The Magic World of Orson Welles

by James Naremore

  This early draft of the script is exciting to read and suggests a good many psychological tensions running beneath the suspense plot. It also calls for a number of complex technical effects, including underwater photography, several shots from the top of a ship’s mast as it bucks and whirls in the open sea, and a spectacular fire aboard the Orpheus. I have subsequently seen exciting clips from the film that make its loss all the more painful. Undoubtedly it would have differed from the screenplay, as Welles’s pictures always did, and might even have employed flashbacks and a dream sequence. (For an important discussion of the production, see the interview with Oja Kodar in Drössler, Unknown Orson Welles, 24–29.) Although shooting on the picture was completed, the soundtrack was incompletely dubbed and Welles had trouble finding a distributor. Other filmmakers had better luck with similar projects: in 1977 Peter Yeats directed a Peter Benchley script called The Deep, and in 1989 George Miller directed Dead Calm, based on the same Charles Williams novel Welles had used as a source.

  In the early seventies Welles became involved with Films l’Astrophore, a Paris-based company financed by the Iranian government, which proposed to back not only him but Elia Kazan, Sergio Leone, and John Boorman as well. The company distributed F for Fake in Europe and was prepared to support his other work, but then the Iranian revolution changed everything. Meanwhile, in order to keep his career alive, Welles endorsed Jim Beam whiskey and Eastern Airlines. Throughout the seventies and early eighties he made frequent TV appearances with Dean Martin, Johnny Carson, and Merv Griffin—and in an infamous series of commercials, he promised that Paul Masson would “sell no wine before its time.” Increasingly, he seemed willing to do the kind of jobs that his more puritan admirers thought were a prostitution of talent. He was simple and direct in explaining his motives. “It can be fun,” he told an audience in Boston. “I do it for the exposure. If you don’t, you get forgotten.”

  The only theatrical films by Welles to appear in the last decades of his life were two short works, The Immortal Story (1968) and F for Fake (1976), both of which are virtually meditations by the director on the nature of his art. Of course, Welles’s movies were always self-reflexive, but these two took a distinctly Pirandellian turn, becoming somewhat less public and political. In them he thinks introspectively, immersing himself in notions about artifice and eternity, playing variations on the theme of art and counterfeit. The last and most ambitious film in this vein is The Other Side of the Wind, a movie about Hollywood that Welles began shooting in 1970. In some ways Wind invites comparison with Fellini’s 8½ and Truffaut’s Day for Night, but in others it is a unique, not-so-veiled meditation on Welles’s legend and celebrity.

  An equally important aspect of the three films is their overt preoccupation with sex, a theme Welles had previously treated indirectly—or, in the case of The Lady from Shanghai, via the conventions of a censored Hollywood eroticism. By the 1970s the old production code had fallen and films everywhere were dealing with sex in fairly explicit terms. Like most directors of his generation, Welles was somewhat puritanical about showing too much flesh on the screen. His turn toward films with strong sexual elements was symptomatic of conditions in the industry but also had something to do with what Joseph McBride has called Welles’s “Oja period”—that is, the years of his companionship and collaboration with his Croatian lover, Oja Kodar.

  Born Olga Palinkas in 1941, Kodar was working as a TV news anchor in Yugoslavia when Welles met her during the filming of The Trial. He told her that she was a gift from God, and as a result she took the name “Kodar,” which is Croatian for “a gift.” A sophisticated, cosmopolitan young woman with a stunningly beautiful face and body, she was also a talented sculptor and writer who eventually exerted a strong influence on Welles’s work. She provided the title for F for Fake and cowrote several screenplays with Welles, including The Other Side of the Wind, which, I suspect, she also partly directed. “‘When you see [The Other Side of the Wind],’” she has said, “‘you will feel that somebody else worked with [Welles] because there were things that he never would have done and never did before. He was a very shy man, and erotic stuff was not his thing. . . . I practically directed some of those erotic scenes, because Orson was a very shy person’” (quoted in McBride, Whatever Happened, 140).

