Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The film as we have it is unlike anything Welles had made so far, though as a narrative it has something in common with Journey into Fear. But where that odd gallimaufry, with its cast of Mercury regulars and its striking textures and quirky camera moves, was all Wellesian style and no substance, The Stranger is more formally melodramatic, building through an increasingly tense action to a bravura climax that owes a great deal to the Victorian theatre. The acting, particularly in the cases of Robinson and Young, is mainstream Hollywood: linear, text-bound, existing within a narrow compass emotionally and expressively; this was perhaps inevitable in view of the uncommonly stilted dialogue (realising that her newly wed husband is indeed a Nazi psychopath who has just nearly murdered her brother, Young screams, ‘It was I you intended to kill!’ ‘No!’ roars Welles. ‘Why wasn’t it I?’ she ripostes, stamping her foot, ‘Franz Kindler!!!’). Welles himself gives a performance in a very different vein, one of great intensity (his unaccustomed slimness adds to the neurotic charge), but without the psychological verisimilitude that might have lent credibility to what, as written, is essentially an operatic figure, tormented, hysterical, deceitful, visionary, murderous. He goes hell for leather for a characterisation which, set to music by Verdi or even Wagner, would have brought the house down, but in a film designed to give troubling reality to the still-present threat of Nazism, it stretches belief: a child of three would spot that something was seriously untoward. Every potential threat to his cover is indicated by heavy breathing, whitened knuckles, popped eyes; whenever he goes into the forest to kill a man or to commune with his dog’s corpse, he sheds his suave exterior, his hair becomes not so much dishevelled as longer, rougher, sweatier as he hunkers down to breathe heavily and Hunnishly. This sort of behaviour, de rigueur in Nibelheim and its environs, seems disproportionate in Harper, Connecticut, or indeed anywhere else in the wider world in 1946. It offers an interesting preview of Welles’s performance in Macbeth, and is, needless to say, utterly compelling, but it is neither convincing nor in any way affecting – one is not touched, or scared, or appalled by the man. One just watches a performance desperately in search of a context. His expressive repertoire is essentially formulaic, a sequence of coded gestures, like kabuki or what we know of the Elizabethan theatre: in the realistic universe provided for the film by Welles the director, Welles the actor seems simply stylised. As for the movie itself, it is (as it now stands) curiously unsatisfying as a narrative, largely because of lacunae in both story and relationships caused by the cuts imposed by the producers; the effect is immensely plotty, both complicated and illogical.

  After opening titles over a sixteenth-century German Gothic clock at the top of the bell tower in Harper, Connecticut (how it got there is never explained), and a first scene in which Edward G. Robinson is established as a Nazi-hunter (Wilson), there is a highly evocative sequence in which a character called Meineke (Konstantin Shayne, a very Wellesian actor both in nervous energy and expressiveness of physiognomy) is released from prison in the hope that he will lead them to his old boss, Franz Kindler. This is exactly what he does, travelling between the continents by ship to find him, while Wilson, at a discreet distance, tracks him. The cinematography of this sequence is composed in shadows and sudden lights, not unlike Struss’s approach to Journey into Fear, but even more like Metty’s own inspired work for Welles on Touch of Evil more than ten years later. As soon as we – and Meineke, with Wilson in hot pursuit – arrive in Harper (a beautifully designed set, little used, apart from the gigantic bell tower, which compulsively draws the eye to itself, presaging the climax that inevitably ensues), the camerawork becomes as conventional as the acting. Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young) is casually introduced into the action – on the day of her wedding to Rankin/Kindler – when Meineke comes to her house in quest of her fiancé. He’s not there, so Meineke swiftly goes off to find him, stopping Welles in his tracks to eye-popping effect shortly after we have seen him chatting to the schoolboys he teaches (Welles introduces a few charming hommages to Todd, his old school; even the notice on the gym door is signed ‘Coach Roskie’, Welles’s – rather under-employed, one imagines – sports master when he was there). Meineke comes to him, he says, with a message from the All-Highest, who turns out to be, not der Führer, but God, so Rankin/Kindler takes him to the forest and kills him, then rushes back home to get married. Shortly after the wedding, Wilson is invited to supper; during a discussion about the future of Germany, Rankin, after cowering a bit like a cornered dog, makes an eloquent, purportedly critical, speech about how Germans will never give up till they have found their new Messiah – who will be, he says, another Barbarossa. ‘All Germans aren’t like that,’ pipes up Mary’s young brother, Noah. ‘What about Karl Marx?’ ‘Marx wasn’t a German, he was a Jew,’ – says Rankin quickly, too quickly, and this remark lodges in Wilson’s mind, convincing him that Rankin must be Kindler.

