The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  This indirection is a key to Welles’s overall approach to the visuals, which represent a special problem in any adaptation of Shakespeare. The richness of the Shakespearian text is in its language, of course, and in its manipulation of theatrical convention; hence too much photographic realism tends to overwhelm the poetry. As André Bazin once observed of Molière, “The text . . . takes on meaning only in a forest of painted canvas and the same is true of the acting. The footlights are the autumn sun.” Because Welles began as a theatrical director, he understood this axiom and was uneasy about the specificity of film in general, preferring instead the “poetic” qualities of an art that suggests more than it shows. The purpose of cinematic images, he said in an interview concerning Chimes at Midnight, ought to be to “transform the real, to charge it with a ‘character’ it does not possess.” (A far cry, it can be noted, from the notions about realism that both he and Gregg Toland espoused while working on Citizen Kane.) In Othello Welles had used Moorish seascapes and Venetian façades as expressively as any studio designer, but the Henry plays presented an even greater difficulty. Although their epic grandeur begs for cinematic adaptation, the “outdoor” spectacle conflicts with period costumes and blank verse. Welles remarked that the only films in which “costumes and nature have learned to live in juxtaposition” are traditional genres like American westerns and Japanese samurai adventures. And while Chimes at Midnight is the closest thing to a western Welles ever made, it is a western without a tradition. One of his problems, therefore, was to create a believable natural environment for Shakespeare’s men on horseback. He said that he wanted to avoid the feeling he had gotten from Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, where “people leave the castle . . . and suddenly they meet again on a golf course somewhere charging at one another.”

  Not surprisingly, Welles achieved his ends; he was one of the greatest “period” directors in history, if one considers his success with Kane, Ambersons, and Othello, where there is never a disharmony between actors and environment (or the analogous success of Touch of Evil, in which a suburb of Los Angeles becomes a Southwestern border town). In Chimes at Midnight he once again used the “real” world in an abstract, selective way, disregarding pure historical authenticity (the film was shot on location in Barcelona, Madrid, and other Spanish locations, so the atmosphere is anything but English) and sometimes ignoring plausibility or coherence. The seasons, for example, change rapidly throughout and are rarely presented in their proper order; it is fall when Hal and Falstaff go off to war with the Percys, but the battle scenes are fought in a summer landscape.

  Clearly the film was shot on a budget that forced these compromises on Welles, but it never suffers as a result. “What I try to do,” he said, “is to see with the same eyes the external real world and that which is fabricated.” In every shot, therefore, the rocks, trees, and sky are chosen for their expressive possibilities—not the glamorous, haunting expressionism of Othello or of Welles’s early studio films, but a more homely, gritty style, where occasionally there is a romantic density of air and light. Hence the early parts of the battle scenes, in which horsemen charge through a wooded landscape, strongly resemble picturesque images from The Prince of Foxes. In Henry’s camp immediately before the battle, a wind is blowing strongly, sending gusts of smoke and dust across the actors in a manner learned from Ford. Meanwhile, the camp of the Percys is shot on a calm and sunny day, from a camera position so low to the ground that it comments derisively on the hubris of the rebellion—the screen is literally filled with sky, and as the Percys stride across the frame they appear to be standing on air.

  Figure 9.16: The Percys astride the world, backed by a calm, sunny sky.

  Many of the landscapes are veiled or dappled, and all are used symbolically. The castle across from Mistress Quickly’s inn, for example, is obscured in a cold mist, and in the later parts of the film Falstaff and his companions are photographed in snow, rain, or darkness. The early Gadshill robbery sequence takes place in a Spanish forest rather like the one in Mr. Arkadin—scores of straight, narrow trees without underbrush, the sun streaming down on bright autumn leaves. At one point, when Falstaff is being pursued by Hal and Poins, the camera makes a lengthy lateral track across the scene, and the actors become tiny figures running hilariously through rows of fantastic tree trunks. The area begins to resemble a child’s playground—the antithesis of the battle of Shrewsbury—where men brandish swords harmlessly and scatter fallen leaves over one another; it is a robbery as carefree as the “paper chase” in a New England woods in The Stranger. But, as in that earlier film, the exuberance of “boys” at play has a bittersweet quality, the autumnal background indicating that death must follow from all this ripeness.

  In fact nearly the entire film is shot amid a dead or dying nature, the only important exception being parts of the battle where summer trees make an ironic setting. In the two shots shown in figures 9.17 and 9.18, for example, Hotspur is seen making his dying speech followed by Hal’s memorial to him. The leafy trees behind Hotspur are a sign of his premature death, a reinforcement of his comment, “Thou hast robbed me of my youth.” Hal, on the other hand, is photographed against a slightly foggy view, with a solitary horseman passing in the distance. On the soundtrack a trumpet softly plays a sort of taps, the whole shot being charged with the atmosphere of a military funeral.

