Orson Welles: Hello Americans

by Simon Callow

  The result of all these delays and additions was that a film scheduled to take sixty-five days to shoot took ninety-eight, at a cost of nearly half a million dollars more than budgeted. Dick Wilson wrote a lengthy memo to Welles to support him in his arguments with Columbia, rebutting many of the charges of wastefulness and extravagance of which Cohn accused him. There is no question that they faced trying circumstances, not of their own making; it also appears to be true that the studio’s accounting practices were somewhat dubious. Once again, it seems, Welles and his partners (in this case, Wilson) had been oppressed by a rapacious and inflexible organisation; once again, they can have expected nothing else. It seems that Welles had underestimated his opponent, not for the first time. ‘He snarled at you as you came in the door,’ he told Barbara Leaming of Harry Cohn, ‘and you could gradually throw him little goodies and he would quiet down and start lashing his tail.’ Wrong. Cohn had bugged the portrait of him that hung in Welles’s office at Columbia; Welles cheerily greeted it, every morning and night, with the words ‘Well, that winds up another day at the Mercury. Tune in tomorrow.’ This devil-may-care attitude is endearing, but it was no defence against the ruthless man for whom they were working, who wanted nothing more or less from them than a profitable movie. He was clearly no George Schaefer, supporting and sustaining Welles, aiding and abetting him in his artistic dreams, as became immediately evident in his responses to the rushes.

  From the beginning, Cohn and Jack Fier (about whom Welles quipped, perhaps somewhat desperately, ‘we have nothing to fear but Fier himself’) were convinced that the film would never work, their opinion being confirmed by the veteran editor and feared termagant Viola Lawrence, who reported that the footage was ‘a jumbled mess’.9 Welles had no approval of the final cut; indeed, he seems not to have been involved in the editing process at all. At no point did they accept or acknowledge Welles’s stated intention of giving the film ‘something off-centre, queer, strange’,10 which had a ‘bad dream’ aspect, as he put it. They refused to understand that he wanted the film to be satirical in feel. In fact, their whole purpose was to introduce coherence and logic – and give Rita Hayworth her proper quota of close-ups. Where Welles had evolved a subtle and complex critique of her glamour – first showing Grisby, for example, studying her voyeuristically through his telescope, and then making the audience into voyeurs by letting us see her through the telescope, too – Lawrence and Cohn steamrollered him into shooting a large number of pick-up close-ups of Hayworth, which, though undeniably lovely in themselves, destroy the film’s visual and imagistic coherence; the film’s eye, as it were, stops being beady and cynical, and suddenly mists up. The result is yet another Welles movie that must be discussed in terms of what might have been, rather than what is: another mutilated torso. Welles reckoned that Cohn lost about 20 per cent of the footage – a substantial amount – cutting a number of important details; worse than that, he imposed on the film a dreary score by Heinz Roemheld, which Welles wittily and appositely demolishes in a memo that is one of the most useful surviving accounts of his complex understanding of sound, the precision of his requirements and, en passant, the fineness of his taste. It also confirms just how significant a contribution he expected music to make to his work.

  The memo to Cohn was written after the unsuccessful first preview, for which (as is not uncommon) a temporary soundtrack had been provided, music written by the distinguished film composer and former avant-gardist, George Antheil, for something quite different. Antheil’s score had, says Welles, ‘an atmosphere of darkness and menace, combined with something lush and romantic’, whereas the title music as it stood was ‘atrocious’. The score as a whole depends to the point of exasperation on a constant recycling of the Roberts and Fisher song ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’ sung by Elsa (in fact sung by Anita Ellis on the soundtrack), but ‘there simply isn’t enough musical content in [it] to support its use throughout a serious melodrama’. Moreover, ‘Mr Heinzman’ – at all times Welles refers to Roemheld as Heinzman – ‘is an ardent devotee of an old-fashioned type of scoring now referred to as “Disney”. In other words, if somebody falls down, he makes a falling down sound in the orchestra.’ This is precisely the practice Bernard Herrmann abolished in his scores for Welles, creating instead constant interplay between the music, the image and the text – and silence. Of Roemheld’s inanely associative and compulsively voluble music, Welles notes: ‘If the lab had scratched initials and phone numbers all over the negative, I couldn’t have been unhappier with the music.’ In the sailing montage, ‘he seems to have gone out of his way to create an effect totally different from the one I indicated … the temporary track … had variety, movement, romance. It conveyed the feeling of a journey – a journey – a journey taken into a picturesque and highly-coloured world. It had besides this, a quality of satire.’ He cites the musical response to Hayworth’s second dive: ‘the dive itself has no plot importance. What does matter is Rita’s beauty, the beauty of the scene, the evil overtones suggested by Grisby’s character, and Michael’s bewilderment. Any or all of these might have inspired the music. Instead the dive is treated as though it were a major climax, or some antic moment in a Silly Symphony; a pratfall by Pluto the Pup, or a wild jump into space by Donald Duck.’ The entrance to the bay at Acapulco had, in the preview version, ‘a very curious and sexy South-American strain’, which established the ‘rather sinister sort of glamour’ the scene required. What Roemhold provided is corny, ‘second-rate Germanic filler’. It is all a matter, he says, ‘of taste and dramatic intelligence’. Again Welles stresses the deliberate oddness he is aiming for: ‘Our story escapes the cliché only if the performances and the production are original or at the least, somewhat oblique. This sort of music cue destroys that quality of freshness and strangeness which is exactly what might have saved The Lady from Shanghai from being just another whodunit.’