  Thereafter Wilson slowly stalks him, enlisting the help of Noah, while making enquiries about town, trying to locate the missing Meineke. Rankin meanwhile confesses to Mary that he saw Meineke on the day of their wedding: Meineke was trying to blackmail him over an accidental homicide from his old student days. Rankin gave him all the money he had, he tells her, and the blackmailer disappeared. Soon afterwards Meineke’s body is discovered, and Rankin now admits to Mary that he killed him: what else could he do? Mary, terrified, stays loyal to him, even after Wilson and her father (old Judge Longstreet) have shown her footage of the death-camps, and told her that her husband is in fact Franz Kindler. Rankin knows that he must now get rid of Mary, too, and devises a plot to kill her, sawing through the rungs of the ladder to the bell tower and sending for her, while he creates an alibi – and gives the film some tension – by playing checkers with Billy House in the soda fountain. Rankin returns home and is shocked to find Mary there: her old maid, told not to let her leave the house under any circumstances, has feigned a heart attack, and so Mary has asked Noah to go to the tower for her, which he does, accompanied by Wilson; both have a narrow escape. When Rankin realises what has happened, and that he has probably been responsible for Noah’s death, he screams at Mary, smashing his grandfather clock in a sequence that recalls Charles Foster Kane’s impotent fury when Susan Alexander leaves: there is real danger and rage here, an emotion that Welles seemed effortlessly able to summon up. Quite why he should be so remorse-stricken at the thought that he might have killed Noah, when he unequivocally intended to kill Mary, is unexplained.

  By now, Wilson and the family are knocking the door down, and Rankin makes a swift retreat. Night falls, and Mary sleeps. She is troubled, however, and rises somnambulistically from her bed, picking up a box and throwing a coat over her nightgown, and heads through the cemetery for the bell tower. She climbs to the top, where she finds Rankin in full Hunnish mode: shaggy, longhaired, unshaven, pointing a gun at her. She tells him that she’s come to kill him. Soon they’re joined by Wilson, who confronts him with his past. ‘I followed orders, I did my duty,’ he says, wild-eyed, as Mary shoots him in the shoulder. Finally he staggers out onto the parapet; the mechanism of the clock springs to life as he scampers round to safety; suddenly turning, he is impaled on the sword of the Teutonic knight who is circling Satan round the clock, and he and the knight fall 124 feet to the ground. The breathtaking brilliance of the staging of this piece of Grand Guignol is bizarrely undercut by Wilson’s jaunty last line to Mary as she descends the stairs leading from the tower: ‘Sweet dreams!’ he chortles. Kaper’s music – strings, horns, piano arpeggios – swells headily: THE END, says the final caption. Indeed.

  Kaper’s music is blatantly incongruous, purveying a curiously inappropriate swirling romanticism in flat contradiction to the theme and tone of the film. The question of tone is one that hovers over a great many of Welles’s films, always excepting Citizen Kane and largely excepting The Magnificent Ambersons. It is not coincidental that those two films were scored by Bernard Herrmann, whose music (as well as having uni
quely atmospheric properties) was always solidly based in formal structure, integrating the elements and lending the film a powerful sense of unity. It is easy to mock Kaper’s workman-like score; the problem is that its excitable lyricism spreads a layer of monosodium glutamate over the whole film, and Welles’s genius for detail, for tension, for atmosphere, is diffused and diluted. The use of sound, so potent in both Kane and Ambersons – where Herrmann so well understood when to shut up, recognising the power of silence punctuated, perhaps, by a clock or a sleigh-bell or the whirr of an engine – is negligible here. A question almost impossible to answer at this distance, and in the absence of letters or memoranda, is whether Welles willingly acceded to the corny music and the absence of a sound score, or whether he was overruled. Whichever it was, it shows a tragic indifference to his great strengths as a film-maker. Not that either score, musical or sonic, represents the greatest problem with The Stranger as it stands, but they do administer the coup de grâce. The truth, once again, is that the film Welles actually shot was infinitely more interesting and ambitious than the one posing under the same name and now widely available in a spanking new print. Whether it would have been, in the last analysis, a better film we can never know, but it is almost a relief to know that Welles’s originality and imagination had not deserted him completely, which is the inevitable conclusion after a viewing of The Stranger as it was released. Thanks to the diligent labours of that tireless Welles sleuth, Bret Wood, it is now possible to discern the film that might have been; what he has uncovered reveals a framework that not only enhances the narrative, but suggests the mind of an artist at work.