  Repeatedly Welles indicated that Chimes at Midnight is a “human” story done in relatively simple terms—an actor’s picture rather than a director’s. He disliked being called a formalist, and yet, as the foregoing remarks may indicate, the completed picture is a formalist’s delight. It is a triumph of style as meaning; at every moment the “plastics” of cutting, camera movement, and composition translate the story into a nearly universal language, the film as a whole containing as great a range of expressive devices as anything Welles had done previously. For example, as Brian Henderson has noted, the picture is virtually a textbook for the various ways a long take or sequence shot may be constructed: at one extreme is the completely static shot described earlier, where Falstaff, Silence, and Shallow sit before a fire meditating on death; at another is the early scene in the tavern in which Falstaff, Hal, and Poins discuss plans for the robbery as the camera weaves around them in a little dance. Late in the film one finds a classic example of what Henderson calls the “theatrical” shot, with the camera positioned at a low angle at one end of the tavern, serving as a kind of proscenium. Shallow and Silence are doing a funny little dance in the middle distance while Falstaff crosses “upstage” to sit and talk with his page about old times. The dancing couple exits and another page enters to announce Pistol, who comes on excitedly from the right. Falstaff moves forward halfway, learning that Hal is about to be crowned; upon hearing the news, he marches to the extreme foreground, the camera tilting upward to catch his face towering above us like a giant. “Is the old king—dead?” he asks rhetorically, his expression showing jubilation and a quick surge of power; he then exits right and the scene closes. In one temporally unified shot Falstaff has moved from dejection to joy, his steady progress forward in the frame marking his lifted emotion, the wide-angle lens making him seem a dot at the beginning and a colossus at the end.

  Figures 9.17–9.18: Summer trees make an ironic setting for Hotspur and Hal.

  It is a commonplace of writing on the film to say that this formal beauty has been spoiled by a badly synchronized soundtrack, which is indeed a serious flaw. But this problem, which often makes Chimes at Midnight seem a defaced masterpiece, has tended to obscure the fact that the idea of the soundtrack, considered apart from the images, is quite satisfying. It contains some of the most beautiful readings of Shakespeare ever recorded for film—especially in the case of Gielgud’s soliloquies—and the musical settings by Lavagnino are uniformly superb. Henry IV’s celebrated speech on sleep, for example, begins with the palace musicians playing a soft Renaissance melody and then slowly becomes a fuller orchestration, expressing a profound yearni
ng as the speech reaches oratorical heights. Gielgud virtually sings the blank verse, and the concluding couplet (“Then happy low, lie down. / Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown”) is delivered in perfect harmony with the last chords.

  If Chimes at Midnight has any true formal problem, as distinct from technical execution, it is not in the director’s handling of camera or sound, but in the dramatic curve of the story itself, which presents exactly the same difficulty as the original version of The Magnificent Ambersons. It is a film about decline, beginning with the last vestiges of celebration for a youth already spent and then proceeding into a long, slow rendering of dissolution and decay. The delightful Gadshill robbery and the “play extempore” in the tavern have exactly the same function as the Amberson ball and the ensuing sleigh ride: moments of authentic liveliness and charm, laden with ironic foreshadowings of doom, which give way to a somber, almost morbid atmosphere. Thus, except for the battle scene at the center of the film, there is almost nothing to relieve us from extended meditations on disease and death. Joseph McBride describes the problem nicely when he compares Truffaut’s Jules and Jim with The Magnificent Ambersons: “The structure of Truffaut’s film, as he admits, weakens in the last sections, as does that of Ambersons for reasons not entirely due to the studio’s recutting. To create a mood so buoyant as that achieved in the first half-hour of each film and let it down gracefully into destruction proved too taxing for both young directors.” But the problem stayed with Welles in his later film, which places him in exactly the same situation. Until the dramatic heights of the coronation scene and the subsequent death of Falstaff, he must render lifelessness or near stupor without allowing the film itself to lag. It seems to me he never quite overcomes this difficulty, and for much of its second half Chimes at Midnight demands that the audience give up its desire to be intensely moved or entertained. Like many great works, it contains moments of lethargy, which are the price we pay for the power and ambition of the whole.

  Luckily, however, the concluding scenes have not suffered the fate of Ambersons, and the drama rises to a remarkable pitch, more moving, dignified, and “human” than any previous film by Welles. Falstaff, hearing the news that Hal has become king, rushes precipitously to the coronation, leading Shallow across the snowy landscape we saw at the beginning of the film and promising riches and joy to come. Inside the castle he realizes that he has forgotten to dress properly but notes that this will be interpreted as a sign of humility, as if he were a heedless worshipper come to see the Christ child. Welles speaks Shakespeare’s lines with virtually no suggestion that Falstaff is cunning or opportune, making him instead a vulnerable innocent, overcome with excitement, proud “to stand stained with travel, and sweating with desire to see him, thinking of nothing else to be done but to see him.”

  Meanwhile the new king moves past a ceremonial gathering, his crown barely visible beyond clouds of incense and rows of armed men. Without warning, Falstaff bursts through the ranks of celebrants and into Henry’s wake, shouting blissfully through stone corridors that until now have heard nothing but solemnity and scheming: “God save thy Grace, King Hal! My Royal Hal! . . . My King! My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!” There is a hushed, stunned silence while a guard rebukes the intruder and tries to allow the coronation to go forward. Hal turns and in close-up makes his famous rejection speech:

  I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.