  Welles implies that he wants this disorientation simply to take the curse off drearily familiar material; almost all of his work, in theatre, on radio and in film, administers shocks to the audience. This is to some extent congruous with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt: making things strange, unexpected, therefore puzzling and arresting (the opposite, in Brecht’s formulation, of the narcotic and lulling); but in his use of this procedure, Welles speaks simply as a smart showman, a knowing manipulator of audience responses, an entertainer. Where he and Brecht coincide perfectly, though, is in wanting an active, not a passive, audience. ‘The strongest mediums are those which ask the most from the public,’ Welles said in an interview, and this notion was of course anathema to the Harry Cohns of this world, who delighted in Roemheld’s music – ‘the poorest and the purest corn’, as Welles says, and thus perfectly undemanding. Sequence after sequence is rendered ordinary, banal, stagy, phoney or just dull. ‘The audience should feel at this point [in the Chinese Theatre], along with Michael, that maybe they are going crazy. The new dubbing job can only make them feel that maybe they’re going to sleep.’ The music for the Crazy House ‘is an insult to the material … this is a chance for the score to tie together the whole “bad dream” aspect of the production and resolve it – to deliver the story to its climax on a new dimension. Given the faintest premonition of what sort of music was going to be imposed on this difficult and costly sequence, I would never have gone to the trouble or expense of shooting it.’ The end of the picture, he says, is done incalculable injury by a particularly swoony and meaningless reprise of ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’. His comments on the sound are equally trenchant: he discerns a process of ‘smoothing-out’ in both the effects and the voices. Tracks are frequently dead; vocal tracks lack ‘peaks and accents’. In the song sequence, ‘Grisby’s voice is no longer intrusive and nagging … all the “levels” are so precisely balanced that the sequence achieves, for the first time since I started work on it, an overall quality of flatness and banality.’ The courtroom scene is deprived of ‘the vitality and punch it previously possessed’, with the ec
ho effect that Welles wanted dropped entirely. The tension created by an over-amplified recording of heavily and deliberately corny Hawaiian music has been lost. Michael’s run from the pier, in which ‘a careful pattern of voices had been built up with the expenditure of much time and effort by me’ – has been ‘junked in favour of a vague hullabaloo’. The interesting sound pattern they developed for the Crazy House has been dropped.

  This eloquent and precise document is a vivid record of the amount of detailed and conscious thought that Welles brought to every aspect of his films. It is one of a long line of similar memoranda to the powers-that-be – stretching from The Magnificent Ambersons to A Touch of Evil – railing against bad and insensitive decisions that have wrecked, or will wreck, his work. They always concern the post-production on the film, editing, music, sound; and they are always too late. This particular memo is an expansion of notes given to Welles by Dick Wilson; it evidently took Welles some time to gather his thoughts and express them with force. Even as he writes, he seems to know that nothing is going to happen, and indeed, in this case (as in the others) it didn’t. Its only purpose seems to be to set the record straight, an understandable impulse, but an ineffective one. The question arises: how did such a talented, bright, powerful – indeed formidable – man allow himself to be constantly worsted by less intelligent, less talented, altogether less remarkable men than himself? Knowing how critical post-production was to his work – more, perhaps, than to that of any other major director – how did he allow this to happen, again and again?

  No doubt the answer lies in the condition of the film industry: its cost-intensiveness means that it is in the hands of those who can best raise and make money. Occasionally, a George Schaefer or a David O. Selznick will emerge who is responsive to the idea of art; in the case of Selznick, this brought with it massive interference. Welles had a further difficulty, which was that for all his appreciation of popular culture, he was at heart an experimentalist: to keep him interested, each film had to be a challenge. The point of genre was to play with it, invert its conventions, challenge it from within. This has never been the route to popularity. In The Lady from Shanghai he had, because of a personal connection, access to one of the greatest icons of the screen. To expect that he would be allowed to deconstruct and reinvent her at the expense of her owner (because that is what, in effect, Harry Cohn was) was an unrealistic notion. To assume that the machine of Columbia Studios would put itself behind him and attempt to realise his highly idio-syncratic vision was to surrender to fantasy. It is fascinating to find, then, that the central character of The Lady from Shanghai is just such a figure, a dreamer, a romantic, who explicitly associates himself (or did before Harry Cohn made his cuts) with the figure of Don Quixote – whose bony profile was to cast such a long shadow over Welles’s life and work.