  The finished film as edited by Welles lasted 115 minutes; the presently available version is a full twenty minutes shorter. The single greatest cut, imposed by Spiegel and Goetz before shooting began, removed what would have been two complete reels depicting Meineke’s tortuous quest for Kindler in Latin America. But much more damaging are cuts removing the entire framework of the film. In the director’s cut, the film opens with the sound of a bell tolling, under the image of a demon silhouetted against a white screen. The camera pulls back and we see that it is in fact nothing but the shadow of a tree in Mary Longstreet’s bedroom. She is asleep on the bed; a man’s voice tells her to get up and walk through fields, through the cemetery. She obeys, while the voice recites the names of members of her family who have died for their country. She goes trance-like to the bell tower, climbs up into the belfry, looks down and sees an angry mob below. The mob looks up and sees two people fighting on a ledge of the belfry; they finally fall and die. Then, and only then, do we get the titles, followed, as in the present cut, by the scene in which Wilson tells his colleagues to ‘leave the cell door open’, and the scene of Meineke at customs entering an unspecified Latin American country. Then the two-reel cut followed: in these scenes Meineke was shown going to a kennels, where he is given a truth serum under whose influence he says he believes that God delivered him from prison. He has, he tells them, a message from the All-Highest. They send him on his way, watched by a young woman working for Wilson. Meineke goes to the morgue, where he gets a new passport and a new identity; shortly afterwards Wilson’s young female agent is brought in, dead, savaged by dogs. Meineke next visits a photographer, as in the released version, but a sequence is cut that explains Kindler’s new name – F(Ran)z (kin)dler. (Representative John Rankin, incidentally, was chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee – a sly touch, though whether it was Welles’s or that of one of the other screenwriters is hard to know.)

  Whether the two cut reels, and even the cut explanation of Rankin’s name, are a tremendous loss is hard to judge – everything depends on how they were done (and, as already noted, the scenes on board ship and at customs are among the most visually tony sections of the film). But from a narrative point of view, the opening dream sequence not only makes sense of a number of baffling elements in the released version – Mary’s final-reel sleepwalk to the bell tower; Wilson’s constant reference to her unconscious (‘we have only one ally: her subconscious’); his otherwise incongruous final line – but also seems to turn the whole film into her nightmare. What could be more appalling for a pretty, nicely brought-up young woman in Harper, Connecticut than to find out that her fiancé is not at all who he seems to be, but the monster of the death-camps, whose existence had only recently been revealed to the general public, and the horror of which may well have entered into the subconscious of many a suggestible individual. This is a curious and far-fetched premise, but it has a certain poetry about it, and it takes Welles into a territory where he was very comfortable as an artist: the dream- or nightmare-world in which Expressionism resides. It also makes perfect sense of his own performance of Rankin as a baffled ogre, the stuff both of fairy tales and of nightmares.