  How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

  I have long dreamed of such a kind of man,

  So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane,

  Figures 9.19–9.20: Hal banishes Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man.”

  But being awaked, I do despise my dream . . .

  Presume not that I am the thing I was,

  For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

  That I have turned away my former self,

  So will I those that kept me company.

  The prophecy Hal made in the tavern has now come true, and this time his imitation of his father is in unmistakable earnest. When Hal banishes Falstaff, “not to come near our person by ten mile,” the old man drops to his knees in pain. The speech is chilling, detached, and ruthless, but the exchange of looks between the two men, shown here, reveals an unspoken communication passing between them. Hal’s face, backed by the cold mists of his castle, is nearly a mask, but it has a pale intensity that conveys his anger and his painful recognition of what he is casting aside. Falstaff is on his knees, but he is photographed from a slightly low angle that makes him equal in stature to the king; controlling his grief, he stares back in silent rebuke. The boyish monarch has in fact always been an old man, while his gray-haired subject has been as transparent and naïve as a child. In the irony of their relationship, and in the tension between these two shots, is the essential meaning of what Welles has called a “somber comedy.” As in Citizen Kane, friendship is revealed as policy, and childhood as a dream.

  10

  Art about Art (and Sex)

  Man . . . the instrument of creation . . . will die. . . . But what is created by him will never die. And in order to live eternally he has not the slightest need of extraordinary gifts or of accomplishing prodigies. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? And yet they live eternally because—living seeds—they had the good fortune to find a fruitful womb—a fantasy which knew how to raise and nourish them, and make them live through all eternity.

  —Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

  Welles’s career was littered with abandoned or unfulfilled projects, the residue of a restless, energetic life. After 1955 he worked, in bits and pieces, on a film adaptation of Don Quixote, which he wryly predicted would have its title changed to a question he was always asked: When Will Don Quixote Be Finished? The picture was started as a half-hour television show but subsequently grew into a feature film composed of three episodes from Cervantes, framed by scenes of Welles himself explaining the story to child actress Patty McCormack. The episodes are staged in twentieth-century settings; for example, Welles has Quixote assault a movie screen in an attempt to rescue a starlet. Unfortunately, Patty McCormack is no longer a child, and the Mexican actor Francisco Reiguera, who plays Quixote, is now dead. Even so, Welles was able to complete most of the film. His former secretary, Audrey Stainton, has written a fascinating memoir in Sight and Sound (Autumn 1988), showing how he confronted and overcame many obstacles to the project, incessantly revising it like an impassioned amateur. He had begun shooting with no clear plan in mind, and as the picture slowly expanded, he perpetually added refinements. One of his editors, Mauro Bonanni, became the guardian of an almost finished, hour-and-a-half version—still in need of dubbing and post-synchronization—fragments of which have been shown in Cannes, New York, and other venues. (See also Esteve Riambau, “Don Quixote: Adventures and Misadventures of an Essay on Spain” in Drössler, Unknown Orson Welles, 71–76.)

  In the late sixties in Yugoslavia, Welles wrote and directed a thriller called The Deep, based on Charles Williams’s novel Dead Calm, starring Welles, Laurence Harvey, and Jeanne Moreau. I have seen an early version of the script, titled Dead Reckoning, which is an almost pure suspense story told in the limited time span of a single day, without flashbacks or even much reference to the past lives of the characters. It all takes place in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where a honeymoon couple, John and Rae Ingram (played in the completed film by Michael Bryant and Oja Kodar, acting under the name Olga Palinkas), are sailing to an island aboard their ketch, the Saracen. One morning on a calm sea they discover a man rowing desperately toward them from a sinking yacht called the Orpheus. He is Hughie Warriner (Laurence Harvey), and when he is hauled aboard he tells a gruesome story of how his wife and everyone else on the Orpheus have died of food poisoning. He claims he has buried them all at sea and has been adrift ever since, his radio broken and the yacht beginning to sink.

  When Hughie collapses of exhaustion, John Ingram gets
into the lifeboat and rows across to investigate the Orpheus. In the half-flooded cabin he discovers Ruth Warriner (Moreau) and Russ Brewer (Welles), both of them alive and hiding in fear of Hughie. Just as he is about to rescue these two, Ingram looks back at his own boat and sees that Hughie has regained consciousness and is starting the engines. When Rae struggles with him, he strikes her savagely and she collapses on the deck. John makes a frantic attempt to row back to the Saracen, but the boat moves off at high speed, leaving him and the two strangers back on board the Orpheus. The remainder of the film involves John’s desperate attempt to keep the yacht afloat, hampered by the drunken Brewer, a broken engine, and faulty instrumentation. Meanwhile, on board the Saracen, Rae Ingram recovers and finds herself confronted with a madman whom she must outwit if there is to be any chance of saving her husband. By the end the Ingrams are in fact reunited, but not before Hughie Warriner and Russ Brewer—each of them revealed as psychotic—have had a fight to the death.