The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  Welles seems to have decided, somewhat uncharacteristically, that the movies were too intimate, too “modern” for Shakespeare’s lavish stage conventions; he reasoned that the camera’s tendency to exaggerate an actor’s behavior must be taken into account—good enough logic for most movies, but inimical to Welles’s temperament and his best work. Therefore MacLiammóir was right when he sensed something lacking in Welles’s performance, which is not so muffled as MacLiammóir’s own but does have a controlled, even guarded quality in the “organ-stop” moments. Welles is at his best when Othello is trying to repress his feelings, or in the relatively quiet, determined mood just before the murder of Desdemona; the “put out the light, and then put out the light” speech, for example, is superbly delivered and genuinely moving. On the other hand, Welles as actor never captures Othello’s splendidly romantic self-confidence and hubris, his boastful ability to charm Desdemona and the audience with tales of his exploits. The great speech to the duke explaining how he won the girl (“She wished she had not heard it; yet she wished / That heaven had made her such a man”) is delivered in a near monotone and photographed in soft focus, and Othello’s calm put-down of an angry mob—“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them”—is virtually tossed away. In the later mad scenes, where we ought to see the easy destruction of all this strength, Welles is equally restrained. Othello’s epileptic seizure, the foaming at the mouth described by Iago in Shakespeare’s text, is nowhere to be found. The attack on Desdemona before a group of senators from Venice is delivered with a fine visual shock, but the camera literally becomes Othello: Desdemona walks into a close-up, looking into the lens as if it were a character, and Welles’s hand suddenly enters from the left to slap her face. Because he is so intent on visual effect, Welles has left Othello’s violence, his incoherent reference to “goats and monkeys,” to a disembodied offscreen presence.

  “When I love thee not,” Shakespeare’s Othello tells Desdemona, “Chaos is come again.” But Welles’s performance, for all its intelligence, lacks chaos and true terror. When Othello falls into a passionate swoon beside the ocean, a series of dissolves and tilted camera angles are used to convey his agony. What is needed, however, is a naked intensity comparable to Agnes Moorehead’s depiction of Fanny in The Magnificent Ambersons, or perhaps comparable to Welles’s own terrifying destructiveness in the bedroom scene in Citizen Kane. The film wants a dramatic climax in which camera work does not substitute for human behavior. In the murder scene, for example, Welles is reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane after the tantrum in Susan’s room; when he approaches Desdemona’s bed, he does so with the somnambulistic stiffness of Kane going past the mirrors in Xanadu. But nowhere have we seen a sufficient release of the character’s festering madness, a moment of crisis when everything breaks loose, leaving him with this stunned, almost resigned determination. Instead Welles has chosen to make the camera project emotions that speakers of verse were meant to deliver.

  Few would deny that the film succeeds admirably at the visual level. The punishment of Iago—“The time, the place, the torture; O! Enforce it!”—has become an image instead of merely being alluded to. The shots of a funeral cortege bearing Othello and Desdemona equal the stylized, heroic montages in any one of Eisenstein’s late films, and they have a far greater sense of dramatic movement—as when Desdemona’s body is drawn past the camera at a slow descending angle, her death becoming a chilling fact. The scenes showing Iago’s destruction of Othello’s confidence in Desdemona are photographed in two brilliantly contrasting moods: first a long walk in sunlight across the castle battlements, where, in the uninterrupted flow of a single shot, we see Othello disintegrating before our eyes. Next, a more fully edited sequence inside the castle, the bright air and the steady fortifications replaced with a descent down a serpentine stairway into a narrow, murky tower. Iago remarks, “I see this has a little dashed your spirits,” and Othello, whose face is seen in a small distorting mirror, hastily replies, “Not a jot! Not a jot!” The Moor has become psychologically unmanned, a fact that is emphasized when, during their discussion, Iago helps him remove his steel armor and his huge cloak. Even in these expressive scenes, however, Welles has held back a little. When Othello murmurs the line, “and yet how nature, erring from itself,” we see his face in a small “Carpaccio” mirror, but the hideous distortion of his features comes from a mirror, a naturalistic source, not from the extreme lenses Welles would later use in Touch of Evil. Othello therefore breaks fewer rules of plausibility and coherence, and for all of its beauty it is a less fundamentally daring film.

