7
The Gypsy
Ironically, Welles’s departure from Hollywood and his fitful, hectic career on the continent were precipitated by the stage musical titled Around the World. At the end of that show’s financially beleaguered two-month run, Welles had gone $350,000 in debt and had been forced to commit himself to three movies (The Lady from Shanghai, The Third Man, and Prince of Foxes). The Internal Revenue Service refused to allow him to deduct his losses, and for the time being no important offers came from US movie producers. Partly to raise extra money, partly out of his growing alienation from America, Welles sought work in Europe, living in France, Spain, and England and filming in locales from Morocco to Yugoslavia. In 1973, looking back over his career in the States, he gave a Spanish interviewer a bitter summary of the facts: “During the twenty years that I worked in or was associated with Hollywood, only eight times did they permit me to utilize the tools of my trade. Only once was my own final cut of a film the one that premiered, and except for the Shakespearian experiment only twice was I allowed to give my opinion in the selection of my subject matter.”
Welles’s subsequent European movies were financed largely from his own pocket and are a testimony to his resourcefulness and ingenuity. In the main he had to work under worse conditions than celebrated art directors like Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini. Frequently his backers were in financial difficulties themselves or caused problems similar to the old Hollywood moguls. For example, when the original producers of Othello went broke, Welles spent four years of intermittent work on the film, stopping now and again to act in The Black Rose (Henry Hathaway, 1950) until he could gain enough money to continue; it is said he even “borrowed” equipment from the Hathaway movie to shoot parts of Othello in North Africa. In September 1961 Filmosa S.A., the production company for Mr. Arkadin (also known as Confidential Report), charged Welles with a breach of contract because they were infuriated with the almost chaotic form of the film’s narrative. Welles seemed in trouble until about a year later, when Michael and Alexander Salkind, two energetic entrepreneurs without much money, approached him to play a bit part in Taras Bulba. “Are you kidding?’ Welles is reported to have said, “I am Taras Bulba!” He refused their offer but persuaded them to arrange financing for The Trial, a project he had been contemplating for fifteen years. The Salkinds raised $1.3 million and hired a well-known international cast, only to find themselves in financial and legal troubles midway through the picture. Just as the production was about to fall apart, Welles conceived a way to shoot scenes in an empty rail station across from his Paris hotel, avoiding higher production costs and speeding up the work. In addition to writing, directing, and acting in the film, he also worked as second cameraman, editor, and dubber, completing everything within the original budget and a week ahead of schedule.
A good deal has been written about whether Welles’s move to Europe was a self-destructive act. The decision, however, was not entirely voluntary. Possibly Welles could have managed his career so as to become a prosperous character actor, occasionally able to find theatrical or film work in America; on the other hand, the 1942–43 campaign against him at RKO had made a lasting impression in Hollywood. He was typed as unreliable, extravagant, and poor box office; his style was outrageous and idiosyncratic; and except for The Stranger he had never made a picture that audiences could watch with an easy, passive involvement. He had therefore gone where he could find the best chances of making films, and in the next twenty years he was able to direct two distinguished adaptations of Shakespeare and two other films that are completely in his own style. In between these projects Welles acted in a variety of other people’s movies, usually bad ones, but sometimes he was able to influence lesser directors in interesting ways. Prince of Foxes (1949), for example, is ostensibly directed by Henry King, but parts of it bear the marks of Welles’s style as vividly as the Robert Stevenson Jane Eyre he had done in the early forties.
As an actor in these films, Welles was usually a “character” in the worst sense and was frequently miscast by directors who did not understand his essential immobility or the fact that he was best when he played a vulnerable or childish figure of power. He appears to have chosen roles casually, out of immediate need for cash, but he does fine work as Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons and as Bresnavitch in John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter; he also makes a nice parody of himself as Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and a clever imitation of Alex Korda in The V.I.P.s. On the other hand, as General Dreedle, the pure monster of Catch-22, he is too much like a movie celebrity playing a cameo. Of all these roles, the one for which he is most famous—Harry Lime, the villain in the Carol Reed/Graham Greene production of The Third Man—is also the best. Here Welles not only steals the film but also makes its success possible, largely because of the strategically clever places he appears, the beautifully sinister compositions in which he is photographed, and the use he makes of his own spoiled-baby face. Actually he has little to do but has been given the title role and is the subject of everyone else’s conversations; therefore his brief, tantalizing appearances are supercharged, bringing just the right amount of Luciferian dramatics to the bleak, downtrodden backgrounds of postwar Vienna. There is in fact a good deal of the young Charles Foster Kane in his performance. Joseph Cotten plays a man not unlike Jed Leland, and the famous scene between him and Welles atop an empty Ferris wheel has many of the same psychological dynamics as the newsroom encounters in Citizen Kane. Welles’s “touch” is everywhere apparent in that scene: poised high above an amusement park reminiscent of the one in The Lady from Shanghai, he looks down on the people below and calls them “dots,” an echo of Franz Kindler in The Stranger. A moment later he makes a bravura exit speech, disarmingly confessing his ruthlessness with a joke that Graham Greene has said Welles invented: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” (A few years later Welles told André Bazin that although he was responsible for putting the gag in the film, he had stolen it from “an old Hungarian play.”)
