by Simon Callow
I naturally hesitate to encourage you to accept any contract that your lawyers advise against and which, as you state, may mortgage your future.32 However, if you want my candid opinion, the collective future of the American people is in danger of being mortgaged, and individual or personal sacrifices that any of us can make today that will contribute even in a small way to the preservation of the freedom and human dignity of the people of this country seem to me to be a privilege. Few people have the great talent that you have to offer and, knowing you as I do, I am confident that, in the last analysis, your own decision in this matter will not be influenced by anything but your true desire to serve your country in this time of need.
This letter clearly indicates why Rockefeller was Rockefeller, and Welles was Welles, and confirms the truth of former Vice-President Wallace’s wisecrack about him: ‘Nelson Rockefeller’s definition of a co-ordinator is someone who can keep all the balls in the air without losing his own.’33 Back Welles went to RKO, where the new executive president, Peter Rathvon, in schoolmasterly vein, told him the conditions under which they might be interested: ‘If on your own responsibility you are willing to spend time on the picture I should think the proper procedure should be the preparation of a complete layout of the work to be done on the Brazilian section … not an off-hand stab but a complete study and layout.’34
Three days later Welles was telling the New York Times that he didn’t understand RKO’s refusal to spend the extra $ 200,000 needed to complete the film, because once it was completed they could invoke the co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs’ guarantee of $300,000 payable on completion and release. To his friend Ferdinand Pinto, the owner of the Jangada Clube in Rio, he wrote that his quarrel with RKO was assuming ‘Homeric proportions’.35 As he also wrote that they were refusing to release the film, though it had been completed in August, this letter cannot be regarded as a strictly factual document. In December, Welles held a screening of a selection of the footage to various producers and studios; there were no takers. There was a screening early in 1943 for the I-AA; vague plans were advanced for a collaboration with Fox. A few months later Welles applied to Rathvon for a greatly reduced budget of $75,000 to complete My Friend Bonito and a further $25,000 to knock the Carnival material into shape. To this end, he finally produced, in a sixty-five page document, the unifying structure for which everyone had so long been clamouring.
The format was not excessively ingenious: Welles himself – fancy! – was to be at the centre of the film with his real-life secretary Shifra Haran and the cameraman Harry Wild, pooling their brains about how to make a film concerning Latin America that is not a documentary, or a travelogue, or an illustrated lecture. ‘He’s ready to leave elaborate historical pageants to other movie-makers,’ Welles writes of himself.36 ‘The way he looks at it, people are interested in people, and he’s going to use his camera to show American people to each other.’ The various already filmed sequences are linked by newly filmed passages: ‘Since the focus of the main part of our picture is on simple people, the incidental characters in the linking sequence are, wherever possible, presented as cultivated and well-to-do. The purposes of this tactic are, I am sure, self-evident.’ Several of the linking scenes involve Welles, Wild and Haran discussing the movie they want to make, reviewing on a projector the footage they’ve already got; the film thus becomes a film about filming. The jangadeiros’ story is shown in fragments, while Welles reads Jacaré’s own testimonial: ‘We are part of another land. We belong to a great nation – Brazil. There is a President in a capital city. He is just. If he knew of these things, he would never permit them. We will go to him and he will help us.’ They determine to interview Vargas, who now appears being humbly questioned by Welles. ‘The producer’s relations with the President of Brazil were of the very warmest,’ says the treatment. ‘No possible official objection need be expected.’ The sycophantic portrayal of Vargas ends on his ‘sly, warm smile’.