  When Welles employs unorthodox techniques here, he does so in subtle ways, chiefly at the level of editing. For example, as Noel Burch has observed, he created a “deliberately jerky” rhythm for the film by introducing a slightly illogical ellipsis between some of the cuts. To cite one instance, in the scene where Desdemona pleads with Othello on behalf of Cassio (“Good love, call him back”), we see Welles and Suzanne Cloutier in a large two-shot, the camera located behind Cloutier’s shoulder. “Shall I deny you? No,” Welles says, and Cloutier exits, moving out of the frame to the right. Instantly we cut to a reverse shot of her, seen from Welles’s point of view as she walks away, but she seems nearly a block down the street, having moved much farther than the ordinary time between a shot/reverse shot combination would allow. Most viewers who are aware of such things will notice that this slight discontinuity is typical of the later sections of the film, where Welles gives the feeling that Othello’s world is falling apart.

  Like most of Welles’s films, Othello is fascinating to watch; it is even more remarkable when one considers that its high degree of formal control was obtained under the poorest of circumstances, with Welles periodically suspending production while he sought money to continue. The beauty and rigor of his style indicate that he had seized upon a clear, forceful conception from the very beginning and was able to maintain a vision of the whole despite numerous delays and hardships. What results is a distinguished film, but not a great one. Jack Jorgens, in his fine essay on Welles’s imagery, has said that Othello should be regarded as “poetry of the screen,” which in many cases it certainly is. The early reviewers who claimed that the film was arbitrary and excessively stylish were incorrect; if Othello ultimately falls short of greatness—and I believe it does—it fails not as visual poetry but as drama. Welles, MacLiammóir, and Cloutier are physically effective in the leading roles, but they lack fire. Welles has been a bit too wary of his own romantic inclinations and never generates an acting intensity equal to the drama itself. He is the last director one would accuse of taking an “academic” approach to Shakespeare, but in this case, for all the liberties he has taken with the source, he comes very close to a well-made, passionless gloss, a gothicism in good taste.

  II Mr. Arkadin

  Welles’s next project makes an interesting contrast. It is even less effective as human drama, but the difference in subject matter liberates him in many ways. From a respectful adaptation of a classic, he moves to a burlesque of his own earlier work, producing a more chaotic but more truly adventurous film.

  Like Touch of Evil, Mr. Arkadin has different versions: there are at least five feature films (two in Spanish, with a couple of different actors), plus the novelization by Maurice Bessy and an earlier screenplay by Welles. Those interested in exploring the labyrinthine history of the production and the various textual variants should consult three sources: (1) the Criterion DVD boxed set titled The Complete Mr. Arkadin, which contains the 99-minute US or “Corinth” version along with the 98-minute British/European version (titled Confidential Report) and the 105-minute “comprehensive version” assembled by the Munich Film Museum; (2) Jonathan Rosenbaum’s essay “The Seven Arkadins,” in Discovering Orson Welles; and (3) Jean-Pierre Berthome and François Thomas’s splendidly illustrated and scrupulously researched Orson Welles at Work. (In December 2014 Christie’s auction house in London announced the sale of roughly ni
nety pages of Welles’s handwritten instructions on editing the film, plus another twenty-four pages of the continuity script with his annotations and music cues. This will no doubt lead to further scholarly complications.) In 2006 I had the pleasure of recording a commentary with Jonathan Rosenbaum for the “Corinth” version of the film in the Criterion boxed set. That is the version I used for the following discussion.

  Mr. Arkadin opens with a legend printed in typescript capitals: “A certain great and powerful king once asked a poet, ‘What can I give you of all that I have?’ He wisely replied, ‘Anything, sir, except your secret.’” The legend fades away to reveal a single-engine aircraft winging across a clear sky. Welles’s voice announces, “On December twenty-fifth, an airplane was discovered off the coast of Barcelona. It was flying empty. Investigation of this case reached into the highest circles and was responsible for the fall of at least one European government. This picture is a fictionalized account of the events leading up to the murder, and the appearance last Christmas morning of the empty plane.” The credits then appear (according to Peter Cowie, Welles intended to show them against a background of frightened bats flying in all directions, which would have been a perfect metaphor for the rest of the movie), and at their conclusion we see a young man (Robert Arden) crossing a snowy plaza in Zurich. He walks up an old stairway while the camera tracks back and away from him.