The films Welles directed during these years were infrequent and sometimes technically crude, but as the auteur of Chimes at Midnight he can hardly be said to have lost his powers. In retrospect, his best work was done inside the studios, where he was able to take full advantage of an elaborate machinery for creating fantasy and a series of technicians who could bring his ideas to life. The bitterest irony of his career is that he had the potential of bringing so much imagination to an inert studio technology but was regarded as too romantically individualistic to be supported by the American system. Hence in the European films one sees all the old ingenuity but nothing to compare with the sumptuous illusionism in The Lady from Shanghai or the viscerally effective camera movement of Touch of Evil. The dazzle is gone, if not the intelligence.
Of course in some ways the European films are more satisfying than the American ones. They are free not only of Hollywood formulas but also of the aestheticism and tendentiousness of the worst of the avant-garde. Frequently they gain in interest and charm because of the contradictory impulses in Welles’s personality—his old-fashioned love of the “classics,” plus his youthful instinct for motion picture spectacle. And yet something is always missing, and not just at the superficial level of technical resources. The deepest problem with these films as a group—a problem barely suggested in serious criticism of Welles’s work—is that their director has lost touch with the social and cultural environment he knows best. It is true that Welles was always an internationalist, and, as Andrew Sarris says, he “imposed a European temperament on the American cinema”; nevertheless, his best work was always grounded in contemporary American mores, politics, and popular myth. His purely European films, by contrast, are set in nonspecific dreamworlds, or they
are adaptations of classics from an earlier age. Hence what Welles gains in seriousness, he loses in vitality and the shock of recognition. To a large degree his talents were those of the satirist and the moralist, the sort of artist who needs to maintain a constant relation with manners and national types or else his humor goes flat and his anger becomes merely rhetorical. Outside America, Welles quite simply lost the roots of his art, his work growing more introspective and generalized. He retained his brilliantly surreal imagery and his gift for narrative, but except in Mr. Arkadin all the manic satire and punch of the Hollywood films was lost. Splendidly constructed and mature in outlook as some of these later pictures may be, they have never been able to generate the sheer excitement of the more populist American work.
The complexity of such issues will, I hope, become evident in subsequent chapters, but for now let us consider Welles’s first two European films, Othello and Mr. Arkadin, which illustrate some of his difficulties. Of the two, I have chosen to give more space to the latter; relatively little has been said about it, and for all of its obvious flaws it seems to me the more interesting.
I Othello
Of all Welles’s films Othello is the one for which the adjective “beautiful” is most justified. Given the series of pictures he made before and after it—The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil—it seems almost classically proportioned. The story is lucid, the acting naturalistic, the visual compositions relatively simple and pleasing to the eye. Welles’s characteristic lens distortions and long takes have given way to a crisp, somewhat muted photographic expressionism, and, despite the occasionally garbled and poorly dubbed soundtrack, most of Shakespeare’s verses are audible. Because of the difficult production circumstances, there is less bravura camera movement and more editing. It is odd that so many writers—including Welles himself—should have described the film as if it were another exercise in operatic bravura.
Of course Othello is hardly anti-Wellesian. It has all the Stimmung of his earlier films and takes several liberties with its source. When costumes failed to arrive on the first day of shooting, Welles decided to stage the attempted murder of Cassio in a hastily improvised steam bath, where Roderigo could be dressed in a towel and the air filled with atmospheric mist. The brawl between Cassio, Roderigo, and Montano took place in a foul Arabian cistern; actor Micheál MacLiammóir was impressed by “the macabre sorcery of the place, which I suddenly realize would probably, in the hands of any modern director but Orson, be utilized for mystery-farce starring Abbott and Costello.” The film also has Welles’s typical plot structure, beginning with the funeral of Othello and Desdemona, then showing how their deaths came about, then bringing the story full circle by returning to the funeral. A heavy sense of determinism hangs over everything, and Iago’s reference to the “net that shall enmesh them all” provides a key to the visual design. Welles told MacLiammóir that the costumes should be “Carpaccio,” which meant “very short belted jackets, undershirt pulled in puffs through apertures in sleeves laced with ribbons and leather thongs, long hose, and laced boots. Females also laced, bunched, puffed, sashed and ribboned.” At every opportunity, Welles has used images of confinement. Near the beginning, for example, he shows Iago being dragged through the streets of Cyprus in a dog collar and chains; a subjective camera sees a guard forcing him (us) into a tiny iron cage, which is then hoisted above a jeering crowd. Welles repeatedly situates the same cage at corners of the action during the story proper, reminding the audience of Iago’s fate but also of the way the other characters are imprisoned by their passions. The players are often separated by gates or pillars and are photographed amid barlike shadows or masses of ship’s rigging. Even the bedchamber of Othello and Desdemona is designed like a cell, with a heavy metal hatch at the top through which Lodovico and several others gaze down at the doomed Moor. (As an example of the technique, note the close-up of Iago shown in figure 7.1.)