  Perhaps significantly, the three films discussed in this chapter—The Immortal Story, F for Fake, and The Other Side of the Wind—involve either an old man who is given pleasure by having sex with a young partner, or an old man who gets pleasure by watching a young woman have sex with another man. The last two of the films—F for Fake and The Other Side of the Wind—also bring to the fore themes of homosexuality and ambiguous sexual identity that were often suggested but not treated directly in Welles’s earlier work.

  I The Immortal Story

  The first of these late films is easily the most literary. A sixty-minute work produced originally for French television, The Immortal Story is based rather closely on a tale from Isak Dinesen’s Anecdotes of Destiny; like Welles, Dinesen was an artist in the gothic tradition who was fond of exemplary fables, and Welles needed to make only minor alterations in the story in order to create meanings relevant to his own career.

  The film is in color but is shot in almost rudimentary fashion, using a spartan decor and few ostentatious camera tricks. It opens in darkness, with an iris into an Oriental port city reminiscent of Broken Blossoms, and closes with a slow “burn out” to a white screen; periodically we hear a solitary piano playing a haunting melody by Erik Satie. Unfortunately, many individual scenes are marred by technical crudities and breaks in the visual continuity, but on the whole Welles’s quiet style is beautifully appropriate. Occasionally one notices his typical mannerisms—a small chorus of townspeople like the ones in The Magnificent Ambersons, who provide exposition at the beginning; several deep-focus compositions and radical camera angles; a long, rather bumpy traveling shot down a colonnade; and a couple of scenes on an ornate stairway. But the relative simplicity of the film is in keeping with Dinesen’s own style—a prose that is as economical as a biblical parable and that Welles reads quietly in offscreen narration. The resulting movie is like a charming miniature, a distillation of one of Welles’s favorite themes to its most essential level.

  Dinesen’s tale is set in nineteenth-century Canton, although Welles changes the locale to Macao, the place that in The Lady from Shanghai is called the “wickedest city in the world.” It tells of a rich merchant, aptly named Clay (Welles plays the character and makes him an American rather than a European), who has lived like a god all his life, controlling the little Oriental figures that move in regular patterns across some of the film’s landscapes. As the story begins, Clay has reached a crisis similar to the one that is met by most of Welles’s central characters. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, like Kane, and like Macbeth, his drive to power and autonomy has ended in tragic isolation and a forced recognition of his limits. Dinesen describes him as a “tall, dry, and close old man,” who sits in the midst of his rich house, “erect, silent, and alone.” Welles combines this comment with a visual allusion to Charles Foster Kane, showing Clay sitting down to eat, his head surrounded by mirrors that multiply his image.

  Almost Scrooge-like, Charles Clay is unique among Welles’s protagonists in being completely without outward charm or beauty. He believes, as he says later in the film, that his money will be “proof against dissolution,” and he contrasts gold with human relations, which always involve some giving over of the self. He has cheated his friend and former business partner, whom we are told was a warmhearted man, and has taken over the partner’s house; in his old age his only companion is his accountant, Levinsky (Roger Coggio), a survivor of the 1848 pogrom against Polish Jews, who is equally dry and lonely. Levinsky lives in a solitary flat, viewed discreetly through a window from out in the street as he draws a blind for privacy. “Desire,” Welles comments, “had been washed, bleached, and burnt out of him before he had learned to rea
d,” and yet “things not to be recounted and hardly to be recalled still moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind.” Both men, in their different ways, have tried to protect themselves against the passage of time and the dangers of life by retreating into their houses, by repressing their feelings, and by giving themselves over to an absolute materialism. Clay devotes himself to his goods, whereas Levinsky marshals columns of figures; between them, as Dinesen says, there is “a kind of relation.”

  Figure 10.1: Clay in The Immortal Story.

  When the drama begins these two are seated in Clay’s library, a wide space between them, the warm lights of the room contrasting with blue twilight outside. The old man is lost in a huge chair across from Levinsky, who sits tiny and hunched over, reading his accounts. At the end of the nightly routine, Clays asks, in his perpetually crusty and harsh way, if Levinsky knows of anything else to read. Whereupon the conversation turns to various kinds of books. Besides the accounts, Levinsky has at hand the biblical prophecy of Elisha, which he carefully unrolls from a sheet of aging paper and recites to his master. The prophet speaks of how “God will come with a recompense. . . . Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened. . . . Then shall the lame man leap as a hart . . . for in the wilderness shall waters break out. And streams in the desert.”

