The more K. becomes angry at the court, the more appealing he becomes to the women, who have been arranged in an increasing order of aggressiveness. Mrs. Grubach, dressed in curlers and housecoat, plays the role of a respectable matron, so devoted to K. that she becomes jealous of Miss Burstner; Miss Burstner, in turn, allows K. a free kiss despite her need for sleep and her wish to be left alone; Irmie trails K. around and remarks that “cousins get married”; Hilda says that K. can do with her “whatever you want”; Leni fixes K. in her eye from the moment he enters the Advocate’s house, luring him into a room piled with tons of papers, where, after swaddling him in a judge’s robe and lying down amid the chaotic residue of legal “order,” she tries to seduce him; finally, a horde of teenagers—the mirror image of cousin Irmie—chase K. up a spiral staircase, pulling at his coat and squealing in sexual frenzy.
These women are slightly different from the ones in Kafka. They are wittier, usually authentically attractive, and lacking in what Walter Benjamin called Kafka’s “dirty voluptuousness.” We see Leni spreading her hand to show a web of flesh between the fingers, but on the whole Welles seems either unwilling or unable to provide a truly Kafkaesque imagery of sexual unhealth. (In any case Romy Schneider is altogether too beautiful for the character she plays.) On the other hand, Welles has echoed Kafka by making the women in K.’s world become more unpleasant and threatening as they become increasingly erotic. At first they are only mildly annoying, but they become associated with a mounting perversity and violence as the nightmare deepens. Mrs. Grubach’s smothering solicitude angers K., who unsuccessfully tries to close a window shade in her face; the promiscuous Miss Burstner throws K. out of her room when she suspects that he has committed a “political” crime; Irmie embarrasses K. at his office and follows him around the streets; Hilda brings him face-to-face with a terrifyingly sadistic law student who picks her up and carries her away; Leni, a vixenish woman with a “physical defect,” deceives and manipulates K., at one point trying to seduce both him and the client Bloch at the same time. In the most frightening scene of all, the swarm of urchins gather outside Titorelli’s garret, peering at K., reaching through cracks in the walls to pinch him, begging to be let inside. Titorelli calls them “dirty-minded little pussies” and threatens to punish them with an ice pick. When K. leaves the garret, he first tries to avoid the girls by taking an exit that leads him into the court; realizing the futility of this course, he goes back the way he came, running a gauntlet of squealing females who chase him through an obviously symbolic sewer.
Figures 8.8–8.11: The threat women embody in The Trial.
All of this ambivalence toward sexuality is perfectly in keeping with Kafka’s novel, but it may also be a reflection of Welles’s own much-mentioned reactionary attitude toward women. “I hate women,” Maurice Bessy quotes him as once saying, “but I need them.” In fact his female characters are often predatory types—suffocating mothers or sexy, conniving prostitutes. The Trial brings the psychological implications of this recurrent fantasy closer to the surface than any of his previous films, and it leaves K. imprisoned within the terrible dream. The original script contained a passage in which K., being led away by his executioners, catches sight of Miss Burstner; trying to run toward her, he cries, “Miss Burstner! Marika! Will I never be able to reach her?” It is difficult to say whether the scene, which was suggested by the novel, was intended as an indication that freedom might be obtained through love, or whether it was simply another instance of a mysterious temptress lingering outside the grasp of the Law. In any case it was never shot, and an atmosphere of isolation and sexual pessimism hangs over the film until the end.
By contrast, K. has been allowed to speak out against the idea of absurdity, and he achieves a sort of “manliness” when he attacks those who stand timidly before the doors of the Law. Against the patriarchal authority of the court he is reasonably effective; in a sense he cuckolds the Advocate by dallying with Leni, but he refuses to pay the penalty imposed on other “clients.” Soon afterward the executioners take him to a pit in the ground where they bid him lie down and remove his shirt; in his last moments he refuses to collaborate in a ritual that suggests castration, and he dies while making a rebellious gesture. The psychoanalytic message of his nightmare seems pretty clear: an oppressed child turns against a weak but menacing father and deposes him. But the victory is obtained at the cost of extinction, and the sexual malaise that provoked the original anxiety remains unabated.