  Upstairs in an attic filled with decaying mementos of Nazi Germany and an upside-down painting of Hitler, the young man encounters a consumptive Jew named Jacob Zouk (Akim Tamiroff). Identifying himself as Guy Van Stratten, he tries desperately to make Zouk come away with him; first he babbles about a man named Arkadin and then pauses to explain what has happened in recent months. The movie now becomes a series of flashbacks within a flashback, narrated by Van Stratten’s offscreen voice.

  It seems Van Stratten is an uprooted American who has been earning a living smuggling cigarettes in the European black market. One evening in Naples, he says, he saw the police shoot down a man on the docks and heard the dying man whisper the name “Arkadin.” Hoping to use this flimsy evidence for blackmail, he sought out the fabulously wealthy armaments king Gregory Arkadin (Welles) at a castle in Spain. To gain an audience, he romanced the man’s daughter, Raina (Paola Mori, Welles’s third wife). Although Van Stratten’s blackmail attempt was a clumsy failure, Arkadin gave him a job anyway, devising a fantastic quest that would keep him as far as possible from the girl. Claiming to remember nothing before 1927, when he found himself on a street in Zurich with two hundred thousand Swiss francs in his pocket, Arkadin proposed an investigation into his own past, a search that would ultimately take Van Stratten to three continents. But Van Stratten was more competent and determined than Arkadin realized. Gradually he uncovered the tycoon’s secret history as a white slaver in Poland. When Arkadin learned of this discovery, he set about murdering everyone who had known him in the old days, and as a last stroke he planned to kill Van Stratten himself.

  At this point we return to the loft in Zurich, where Van Stratten tells Zouk that between them they are the only ones left who know Arkadin’s true identity. There follows a series of darkly comic attempts to hide Zouk from his potential killer; the attempts fail, and Zouk is knifed. Realizing that he will be the next to die, Van Stratten flies to Arkadin’s daughter in Spain, where he plans to tell her the whole story. By luck he arrives ahead of his pursuer. Believing that Raina has been told the truth, Arkadin commits suicide by leaping from his private plane. Van Stratten is left standing in a Barcelona airport, as penniless as he was at the beginning of his adventure, while Raina drives disconsolately back to town.

  I have summarized these events in some detail because Mr. Arkadin is an unusually frenetic and bewildering movie, its labyrinthine plot further obscured by awkward dubbing of the actors’ voices, its continuity disturbed by Welles’s blithe refusal to obey the laws of classical editing. In many ways it is a deliberately confusing, low-budget mixture of Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, and The Third Man: against the background of postwar Europe, a search is conducted for the secret of a rich man’s life; we begin with a mysterious death and return to the same point, having discovered, through flashbacks, a tycoon’s crimes and the identity he has tried to keep hidden. But Arkadin as a character is profoundly uninteresting. He lacks the psychological fascination, the contradictory personality, the historical validity of a Charles Foster Kane or a Harry Lime. In outward form his story follows the same “tragic” curve as theirs, yet the scenes of his discovery and death are emotionally empty. He seems hardly more than a bombastic figure in costume who gives Welles an excuse for the rest of the movie, and if one admires Mr. Arkadin as I do, then one looks for its power in something other than conventionally realistic characterizations or even a plausible story. In its own way it is as unorthodox a film as the Welles Macbeth, but it is photographed in real places and takes itself less seriously. An effective but often tongue-in-cheek variation on the psychological thriller, it reduces the Kane plot almost to the level of archetypes, becoming a sort of hallucinatory fable; even more interesting, it links its quasi-Freudian theme to a vision of society, a satiric portrait of the world after the war, showing a flotsam of international gypsies living in the ruins of Western civilization.

  One of the impressions that Arkadin registers most strongly is of a dizzying montage, a kaleidoscope of exotic settings and grotesque cameo performances. Slightly ahead of his former associate Mike Todd, with this film Welles created his own perverse version of Around the World, a mad journey that leads us past a series of well-known performers: Mischa Auer as a flea trainer in a Copenhagen circus; Peter van Eyck as a fastidious black marketeer in Tangiers; Michael Redgrave as a homosexual fence in Amsterdam; Suzanne Flon as a Polish aristocrat reduced to working as a vendeuse in Paris; Katina Paxinou as the poker-playing wife of a government official in Mexico; and, most impressive of them all, Akim Tamiroff in the role of the former dope peddler Jacob Zouk. According to the script, all of these characters were once in Poland, most of them having been witnesses to Arkadin’s criminal life there in the twenties. When they appear, however, they produce a crazy quilt of accents in wildly different settings, and Welles has created a still more disjointed effect by occasionally dubbing his own voice in place of theirs.