In places, the treatment aims for whimsical charm and even has elements of a romantic caper about it, specifically in the relationship between Welles and Shifra, with a hint of amorous expectations on Welles’s part. It presents Welles in an unaccustomed role – one with which he would occasionally flirt in the years to come – that of dashing leading man. Baulked of a date with Shifra, he mediates between Dorothea, a Chilean girl, and a young Brazilian waiter, who have no common language. Welles now becomes fascinated by Dorothea himself and woos her by taking her to the favelas to listen to the music. They encounter Grande Otelo: ‘From here we will come upon him often as a type among carnival celebrants, a personalisation of many popular aspects of the institution. This we think has been managed in the completed film in terms of truly uproarious entertainment.’ Sitting in his car with Dorothea, Welles produces the instruments used in the Carnival, and plays them ‘expertly but glumly’. Next day, he brings her to the location as they shoot the Carnival sequence. Sweeping across the vast numbers of revellers, Welles notes, ‘Here we demonstrate another of the amazing truths about carnival: the unpoliced good behaviour of carnival’s mobs.’ This sequence is intercut with the Urca Casino footage: ‘When it seems that everything has been shown, the star enters to top everything. In our case, the star is the Americas. Rio’s carnival becomes Pan-America’s carnival … the Americas, all the Americas together, are joined in fact as well as in idea, today rather than in the future.’ The Carnival sequence ends with Otelo snoozing, then waking and wandering through the debris, singing ‘Farewell Praça Onze’.
The scene changes to Welles interviewing a government representative, Donna Maria, extolling the beauties of the changes that have been wrought in Rio, including the demolition of the Praça Onze and its replacement with the Avenida Getúlio Vargas. Welles allows himself an uncharacteristic panegyric for the new versus the old: ‘Rio’s one of the only beautiful old towns where new things are even more beautiful than the old ones.’ And he gives Donna Maria a speech in which, bright-eyed, like the heroine of a Soviet propaganda movie, she tells him, ‘the hills up there, for instance, where the poor people live, where the Schools of the samba come from – you were up there photographing one of them, Senhor Orson – do you know we’ve got new housing projects for all those places – model homes? They’re going up right now’. ‘That’s fine,’ says Welles. The film ends with the return of the jangadeiros to Ceará. As their plane soars into the sky, Welles’s narration tells the story of the success of their petition:
The flight back really happened. This picture is all true. Bonito was pardoned; carnival was just as you’ve seen it; the four men from the North really sailed all those long miles to Rio in five logs of wood with only the stars to guide them, so they could talk to the President of their country. Naturally our cameras weren’t always on the spot. Some of he action we had to reconstruct. Here – for instance – before we’d finished our work, Jacaré, the leader of the jangadeiros, had died in the sea. But this is still the end of our picture. Because this is the best place we know to stop. Also, it’s true. Jacaré did go back to Ceará, of course, he’s still there – alive in the love of his fellows; still with us, like the Dragon of the Sea who told the slave traders he’d carry no more slaves. For Jacaré lives now in American history. This picture is his: a humble, solid declaration. To Jacaré, then! To his sixty days on the open sea, and the eight hours it took a plane to fly him back through the air, over fields and mountains and jungles to his family on Ipacema Beach; to the hours less it’s going to take to fly there tomorrow; to all brave flights and voyages; to his dream of the future.
This treatment was handed over to William Gordon for his comments: they were not kind. ‘Possibly this outline can be brought in at a nominal, acceptable cost.37 However, in light of our previous experiences with the producer, the cost could reach exorbitant, even fantastic proportions, especially since it is so loosely drawn and none too well particularised.’ Suspicion of Welles runs through the report, which is worth examining as the on
ly existing detailed contemporary account of the footage, however predisposed against it the attitude may be. ‘This newest version of It’s All True makes nice reading, but I don’t think it’s a practical motion picture. To me, this outline appears to be full of fast, smooth, evasive double talk – another example of Welles’s charming, persuasive, impractical self. No matter how you slice it, all in the world you have here is a bullfight in Mexico and a carnival in Rio. There is no sustaining story, no romance, no nothing, except what undoubtedly are well-photographed travelogue scenes.’ Gordon had little faith in the impact of Welles’s personality on the public: ‘Audiences (composed of what audiences are composed of) will be indifferent to seeing him enjoying the beauties of the countries he visits.’ Bonito is dismissed: ‘I doubt whether in a picture advertised as tending to better inter-American relations, it is fair to Mexico to set up the promise to audiences to show them Mexico at its best – including the culture and the fineness of the people – and then restrict this demonstration to a bullfight, no matter how noble the bull or how many little boys are crying over the beast’s imminent departure from this life.’ He adds that ‘North American audiences do not like bullfights and will pay you not to show them.’ The Rio sections are impressive as shots of ‘the great pageant that is Rio’, but nothing more. There is no story. Gordon intimates that it’s Welles’s home movie, ‘which will not mean much to the guys who whistle in the gallery … it still looks like a hodgepodge … we will not keep a typical movie audience in its seats if all we’ve brought them is a nicely photographed scene of dancing in the streets, interspersed with that high and mighty attitude of Welles’.