A similar pessimism is suggested in Welles’s earlier films, even in those that preserve the optimistic formulas of Hollywood melodrama. In The Lady from Shanghai, for example, Welles had closed on a highly qualified note typical of the film noir. Michael O’Hara is as much a “collaborator” with an evil society as is Joseph K., and he, too, suffers from a dangerous attraction to a female. The last shot of the film is wonderfully lyrical and ostensibly liberating, the camera rising on a crane while Michael walks toward a sunny horizon. At the same time, however, he is shown as a brooding, isolated figure, reminiscent of the loners Humphrey Bogart usually played, and in his final words he suggests that he will spend the rest of his life trying to forget the woman he has left behind. The Trial, if only because it remains adequately faithful to its source, follows this problem to a darker resolution. We see K.’s executioners lighting a bundle of dynamite and tossing it at him; a rapid series of shots follow, showing K. laughing hysterically, the fuse burning down, and the executioners running away. Very briefly, K. is seen bending to pick something up; cut to a long shot of the empty field, K.’s laughter heard across the vast space; then a series of explosions, leaving the dark cloud in a dirty sky. Albinoni’s Adagio begins to play softly while Welles’s voice reads the credits to the film. We do not know whether K. has succeeded in destroying his persecutors or not, but the last shot conveys an utter desolation, as if death were the only escape from sexual paranoia.
9
Chimes at Midnight
When an artist admires Shakespeare as much as Welles did, he seems to identify strongly with the plays, and his comments on them are likely to be a helpful guide to his own work. Here is Welles speaking to André Bazin about Shakespeare’s temperament:
He was very close indeed to another age, if you understand me. He was standing in the door which opened onto the modern age and his grandparents, the old people in the village, the countryside itself, still belonged to the Middle Ages, to the old Europe. . . . His humanity came from his links to the Middle Ages, . . . and his pessimism, his bitterness—and it’s when he allows them free rein that he touches the sublime—belong to the modern world, the world which had just been created.
If the historical terms are changed, this becomes a fairly accurate description of the man who made The Magnificent Ambersons—a film that draws its “human” qualities from a nostalgia over the nineteenth-century Midwest and its lyric pessimism from a bitterness over the modern age. Thus Shakespeare’s links to “the countryside” are very like Welles’s own attachment to a vanished Wisconsin, and the bard’s “sublime” is very similar to the director’s romantic quarrel with industrialism.
In Welles’s films this historical myth is nearly always tied to personal concerns. All of his major characters—Kane, George Minafer, Captain Quinlan—are imprisoned by their past, destroyed not only by the aging process and the inexorable march of “progress” but also by the sheer difficulty of becoming adult in a new world. And given his obsession with this kind of story, it is only natural that Welles should have had a lifelong preoccupation with Shakespeare’s history plays, which treat the same intersection of public and private problems in the context of the Wars of the Roses. The two parts of Henry IV in particular are devoted to the transition from a medieval, chivalric code to a modern empire, from a kingship of heredity to a kingship of power politics, and they depict this theme by means of a personal rite de passage: Prince Hal’s exchange of childlike revelry for adult responsibility. Moreover, the princ
e’s abandoned friend Falstaff is the exact embodiment of a type Welles dealt with again and again: an adolescent caught in an aging body, a living contradiction of spirit and flesh, who suffers banishment under the new order of things.
The very plots of the Henry plays confirm Welles’s notion of Shakespeare as a man caught between two ages, because they are a blend of medieval folklore and hymns to Renaissance imperialism. The character of Hal is at least as old as the prodigal son, and Falstaff, the tempter and “father ruffian” who partly substitutes for Hal’s true father, is an updated version of the vice figure from the morality plays; at the same time, Shakespeare gives us a fairly specific account of how Hal and his father manipulate public opinion in order to gain power, subduing the Percy family and creating a rule that depends more on political craft than on legitimacy. It is as if the playwright, with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in a secular and skeptical time, had deliberately sought to create a dialectic between past and present. As C. L. Barber has noted, Falstaff is “a Lord of Misrule . . . brought up, so to speak, from the country to the city, or from the traditional past into the changing present,” who becomes “the mouthpiece not merely for the dependent holiday skepticism which is endemic in a traditional society, but also for a dangerously self-sufficient everyday skepticism.” When the old medieval Vice is thus brought into contact with the new politics, his meaning alters slightly; he is, as always, a creature of anarchic libido who gives a necessary release from too much pious social authority, but he has also become a skeptic among skeptics, a charmingly honest rogue who acts as a critic of the state. To quote Barber again, he is “set in an environment of sober-blooded great men behaving as opportunistically as he,” and “the effect is to raise radical questions about social sanctities.”