  There are further cuts that explain some of the narrative hiccups. Another seriously damaging one is the scene in which Mary and Rankin meet each other for the first time under the bell tower. Rankin says, ‘You know my first impression of your town was the incongruity of a Gothic clock in a Connecticut church tower,’ dealing with that question, and also establishing him as a connoisseur of clocks, which is the only lead Wilson has on him. Rankin then speaks the lines first heard in voice-over at the beginning of the film, telling her to get up. Mary is frightened of heights, but he persuades her to cross a bridge; the screenplay then intercuts Meineke on board ship for America with Mary announcing her engagement to Rankin. After this the screenplay continues substantially as in the released version, until after the scene between Noah and Wilson. The next scene between Mary and Rankin is another significant cut and a real loss: in it Rankin describes the ideal social system in terms of chronometry. ‘The force that runs the clock, the spring or the weight, or whatever it is, is the head of the State. The pendulum is his government which transforms his inspirations into law. The train of gears are the working masses … formed into economic units which engage each other without friction … the teeth are individuals, just as these are of flawless metal, well ground and polished, so must the individual be of good blood, trained and fit physically.’ It is a perfect example of Popular Front writing, and could almost have come out of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male; Welles must have done it superbly and it might have had the same impact in the film as Harry Lime’s amoral little aria in The Third Man. When Rankin finishes speaking, a spring breaks in the clock. Then the screenplay continues as in the released version until after the screening of the death-camp films to Mary.

  In the subsequent sequence, another cut, Rankin gives Mary a sleeping draught; she ‘brings her hands together in the immemorial gesture of blood guilt. Now her subconscious is in control and thus she acknowledges her complicity in the crimes of [Kindler].’ When she sends Noah to the bell tower in her stead, she realises he’s going to his death and faints. Then comes the second most damaging cut, another more impressionistic dream sequence in which Noah climbs to the belfry: a rung breaks and he falls; rung after rung breaks; at last one stays intact. ‘Beneath it the two shafts of the ladder stretch down into space like a pair of cosmic stilts.’ Red, the dog (poisoned by Rankin), is at ‘the base of this lunatic machine’, howling and barking. His barks merge with the music. Then Rankin is on the ladder. The camera dollies in on his eye until it fills the screen. Rankin says, ‘Failing to speak, you become part of the crime … with these hands. The same hands that have held you close to me.’ The pupil of his eye fills the screen, then turns into the face of the clock. After this the film would have proceeded as released until the final dialogue, which was to have been between Wilson and old Potter of the soda fountain (Billy House), who says he’s had enough trouble, but ‘they say accidents come in threes’. ‘In threes?’ asks Wilson. ‘What about World Wars? Mr Potter, I devoutly hope and pray you’re wrong. Good night, Mary. Pleasant dreams.’

  The dream sequences – which so strikingly anticipate the Hitchcock of Spellbound – are obviously tricky to bring off and m
ay or may not have worked, though on the page they certainly add much-needed depth to the character of Mary Rankin. They also suggest an allegoric quality to the whole film. The film in the shooting script is a perfectly accurate reflection of two of Welles’s most pressing political concerns: the survival of fascism and the threat of a Third World War. The film Welles wanted to make was in the nature of a warning: the evil that Hitler represented had by no means been expunged. The introduction of the element of the subconscious, and the revelation through it of Mary’s guilt at her innocent collaboration with Rankin, exemplifies another preoccupation of Welles’s: the complicity of the silent majority; it is another of his wake-up calls to America. All these are potent themes. The question is whether the essentially melodramatic plot device could ever have made them serious points. (It is almost the mirror image of the plot of Tomorrow Is Forever, Welles’s most recent appearance as a film actor, where a war hero returns to his unsuspecting wife in disguise, instead of, as in The Stranger, a war criminal disguising himself in order to insinuate himself into the heart of an innocent woman.) It is of course true that from the time the film was shot up to the present day, covert Nazis have been unmasked, and Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal have pursued them to the ends of the earth. Many of them have changed their names, married and had children. To be credible, however, the approach to such material would have to be rigorously realistic, an approach that was never to be that of Welles. It underlines the difficulty Welles had in dramatising his ideas – his natural inclination was to melo-dramatise them, except (one can only monotonously repeat) in Citizen Kane, where of course he had the services of a remarkable writer at his disposal. However, The Stranger was clearly – at least potentially – a much better film than the one released to modified rapture (but healthy sales) in 1946, and the missing reels are almost as great a loss as the original end of The Magnificent Ambersons.