  The protagonist of the film, Van Stratten, is an American ne’er-do-well who speaks movie gangsterese, his dialogue filled with mispronunciations like “aminesia.” His investigation into Arkadin’s past introduces him to nearly a dozen minor characters, whose faces keep looming like apparitions in a nightmare. Consider, for example, the small gallery reproduced here (see figs. 7.2 through 7.5). In barely concealed mythical terms, Van Stratten is a knight trying to rescue a fair lady from an ogre in a castle, and these faces are the monsters he encounters on his quest. In an equally displaced but more clinical sense, the faces are cathected objects, symptoms of sexual anxiety, and the movie plays indirectly on the theme of a “confidential report” into the unconscious. Van Stratten is a young man caught up in a contest of masculinity with the powerful Arkadin; the two are rivals for power and for the love of Raina, and by working his way back to a sort of primal scene Van Stratten hopes to replace the kingly older man. “Maybe I’ll be an Arkadin some day,” he says, in one of the many places where a parallel between him and his opponent is stressed. Hence one of the most powerful shots in the movie—actually it appears twice—is designed to suggest a journey into a psychic heart of darkness: Van Stratten crosses a snowy street in Zurich, walking up a stairwell while the camera retreats backward into a dark corridor, as if into a cave or a womb. The lighted archway of the stairs becomes a tiny square of light at the corner of the screen, resembling the old-fashioned iris that closes the snow scene in The Magnificent Ambersons, except that here the entire image shrinks into sinister blackness.

  Figures 7.2–7.5: Minor characters’ faces loom like apparitions in Mr. Arkadin.

  Of course the “pri
mal scene” turns out to be rather banal, the movie generating its most impressive effects at the level of imagery rather than content. As with most of his other films, Welles uses Freudian expressionism in a teasing, half-conscious way, constructing the story as a devious, defensive puzzle, a conjuring trick that plays upon certain anxieties without naming them directly. The characters are so broadly drawn that they suggest various symbolic possibilities: Arkadin and Van Stratten resemble the antagonists in a “family drama,” and because one is American while the other is Slavic, they also vaguely connote figures in a Cold War allegory. In the most general sense, they are like the scorpion and the frog in the little fable Arkadin tells his party guests. One day, the story goes, a scorpion persuaded a frog to carry him across a river; midway across, the scorpion stung the frog and drowned himself. When the dying frog complained that “there is no logic in this,” the scorpion replied, “I know . . . it’s my character.” The moral, as in Welles’s other films, seems to be that life is determined by irrational principles. In this case the frog manages to survive, but toward the end his antagonist tells him, “You didn’t know what you were asking for.”

  Like any assault on the surface logic and reasonableness of things, Mr. Arkadin generates a nervous humor. It resembles The Lady from Shanghai in being narrated by a frog-witted, sometimes dumbfounded protagonist whose reactions heighten the zany unreality of events. Nearly always there is a tension between Van Stratten’s clipped, world-weary commentary—which falls squarely in the tradition of the private-eye story—and the surreal quality of the imagery. For example, when Van Stratten remarks that Arkadin spied on him and Raina, we see the couple cycling through a forest in Spain; Welles then cuts to the shot reproduced in figure 7.6, showing one of the tycoon’s well-dressed minions peeping out from behind a slender birch tree. Much of the film is played in this farcical style, as if the world were making Van Stratten the victim of a practical joke. He bumps into a stuffed armadillo in Trebitsch’s junk shop, where the proprietor keeps trying to sell him a rusted “teleoscope”; he is peeped at through a magnifying glass by a flea-training “Professor,” who tells him (in the voice of Orson Welles), “after twenty-thousand years murder is a business that is still in the hands of amateurs”; he is quizzed by a silly German policeman (Gert Frobe), who shouts in broken English, “It’s very interesting to learn how you that knew!” In the midst of his desperate attempt to escape Arkadin, he is blackmailed by Zouk, who insists on being given a hot goose liver for Christmas dinner; at that very moment, a cuckoo clock chimes on the wall behind Van Stratten’s head.