Welles was aware of this tension in the history plays and had tried to document it as early as 1938, in the failed Mercury production of Five Kings. The idea of combining the history cycle into one unified piece stayed with him until the early sixties, when at last, under the usual catch-as-catch-can circumstances, he made a film about Falstaff called Chimes at Midnight. It is a brilliant editing of scenes from Richard II, Henry IV parts one and two, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, spliced together with offscreen narration spoken by Ralph Richardson from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Quite a free adaptation, it does no violence to Shakespeare’s text and actually improves the story of an heir apparent and his dissolute friend by making it more unified. The acting, particularly by Keith Baxter as Hal, John Gielgud as Henry IV, and Welles himself as Falstaff, is virtually flawless, and the script serves to heighten a quality that Welles’s best movies have always had in common with Shakespeare: an architectural mastery of double plots and multiple characters by means of which, as Barber says of the history plays, “everything becomes foil to everything else.”
By condensing the story into an account of the Falstaff-Hal relationship, Welles forces the audience to make repeated contrasts and comparisons between the characters, who are quite paradoxical in themselves. “The interesting thing about the story,” he once told an interviewer, “is that the old king is a murderer, he has usurped the throne and yet he represents legitimacy.” Hal, the “legitimate” prince, “must betray the good man in order to become a hero.” Falstaff’s public and private selves do not conflict so much, but he, too, is an ironic figure; an old man who stands for youth, he continually makes jokes about the difference between appearance and reality: “My Lords,” he tells the bishops, “you that are old consider not the capacities of us that are young.”
One has only to consider a few close-ups of Falstaff, such as the two reproduced in figures 9.1 and 9.2, showing him in a burlesque of kingship, to see what complexities he brings to the story. To some degree Welles seems to have been influenced by the nineteenth-century romantic notion of the character, turning him into a true friend of the prince and a wise man among politicians; he has called Falstaff “Shakespeare’s good, pure man,” whose faults are minor compared to the rest of the world. In the film as a whole, however, the portrait is rather more ambiguous. If Falstaff is not quite a rogue, neither is he the source of all virtue. Physically he is the opposite of John Gielgud’s monastic king, resembling a filthy Santa Claus who has carried “gourmandizing” to a dangerous extreme, but at the same time his sly behavior is like an “honest” version of the king’s opportunism. The furthest thing from a clown, he is in fact a man of very high intelligence, an alcoholic in the same way as Welles’s idol John Barrymore was, whose playacting in the scenes above or whose behavior during the battle with the rebellious Percys is an intentional commentary on the selfishness behind kingly idealism. Yet he is also something of a child, and like a child he sometimes overreaches, his very wit becoming self-destructive. Consider, for example, the scene where he drags Hotspur’s dead body across the battleground, dumping it between the king and the prince while boasting of his valor. On the one hand the scene parodies Hal’s ambitious, calculated attempt to obtain “honor” by killing Hotspur, but on the other hand it becomes a hollow joke, robbing a dead man of his dignity and derisively capitalizing on the bloody sacrifice that has gone before. Clearly Falstaff is out of his element when he is brought into actual proximity with the king, and his attempt to carry on the joking of the tavern badly misfires; thus when he delivers his encomium on “sherris sack” in the wake of the battle, the prince turns away, drops his cup, and wanders off across the field toward his real father.
Figures 9.1–9.2: Falstaff in a burlesque of kingship.
Although Falstaff is the center of the film, the true dynamics of the story are created by Hal, who in some way resembles everyone else and seems to profit from their mistakes. He is partly like Falstaff, the carousing publican; partly like the king, who is burdened with responsibility and cursed by his own drive to power; and partly like Hotspur, who is capable of a beautifully aristocratic, if misguided, courage. In Shakespeare, Hal somehow absorbs the best traits of these characters into a healthy synthesis, becoming an ideal figure of state, but in Welles’s more pessimistic view, the dialectic breaks down and the synthesis never develops. Hal is a tragic figure who deliberately chooses power and responsibility over friendship, keeping an eye always on his future. Welles never suggests that he ought to have avoided his destiny, and never completely sentimentalizes Falstaff; the dilemma of the film is simply that youth and age cannot be reconciled any more than lovable, sometimes dangerous anarchy and needful, sometimes self-regarding social order.