It becomes clearer and clearer how insufferable these RKO executives – not all of them money-obsessed philistines – find Welles: they really don’t like him. Professing himself worried by comparisons with Saludos Amigos, Disney’s wildly successful contribution to hemispheric unity, in which Donald Duck teams up with a parrot called Joe Carioca (and which, surprisingly, Welles himself proposed putting on a double bill with It’s All True), Gordon scorns Welles’s ‘constant and continuous showing off … the use of Portuguese and Spanish reaches ridiculous heights when he acts as a Brazilian interpreter for the Chilean girl. Any Spanish-speaking person can follow Portuguese intelligently – certainly better than one who learned the language in six easy lessons.’ He gravely doubts whether Welles will get Carlos Chávez and Heitor Villa-Lobos to write the score, as he seemed to believe; repeating the conventional wisdom that the jangadeiros – described in the report as ‘Indians’ – will be quite unsellable in the South, he also observes that it is impossible to understand from the film why they travelled down-country to present their petition, which is a reasonable comment in the light of the extant Four Men on a Raft material.
Gordon was not necessarily wrong about the probability of Welles spending a great deal more on this version of It’s All True than he suggested he would. Whenever Welles started work on something, he saw a better, a richer, a bolder – and almost certainly a more expensive – way of doing it. The treatment itself is a curious mix of straightforward Popular Front politics (surprisingly enthusiastic about the deeply undemocratic Vargas, with whom, it was rumoured, Welles had liked to have contrast-and-compare conversations about their respective sexual achievements), rather corny and coy boy-meets-girl guff, and the core material at the Urca Casino, in the favelas and on the ocean. It is an uncomfortable mix as described, but any film is only as good as its realisation, as Welles knew better than most. What is surprising is that the finest material – Four Men on a Raft – only appears in fragmentary form in the treatment; Welles clearly believed that it was the entertainment value of the film that was its best claim to public attention, and maybe he was right. But it is the footage shot on Ipacema Beach, in Recife and in Bahia that justifies the whole of the rest of the film.
This would not be the last attempt to salvage the material, nor was it the last elaborate recasting of the structure. Welles’s career was full of magnificent obsessions, starting with Five Kings (to which he returned twice, the second time in triumph), continuing with Macbeth (four versions) and culminating in Don Quixote, a twenty-five-year fixation without ultimate issue. He never ceased to regret the potential of It’s All True, with the complex love one bears for something that has come close to destroying one. He wrote to Ferdinand Pinto early in 1943, when he was still busily trying to reclaim the material, ‘I have a degree of faith in it which amounts to fanaticism, and you can believe that if It’s All True goes down into limbo I’ll go with it.’38 The film did go into limbo, from which it only partially emerged in the early nineteen-nineties. Welles occupied a more productive place, but it is true to say that had he never received the invitation from the Office of Inter-American Affairs to make a film in Brazil, his life would have been radically different. It is doubtful whether Journey into Fear at its best would ever have been anything other than an entertaining jeu d’ésprit, but The Magnificent Ambersons – though it would never have been in tune with the times – would at least have been a complete work, unified in its vision, the work of one artist.
We shall never know, since in December of 1942, Charles Koerner, utterly disregarding George Schaefer’s parting injunction to spare the film for posterity as Welles shot it, ‘now agrees’, as an anonymous internal memorandum put it, ‘that we may now junk all positive and negative trims and out-takes which you have been holding on The Magnificent Ambersons’.39 The nameless functionary chooses his verb with particular relish. Ambersons was an emblem of exactly the thing that Koerner knew had to be rooted out of RKO: art for art’s sake. The mood both in the country and in the movie business was dead against everything that had led to Welles’s arrival in Hollywood: specifically the New Deal, with its extension of the subject matter of both theatre and film, its belief in the centrality of the arts to human life and the appropriateness of subsidy for its activities, its sense of collaborative activity in every sphere and its wide social embrace. Roosevelt had been slowly withdrawing from his social revolutionary programme; by the time war was declared, he had shifted his priorities, and Welles was among those who denounced him for it.
