to the misogynistic tone of forties melodrama. In this film, made while his marriage to Hayworth was ending, he gives a rather bitter farewell to his wife and portrays her as a woman “kept” by rich businessmen. Later he suggested Monsieur Verdoux to Chaplin, and after The Lady from Shanghai he turned to Lady Macbeth.) In many other ways, however, Welles has not been content with the mildly alienated fantasies of the tough-guy mystery, and Columbia’s revisions have not disguised his intentions. The ostensible hero of this film claims that he is not a hero, presenting himself instead as a confused and likeable fellow who has fallen into a situation over which he has no control. But just as Welles rarely treats his villains without a certain compassion, so his idealists are meant to evoke an ambiguous response. From the beginning O’Hara knows that Bannister is the “world’s greatest criminal,” and he blithely comments that Elsa comes from the wickedest cities in the world. He recognizes the evil around him quite easily, and the only way to explain his behavior is to say that he is either more foolish or more complicated than we expect him to be. In the introductory voice-over, he says he is “foolish” and adds, “If I’d been in my right mind . . . But once I’d seen her I was not in my right mind for some time.” This early comment on insanity prepares us for the distorted style of the movie and for Michael’s voyage to the Crazy House at the conclusion. At the same time, it gives a casual hint of the irrational temptations that underlie the consciousness of the progressive, presumably rational “hero.”
O’Hara is supposed to have murdered a man in the Spanish Civil War, and in the hiring hall the shipmate remarks that “Black Irish” O’Hara can “hurt a guy” when he’s angry (we see him do this later, in the funny but terrifying courtroom brawl). Grisby, Iago-like, taunts O’Hara and seems to look right into his past. “I’m very interested in murders,” Grisby says. “How’d you do it? No, let me guess. . . . You did it with your hands, didn’t you?” O’Hara looks dazed, openly conveying the guilt he can barely conceal throughout the film; in fact one suspects that his occasionally whimsical or baffled attitude comes from a reluctance to acknowledge the full extent of his temptations. When he walks the moonlit streets of Acapulco with Elsa, he passes down a long stone corridor lined with open doorways showing the hovels of the poor. When he walks with Grisby above Acapulco Bay, he glances at a peasant woman hanging out clothes, and then at a lady tourist followed by a gigolo who is saying, “Of course you pay me.” These events are not lost on O’Hara, who remarks that the brightness of the bay can’t hide hunger and guilt. The guilt, however, is perhaps as much his own as the Bannisters.’
On its surface The Lady from Shanghai is the story of a contest between Elsa and Arthur, whose reflections we see in the apocalyptic finale. At a deeper level, however, it concerns O’Hara’s highly sexual temptation with the bright, rich world—an “exchange of guilt” formula that had interested Welles from the time he arrived in Hollywood to adapt Heart of Darkness. Although he was essentially a humane man, Welles was always aware of the perils of humanism (to say nothing of the perils of California); thus O’Hara descends into a nightmare, coming out of it all resolving to grow older, wiser, and perhaps less complacent. The story has been a comedy, a satiric fantasy, and something of a cautionary tale. For all its imperfections, it manages to retain many of the qualities of Welles’s best work.
IV The Expressionist Macbeth
The financial failure of The Lady from Shanghai meant that Welles was out of work in Hollywood for several years until he managed a deal for Macbeth, which became what Charles Eckert has called the most controversial Shakespeare movie of them all—“a touchstone to discriminate the cinéaste from the Bardolator.”
Although Macbeth is a decidedly minor film in the Welles canon, it remains interesting because it is a courageous experiment. Welles had always wanted to bring classics to a popular audience, and ever since the age of nineteen, on and off, he had expended creative energy on this particular play. In 1936 he had achieved major theatrical success with the “Voodoo Macbeth”; a few years later he made a long-playing recording of the play and also performed the play on radio with Agnes Moorehead. When he brought the Mercury Theatre to Hollywood, Macbeth was on his list of proposed films; in 1947, his fortunes much declined, he staged Macbeth at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Then at last, under an arrangement with Herbert Yeats of Republic Pictures, he turned the Utah production into a film, taking two and a half weeks for the shooting and spending around $700,000. He said later that he did not set out to make a great movie, only to prove that worthwhile work could be done on a shoestring. (Actually, the film was not so cheap by Republic standards, and if one counts the Utah stage show as production time, it was not quite such a quickie as it seems.) The haste and cost cutting show through in many ways, and yet the film remains both fitfully exciting and revealing of its director’s interest in a radical style.
Every time Welles adapted Macbeth, his basic strategy was much the same: he gave it a primitive, exotic setting and tried to eradicate its Renaissance manners. It was precisely this strategy that drew extravagant praise for the Harlem production in 1936. Here, for example, is part of a review by Brooks Atkinson:
The witches’ scenes from Macbeth have always worried the life out of the polite, tragic stage; the grimaces of the hags and the garish make-believe of the flaming cauldron have bred more disenchantment than anything else that Shakespeare wrote. But ship the witches into the rank and fever-stricken jungle echoes, stuff a gleaming naked witch doctor into the cauldron, hold up Negro masks in the baleful light—and there you have a witches’ scene that is logical and stunning and a triumph of the theatre art.
Welles’s film was made with similar ends in mind, even to the point of having the witches (now Druid priestesses) fashion a sort of voodoo doll out of Scottish clay (a device that is given some precedent in Holinshed’s Chronicles). Everything in the production was designed to make the play more primitive, so what Welles gains in melodramatic intensity, he loses in complexity. Macbeth as Shakespeare conceived him is only partly a heathen of the moors—he is also, quite unhistorically, a creature of the Renaissance court, and his machinations are partly a representation of that court’s plottings, intrigues, and sophisti
cation. Shakespeare’s tragic hero commits his murderous deeds in a reasonably civilized world, where Scottish noblemen are welcome at King Edward’s castle, where Macbeth and his lady give housing to their sovereign, where one must “look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.” This counterpoint between a highly developed social code and the temptations of ambition gives the play its richness of characterizations, its psychological nuance. Welles, on the other hand, chooses to set Macbeth in the heart of darkness, emphasizing not psychology but rather the struggle between a ruthless desire for power and a rudimentary, elemental need to maintain order.
Welles announces this theme in a voice-over narration at the very beginning of the film, immediately after the credits, where Jacques Ibert pays homage to Bernard Herrmann by scoring the “power” theme from Citizen Kane under Welles’s name. We are shown a Celtic cross on the moors of Scotland, a cross that we are told is “newly arrived.” The story takes place, Welles says, in a time “between recorded history and legend,” when civilization is literally being created out of the primeval gloom. Macbeth, in this version, will be a tale of “plotting against Christian law and order” by “agents of chaos, priests of hell and magic,” whose “tools are ambitious men.” However different this conception may be from Shakespeare’s, one can at least argue that it is appropriate to the magic and savagery of the original.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 20