  Clay, who is all too aware of his own dryness and his gouty foot, recalls another kind of story, about how a lonely sailor was once invited by a rich old man to spend the night with his young wife and make him a child; at the end of the evening the sailor was given five guineas and sent on his way. Levinsky, too, has heard this story, which is told everywhere by sailors, but he reminds Clay that it never happened. “If this story has never happened before,” Clay says angrily, “I will make it happen now. I do not like pretense. I do not like prophecies. I like facts.”

  The rest of the film becomes the tragicomedy of Clay’s attempts to turn prophecy into an account book and art into life—to possess the story by becoming both its author (or, more precisely, its auteur) and one of its characters. Life, however, resists his efforts. Instead of a randy sailor he hires a virginal and decidedly mystical young castaway (Norman Eshley), who has just been rescued from a desert island and who is trying to find passage to his homeland; instead of a demure young wife he is forced to use a slightly aging local prostitute (Jeanne Moreau), who is the daughter of his former business partner. The lovers—ironically named Paul and Virginie, after the famous couple in Bernardin de St. Pierre’s novel—slowly become willing participants in the drama, meeting in a sweet encounter that is one of the most explicitly sexual scenes in Welles’s films. But on the morning after, the sailor refuses Clay’s money and announces to Levinsky that he will never tell his companions at sea what has happened. Clay dies, having served briefly as puppet master; his striving for omnipotence and immortality is frustrated because the events he has recreated will have no audience.

  Late in the film, in a speech that belongs to Levinsky in the original source, Welles has Clay explain the perpetual appeal of the “immortal story” to sailors: “The sailors who tell this story are poor men who lead a lonely life on the sea. That is why they tell about that rich house and that beautiful lady.” Art and fantasy, in other words, grow out of isolation and a longing for impossibilities, and Clay’s attempt to bring a platonic second nature down to the real world is an expression of tragic hubris. A dying man, he tries to become what Pirandello calls a “living character”; meanwhile he tries to dominate Paul and Virginie, asserting his power over their passions, turning them into objets d’art like the figures on Keats’s Grecian urn: “forever warm and still to be enjoyed, forever panting and forever young.” “You,” he announces to the lovers from his voyeuristic position on the balcony outside their room, “are young . . . you believe that you are walking and moving according to your own will. But it is not so. . . . You are two young, strong, and lusty jumping-jacks within this old hand of mine.” Standing outside and listening to the sounds of their lovemaking, he tries to deny his own age, rousing himself vicariously and hence bringing waters into his own wilderness.

  As a symbol of humanity, considered apart from his boorishness and cruelty, there is something both vulnerable and sympathetic about Clay. Even though he boasts about money and claims to make other humans move at his will, his control has obvious limits; there is a naïveté and defensiveness in his very seclusion, which is an attempt to wall himself off from those aspects of life he cannot govern. He is also humanized by the fact that he is trying to achieve not just power, but life itself. His age and his sense of being cut off from the living, sexual juices of life are pathetic—indeed Welles seems to heighten the erotic elements of Dinesen’s story so as to bring out this theme more forcefully—and toward the end of the film, in the wake of the lovers’ passionate night together, one almost wishes him success.

  There is a sense, moreover, in which he and all the other characters achieve a kind of victory. Despite the grotesque little charade he produces by hiring an impoverished sailor and a putain respecteuse to spend the night in his house, Clay indirectly gives a gift to himself and everyone else. For a time at least, Elisha’s prophecy comes true, creating sexual joy and love in the midst of barren lives. Paul and Virginie, after all, are as lonely as Clay and Levinsky and are linked to them in certain ways. Paul has been lost on an island, where he could only imagine a woman he has never seen. “I sometimes fancied that I had a girl with me, who was mine,” he tells Virginie. “I brought her birds’ eggs and fish, and some big sweet fruits that grew there. . . . We slept together in a cave.” As for Virginie, who as a little girl lived in the house now owned by Clay, her life has been filled with disappointment. A potentially warmhearted prostitute (Welles photographs her playing with fortune-tellers’ cards, like Tanya in Touch of Evil), she wistfully recalls her first love affair, when an earthquake had literally coincided with her pleasure. Ever since, she has been in decline, and as Dinesen remarks, “she would have liked her lovers better had they left her free to love them in her own way, as poor pitiful people in need of sympathy.”