Charles Koerner enunciated his new-broom policy to Peter Rathvon with crystal clarity: ‘I believe that probably the greatest attribute we can bring to the Organisation is one of good common sense, and frankly that seems to be at something of a premium in Hollywood.40 It is going to take us a solid six to eight months to get rid of the choking commitments we have at this time.’ His arrival at the studio as hailed by the trade press. ‘This new set-up looks like the best RKO ever had,’ exulted the Hollywood Reporter.41 Charles W. Koerner had operated a small movie house in Montana in 1914, and had been in the theatre-management business ever since. ‘There’s no “genius” stuff about Mr Koerner,’ said a spokesman for RKO, pointedly referring not only to Welles but to Gabriel Pascal and Jed Harris, who had also been summarily junked by the studio, in their case without shooting so much as a frame; Pare Lorentz managed to shoot most of his epic Name, Age and Occupation, which, though never released, survives. ‘Our production forces will be levelling off at only one major target, the exhibitor, and through the exhibitor, the public.’ Koerner declared war on what he sneeringly described as ‘interesting film events’, like Gloria Swanson’s come-back and various recently acquired theatre properties. He put his faith in specially developed stories answering the need of the moment: in this case, war and service features ‘with direct appeal to servicemen on leave and war workers with fat pay envelopes’. In other words, it was down with the movies as art.
The first great box-office smash of Koerner’s regime, starring the radio comedian Fibber McGee and his assistant, the ever-faithful Molly, bore the triumphant title Look Who’s Laughing. ‘Showmanship in place of genius’ was Koerner’s much-vaunted watchword, and in terms of fiscal probity, he was entirely successful, wiping out the studio’s debts (though the phrase is a little misleading: it was poor sh
owmanship, rather than wasteful genius, that had lost the most money – as in the case of the star-packed flops Sing Your Worries Away and Valley of the Sun). The importance of Koernerism was as much a question of image as of finances: wartime America needed to be amused and enthused; there was no place for subtleties, experiment or, God forbid, questioning. What were suddenly perceived to be eternal American values had not only to be maintained, but seen to be maintained. ‘Welles was offering Americans an unfamiliar and uncomfortable view of their world,’ as Laura Pells observes, ‘at precisely the time when they hungered for whatever seemed tranquil and routine.’42 He also embodied in conspicuously flamboyant form the notion of wayward individualism, an idea equally profoundly out of sympathy with the times. In a sense, the Second World War was another part of Welles’s bad luck: unlike his fellow director-producers, Noël Coward, Charlie Chaplin and Preston Sturges, he was temperamentally unable to join the mainstream when it seemed appropriate.
No doubt the existence of the Welles Unit at RKO had been something of an anomaly from the start, and it was only a matter of time before it would have been disbanded. From Welles’s personal point of view, however, what happened was profoundly regrettable. The association had offered him unparalleled opportunities and a degree of support that would never again come his way. Henceforward, every film that Welles made was a massive struggle against the odds. Even when he worked for a studio, he was employed from the outside and had to fight for what he needed. Circumstances conspired to end his relationship with RKO in the worst possible way, with maximum damage. Given those circumstances and Welles’s own temperamental vagaries, it remains something of a miracle that at least one completely achieved masterpiece saw the light of day: Citizen Kane. For the one and only time in his life, he was able to work within a structure that allowed full play to his prodigious gifts, neither oppressing nor inhibiting him, and causing no compulsion to flight on his part. He had been given unexampled latitude by RKO, provoking profound resentment both inside and outside the film industry. He left it with a reputation for unreliable brilliance, still regarded as a peerlessly promising film-maker, but for the time being, at any rate, too hot to handle.