Figure 7.1: Iago in a cage.
The film’s style is never self-effacing—indeed, as I hope to show, the camera tends to serve as a substitute for acting. On the whole, however, Welles appears to have decided upon a reasonably calm effect, trying to hold his natural tendency to exaggeration in check so that Othello would be different from the ill-fated Macbeth. In the advertisements he told audiences, “None of our settings were built in the studio. They are all real.” Technically speaking it was a false claim, since some of the castle interiors were designed by Alexandre Trauner (art director for Les Enfants du Paradis, among others), and a few brief shots were made in an Italian studio. Nevertheless, Welles was being essentially truthful; he had gone to the other extreme from the stylized, rudimentary settings of the studio-bound Macbeth, choosing real locales in the Mediterranean. The early scenes with Desdemona and her father were photographed in Venice itself, principally at the Doge’s palace, where Welles emphasized the sensuous, twilit canals and the cultivated, almost fussy Renaissance decoration. Othello’s military domain was “played” by a sixteenth-century Portuguese fortress near the North African seacoast town of Mogador, its mammoth and impressively functional walls surrounded by rocky beaches and baked in a hot, clean sunlight. The one artificial element here—and it is a good one—is the ship used to carry Othello home from the wars; its shadow is seen bobbing up and down against the walls of the fort like a surreal toy.
The opposition between the two worlds of the play is emphasized throughout: in Venice the male players dress in gilded robes and pillowy hats, whereas in the African setting they wear simple tights and light armor; in Venice flocks of pigeons scatter from the façades of crowded buildings, while in Africa the sky is filled with clouds and wheeling gulls. As usual, Welles was supremely aware of how the environment expresses character, and he used his locations to show that Desdemona and Othello are as different socially as they are physically. She is a fair Botticellian girl (nicely played by the Canadian actress Suzanne Cloutier) whose father has kept her sheltered in an ultracivilized society; he, on the other hand, is a dark, nobly direct man of action, a slightly aging veteran of “big wars that make ambition proud.” Each is partly a stranger to the other, this strangeness accounting for their mutual attraction as well as their vulnerability to Iago’s manipulation. Welles’s settings disclose these facts, even while they give the film a sense of natural air and architectural solidity; indeed a few of the exteriors at Mogador have such a windblown naturalness that they conflict with the artful rhetoric of the language.
In Macbeth the acting had been as artificial and exaggerated as the stage sets. In Othello the approach is just the opposite. Welles restrained several of the performances and sought a psychologically “realistic” explanation for Iago’s villainy. Here again the interpretation runs slightly counter to Shakespeare but in still another direction from the method Welles adopted in Macbeth. In the play Iago gives reasons for wanting to undo the Moor, but they are almost like afterthoughts, rationales for what Coleridge famously called a motiveless malignity, or perhaps for too many motives. “I am not what I am,” he says, suggesting that he dissembles even in the moments when he seems to lay bare his soul. He has a protean quality, an evil resistant to categorization. Welles, however, has made “I am not what I am” imply schizophrenia and has given the character the kind of subconscious motives that were cheerfully ignored in Macbeth. He decided, in fact, that Iago suffers from impotence. The malady is never specified in the actual performance, which retains many of Shakespeare’s ambiguities, but it becomes a “subtext” for Micheál MacLiammóir’s behavior. Welles and MacLiammóir agreed to dispense with all traces of “Mephistophelian villain,” and most of Iago’s soliloquies—those fascinatingly repellent visions of a truly evil mind—have been cut from the play. There must be no “passion” in Iago, MacLiammóir wrote in his diary, “no conscious villainy.” On the outside, Iago would be a kind of businessman dealing in destruction with neatness, but to avoid monotony in the performance, MacLiammóir would always remember “the un
derlying sickness of mind, the immemorial hatred of life, the secret isolation of impotence under the soldier’s muscles.” Because of his affliction, Iago would develop a hatred of life, a hostility directed as much against Desdemona as against Othello.
The resulting portrait is an interesting one, accomplished with a high degree of technical skill and underplayed to the point that Iago becomes more of a revolting presence than a passionately vivid force. The “soldier’s muscles” are nowhere in evidence, MacLiammóir conveying instead a smallish, sometimes rather epicene quality; his hooded eyes and the thin beard along the line of his chin give his face a masklike appearance, as if he were utterly detached from his inner pain. But despite the fact that MacLiammóir himself contributed to this conception of the role, he was left with vague dissatisfactions about movie “realism”:
Only thing that depresses me [he wrote] is the camera’s inability—or unwillingness—to cope with the great organ-stop speeches, the “Othello’s occupation’s gone” one, for example, which [Welles] delivers so far with caution as if afraid of shattering the sound-track. . . . this feeling accompanied by a longing to see Orson himself, or Gielgud, or Hilton [Edwards], or any fine speaker of verse stand up on an honest wooden stage and let us have the stuff from the wild lungs and in the manner intended. This I know Orson tried in his film Macbeth and people didn’t like it, a verdict possibly shared by the camera, so there maybe is the answer.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 25