  Once Clay’s little drama begins, however, the story seems to take possession of the actors, their separate longing for renewal and communion being fulfilled in a way that is beyond anyone’s control. Reluctantly and contemptuously, the sailor and the woman agree to Clay’s plan, Virginie plotting a kind of vengeance upon the man who has been responsible for her father’s failure and death, the sailor resisting the corrupt old merchant until the last moment. But when they meet, the lovers are transformed into a Paul and Virginie worthy of St. Pierre’s fiction. The sailor approaches a gauzy, flowerbedecked bedroom where a nude lies waiting for him, and in the romantic dimness he mistakes her for the young girl of his dreams. Welles photographs their lovemaking in a series of almost static images, showing the curve of a back and the flutter of an eyelash, each shot magnified with a telephoto lens in a style uncharacteristic of him. At the height of her passion, Virginie suddenly rises in terror, imagining that the earth has moved as it did in her first affair. Outside on the veranda Clay listens to everything, growing more and more heated, and when the scene is finished the sound of crickets in the garden gives way to the early morning call of birds, the desert having come to life.

  At the conclusion all the characters seem fatigued and slightly changed by what has happened. The sailor scoffs when Levinsky asks if he will talk about his adventure. “To whom would I tell it?” he says. “Who in the world would believe it if I told it? I would not tell it for a hundred times five guineas.” At the same time, he leaves behind a gift for Virginie—a large pink shell, “as smooth and silk as a knee,” that he found on his island. “When you hold it to your ear,” he tells Clay, “there is a sound in it, a song.” In another modest alteration of his source, Welles has the sailor present the shell to the merchant instead of the accountant. As the youth exits, closing the door to the veranda, Welles cuts suddenly to a close-up of the shell, which
is rocking gently on the porch floor; Clay has dropped it in his dying moment, and the rounded pearly shape is an obvious echo of Kane’s paperweight. The symbolic meaning of the object is also reminiscent of Welles’s first film; it suggests an ideal realm—globed, compacted, and pure—which in this case gives the listener an intimation of immortal beauty. We do not know if Clay has listened to the shell before his death, but Levinsky comments to Virginie that the old man’s cup of triumph has been too strong for him. “It is very hard on people who want things so badly,” he says. “If they cannot get these things it is hard, and when they do get them, surely it is very hard.”

  Unlike Kane’s death, Clay’s suggests a possible triumph, an achieved glory just before extinction. The other characters, too, have been moved by the experience. Virginie comes out of her room and stands on the balcony with Levinsky and the dead Clay, watching her sailor walk away through the garden; he turns as he leaves, and they exchange significant glances, having shared the experience of love. By acting out the “immortal story” they have participated in one of those eternalized “moments” so common to romantic literature, making contact not only with each other but also with something transpersonal and hence ideal. In a less direct sense, Clay, too, has been moved by passion and beauty, recapturing the spirit of “jumping-jacks.” The world, as Yeats said, is “no country for old men,” but the aging merchant has been able to transcend his own body.

  The final triumph is reserved for Levinsky, the dark-suited, rather insect-like accountant who has been a silent witness to the action and a go-between for Clay and the lovers. In the last shot he sits before his dead master’s big chair on the veranda while Virginie stands off in the distance watching the sailor depart. Lifting the shell and placing it to his ear, he listens to the song. “I have heard it before,” he says, “long, long ago. But where?” Those passions that we were told have been washed, bleached, and burned out of the man have momentarily returned; he, too, is able to hear the joy of life and is at least dimly in touch with the “big deep-water fish” of his unconscious. With this recognition, this memory of an elemental life force, the film ends, the screen fading to a white tinged with pink, like the color of a seashell.