  The film that we have – compromised, butchered, coarsened, cheapened – is still a remarkable and a highly personal work. The Lady from Shanghai is the story of Michael O’Hara, just as Carmen is the story of Don José. Welles had done some intensive work on his version of the Prosper Mérimée story while preparing The Lady from Shanghai; James Naremore persuasively suggests that he may have used it as his model. Something happens to both Don José and Mike O’Hara; by the end of their respective stories, both are changed, whereas Carmen and Elsa Bannister remain what they always have been: spiderwomen, catching men in their webs. They both die, but unlike poor love-maddened José, Michael O’Hara lives; to that extent it is an optimistic tale. The opening of the narration, over a mysterious shot of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, might well have some autobiographical resonance for Welles (and more than one review eagerly seized on it as such): ‘When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little that can stop me. Once I’d seen her, I was not in my right mind for some time.’ We are thus immediately introduced to Welles’s Irish brogue, a thing much mocked, though in fact it is a more-than-halfway decent west of Ireland accent such as he may well have heard fifteen years before, in Galway, at the start of the mad adventure that was his career. It is perhaps rather relentlessly deployed, however, the same cadence repeated over and over again, and ultimately becomes something of a straitjacket, stiffening his phrasing and inhibiting his natural expressiveness; its authentic softness lends a certain sleepiness to Michael’s utterances, too. No sooner have we heard our hero than we see him, in Central Park, in the dark, catching sight of a beautiful young blonde in a carriage, and setting out to pick her up. The first glimpse of Hayworth transmogrified into a short-haired platinum blonde must have been a real shock, and perhaps a thrill, for the film’s initial audiences; it again turns us into voyeurs, goggling at Elsa rather than simply looking at her.

  Welles himself – for the first time on film sans beard, false nose or other facial make-up – might have been quite a surprise, too. It is a remarkable face, astonishingly protean, seeming to change with every changing angle: now puffy, now angular; huge eyes and small retroussé nose surmounting heavy and seemingly boneless jowls; often, in repose, seeming sullen, only to blaze with animation in action. Dick Wilson noted in his memo, ‘Rudolph [Maté] took a whole day to learn how to photograph you,’11 and one can see that it might have been a challenge. The best solution was to contrive shadows along the jawline and light deep into the eyes, inevitably a somewhat stylised effect. As often, Welles had chosen to play one essential trait of the character, in this case chivalry, and though it is not without charm, it is an unassimilated assumption, put on like the jaunty cap he sports, an indication of a type. It is a good sketch of something, but it is scarcely a performance, let alone a characterisation. The transformation (such as it is) is entirely superficial; there is never a point at which the character seems to have autonomous life, and never a moment at which – in David Hare’s admirable formulation – his gestures cease to be about one thing and become about everything. The particular is so imprecisely expressed that it can never become general. In an interview Welles gave during the shoot, he expressed his impatience with acting:

  I have a small public now whose interest in me is sufficient at the box office to make my appearance on the screen a necessary adjunct to my writing and directing.12 But no critic has ever liked my acting. I can show you, frame for frame, that my eyebrows move less than Ray Milland’s in The Lost Weekend. If I permitted myself a tenth of his expressions in that excellent performance, I would be howled out of the theatre. I have only to walk into camera range and the critics are convinced that I am a hambone. I am an actor of the old school. That is the only way I can explain it.

  The explanation won’t wash: there are plenty of actors of ‘the old school’ – Pierre Brasseur, Michel Simon, Nikolai Cherkassov, Laurence Olivier, George C. Scott – who made searing and profoundly moving impressions on the screen. The truth is that on screen Welles was an extraordinary presence, but rarely an engaged actor. It is hardly to be wondered at that his mind was elsewhere when he was standing in front of the camera during The Lady from Shanghai: he was working sleeplessly round the clock on a film that was in danger of spinning out of control, with a leading lady who was exhausted and ailing, while rewriting on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. But the fact has to be faced that on this exceptionally ambitious film of his, playing a role that was so very close to his heart, Welles gives a limp, rather absent performance, and it damages the film.

  The opening sequence in Central Park suffers from this, despite some witty camera work during the first flirtatious dialogue between Michael and Elsa, whom he dubs his Rosaleen; when she sets out on her own, he finds her handbag and its concealed gun, then hears her being pursued by muggers in the park. Welles’s fist-fight with her assailants is just a little half-hearted; Central Park itself makes a slightly stagy impact, too. Once Elsa and Michael go to the car park, reality kicks in. Michael refuses her offer of a job and, as she drives off, various low-lifers emerge to ask about the classy blonde dame; at which point the unforgettably sweaty and drunken features
of Glenn Anders as George Grisby loom up like a death’s head and then slide speechlessly away. In the loose repertory company that acts Welles’s films, here is often a glamorous tar (Rita Hayworth, Jo Cotten, Anthony Perkins), a number of first-rate character actors (Ray Collins, George Coulouris) and an actor of profound inner life. Anders is one of the last-named; Agnes Moorehead was another, Michael Redgrave (in Mr Arkadin) a third. Anders’s Grisby is a recklessly brave but perfectly centred performance, exuding a sense of fathomless corruption and self-disgust that is deeply disturbing, and it electrifies every scene in which he appears.