At a deeper level this contest between youth and responsibility contains the same sexual dilemmas we have seen in Welles’s work from Citizen Kane to The Trial. The connection is difficult to see at first, because Chimes at Midnight presents its major conflicts in the form of a “family drama” of king and heir, taking place in an exclusively male world of camaraderie, politics, and power, where the nearest thing to a romantic relationship is the rough-house between Hotspur and Kate. There are no mothers in sight—only Doll Tearsheet (Jeanne Moreau), who offers brief comfort to Falstaff in his old age and who is passed freely among the men. In a sense, however, Falstaff acts both as a substitute father and as a displaced mother, being associated throughout with softness, earthy affection, and nourishment. Perhaps because he is a male, and a “rounded” Shakespearian character, he is not treated in the same abstracted, ambivalent way as the mothers in Welles’s early films. Nevertheless, he has the same affective power as they do and many of the same functions within the drama. He is the figure who stands for the child’s need of love, intimacy, and human contact, whereas the king represents the need for public control and an autonomous adulthood. As usual in Welles’s films the two needs are never integrated, leaving human personality torn between infantile hedonism and a role-playing manipulativeness. Just as Charles Foster Kane is a character who never grows up, so Prince Hal is a character who never seems to have been young; behind the two types is the same problem, the same psychological split between private
and public that inhibits the development of personality.
To the extent that the film is about fatherhood, it shows that state to be exceedingly fragile, and here again the pattern is the same as in the previous films, where male authority is uncertain and dependent. Although Falstaff and the old king have an anxious vulnerability that is typical of parents in Welles’s work, it is interesting that Falstaff has more vitality and even physical agility than the prince’s true father. Falstaff clings hopefully to the prince, like a doting mother, trying to manipulate but being manipulated in turn, while the king withers away, always suspicious of his son. As for the prince, he lacks any clear identity beyond the cold, practical purposefulness he has learned from birth. Keith Baxter is particularly good at conveying what William Empson called the character’s “parasitic” absorption into whatever world he encounters: in the tavern scenes he seems slight and rather boyish, like a sensual Tony Perkins; on the battlefield against Hotspur he is resolute, heroic, and a model of chivalry; in the closing moments he begins to take on the chilly demeanor of his father. He is, furthermore, systematically destructive to his various “hosts.” He breaks Falstaff’s heart, of course, but he also kills off Hotspur and literally takes the crown from a dying king. Having outgrown them all, he is grimly isolated, walled up in a castle like so many of the frustrated wielders of power in Welles’s earlier movies.
But if Hal has many faces, he is also ruthlessly forthright about his true intentions. Never a hypocrite, as several critics have called him, he pauses amid the gaiety of the tavern to tell Falstaff that he will “banish fat Jack”; he announces to his father that he will henceforth “be more myself”; he sends a message to Hotspur confessing that he has “a truant been to chivalry” and will redeem his honor with a “single fight.” The problem is that the other characters never quite believe him, and for understandable reasons. Even Poins (Tony Beckley), his rather sinister, perverse companion in revelry—and the true hypocrite of the film—cannot accept the prince’s confessions of weariness and grief on the days just before he assumes the crown. This, too, Poins assumes, must be a kind of dissembling, but in fact Hal has never concealed his feelings. He is an honest pragmatist, burdened by neither his father’s guilt, nor Hotspur’s sometimes crude machismo, nor Falstaff’s cynicism about power. In a way he is paler, more cryptic than these others, who are more obviously ruled by their passions. Thus when the king broods on the way he got the crown, or when Hotspur promises to die bravely in the act of rebellion, or when Falstaff drifts into melancholy, there is a vivid, irreconcilable conflict between the nature of the man and the nature of the world. Hal, on the other hand, seems always perfectly aware of his capabilities, just as he always knows what time it is. The only thing that keeps him from becoming an utterly callous figure or a pure egoist like Kane is that he expresses an authentic sympathy for the men around him who are outmoded and dying: he speaks in awe of his father’s crown; he gives a moving eulogy for Hotspur; and he grieves inwardly and promises to “enlarge” Falstaff from banishment. It is precisely because he has these personal emotions that his fate is so sad. He is led by hereditary ambition to outstrip everyone else, finally becoming a purely public man, surrounded by plotting courtiers, whose inner pain has been subordinated to the need for powerful rule.
The Magic World of Orson Welles Page 30