Orson Welles, Volume 3

by Simon Callow

  In August of 1948, when he should have been treading the boards as Othello in Edinburgh, Welles was acting in the next big Italian–American co-production, Prince of Foxes, in the showy supporting role of Cesare Borgia; it was shot in Florence, Sienna and San Marino, as well as in the Scalera Studios again.18 The Scalera brothers, Salvatore and Michele, had been slowly emerging from a cloud of disgrace: at the forefront of Mussolini’s aggressive promotion of cinema during the war, churning out dozens of features and propaganda films, they were prosecuted after the fall of Mussolini for ‘unjust enrichment’. They had since been busily trying to work their way back to respectability, and to that end had become involved in a number of co-productions. No doubt Michele had somewhere read about Welles’s widely reported Othello plans; he sought out Welles and offered to produce the film. Welles delightedly accepted. Later he used to pretend that Scalera thought he was going to make a movie from Verdi’s opera. What Scalera did think was that Welles was going to make the film with Italian actors (which would have enabled him to get government subsidies): Welles alone, he assumed, would be dubbed. This notion, which was not at all what Welles intended, mutated into a plan to shoot two versions simultaneously, in Italian and in English; that too quietly reverted to a single film in English, which would eventually be dubbed for Italy.

  Meanwhile, in September 1948, there was the Venice Film Festival, in which Macbeth had been entered for the competition. Welles was intensely nervous about showing the film, which he had re-edited in Rome while appearing in Black Magic; meanwhile, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet had just come out in Britain and America, to pretty well unqualified acclaim, and Welles was darkly – and rightly – convinced that if you liked Olivier’s film, you weren’t going to like his. So he approached the festival with high trepidation. He and the perenially provocative Jean Cocteau formed a sort of anti-festival clique, clubbing together to commit what Cocteau rather wonderfully called lèse-festival. They had first met when the Frenchman had attended another, very different Welles Macbeth: the legendary all-black Voodoo production which the twenty-one-year-old Welles had directed in Harlem in 1936; Cocteau was vocal in his praise for both versions. Together in Venice, the two men behaved like two very naughty boys. Welles shocked his hosts by ostentatiously walking out of the showing of Visconti’s uncompromisingly severe masterpiece, La Terra Trema. Like all contestants, he had a press conference, at which, under a certain amount of hostile questioning, he denounced the whole neo-realistic project (exempting only De Sica’s Shoeshine from his strictures) as artistically dismal and politically retrograde, insisting that art required intervention; simply photographing real life was not enough. Nor, he said, could real people straight off the street – so beloved of the neo-realist directors – interpret the world; for that, you needed actors. He further attacked Giorgio Strehler’s newly formed Piccolo Theatre in Milan, generally held to be a model of disciplined imagination; Welles found it bloodless. The only enthusiasm he could muster was for the great Neapolitan actor-writer-director Eduardo de Filippo, whose acting was, Welles said, ‘the result not only of instinct and tradition but of research and application’.19

  These remarks were not warmly received. Neo-realism was the prevailing aesthetic of the day, rigidly adhered to, and Italian critics and journalists of both right and left were for the most part implacably and aggressively opposed to anything that might diverge from it. To them, Welles’s films, not to mention his personality, strongly smacked of the baroque, the ultimate brickbat in the contemporary critical lexicon. Criticism was polarised between the Roundhead and the Cavalier, and it was pretty clear which camp Welles belonged to. Reviewers had by now seen Quarto Potere (Fourth Estate), as Kane was renamed for Italy. The film had a tentative and very brief release; with few exceptions, the critics didn’t care for it, seeing it as an empty display of technique and tarring it with the same brush as Welles’s 1945 thriller, The Stranger, seen at the Venice Festival a year earlier and also disliked. Welles instinctively grasped how fundamentally irreconcilable to his work neo-realism was. For him, film was always artifice; it was a conjuring trick, an illusion. His purpose was to heighten, to distort, to intensify, to disturb perception; and for him, as he said on many occasions, editing was the supreme creative act. For an artist simply to train a camera on life was a dereliction of duty. It is perhaps a little ironic, in view of his spirited defence of acting, that so many of his own films are marred by indifferent performances, but they are nonetheless always performances; it is entirely predictable that the bovine gaze of Visconti’s camera in La Terra Trema would drive the always mercurial Welles to distraction.

  Calming down, he realised that this press conference had not gone well and would do Macbeth no good, so he asked for another, to explain himself more clearly. This he spectacularly failed to do. He was reported as ‘gabbling uncontrollably’, defending Macbeth as simply an alternative to mainstream Hollywood film-making, and denying any element of formalism in his work; he owed nothing, he said, to Fritz Lang or Eisenstein, nor did he feel any rivalry with Hamlet; but if Macbeth – ‘produced by a small, independent outfit’ – were to fail, it would, he said, be ‘the end of the People’s Theatre . . . mine is a small, low-budget film and I’m up against the British Empire’. If these remarks were designed to endear him or Macbeth to the committee, they failed. His special pleading was preposterous and transparent, said the Italian critic Tullio Kezich some years later: ‘Hamlet was produced by an Italian adventurer, Filippo del Giudice . . . who struggled to get backing for his films, as everyone did in those days.’20

  This second press conference was a real disaster, prompting Welles to decide, in conjunction with Elsa Maxwell and the US Ambassador – as ill-advised a pair of counsellors as could be imagined – to withdraw the film from the competition. ‘Why risk it?’ Welles told Daily Variety, apparently under the assumption that only Americans would read the paper. ‘It’ll never be shown in Italy. Shakespeare can’t be dubbed. Better keep it for an audience that understands it. Besides, they don’t like me in Italy: my love for the country is unrequited. I know what they’ll say, that I didn’t have the guts to go up against Rank’s Hamlet.’21 Just as Welles feared, Olivier won the Golden Lion, with La Terra Trema – another triumph for neo-realism – winning an international prize. The whole episode had further soured Welles’s relationship with the Italian press, which had taken another knock from Elsa Maxwell’s reckless offensive on his behalf, proposing a boycott of the festival and doubting whether Italians were able to appreciate international films made in a democracy – unlike Hamlet, for example?

  Nonetheless, while the festival was still running and he was still acting in Prince of Foxes, Welles took the huge gamble of starting to shoot Othello on location in Venice, with a camera crew headed by Alberto Fusi and Italian actors in all of the roles, except for Welles himself as the eponymous Moor, Iago, played by Welles’s old chum Everett Sloane, Kane’s Mr Bernstein, and Bannister in The Lady from Shanghai, who happened to be acting with him in Prince of Foxes, and Emilia, who was played by Lea Padovani’s English coach, Harriet White Medin. Padovani was, of course, Desdemona. Welles’s flits from Florence to Rome, and Rome to Venice, including make-up changes, were achievable only because of Welles’s superhuman levels of adrenalin. ‘In Venice we’d elbow our way out again and down to the waiting motorboat,’ wrote Rita Ribolla, who masterminded the whole operation:

  Vasco, the make-up wizard, would scarcely say ‘hi’ and before the boat roared around the first corner into one of the quieter canals, Borgia’s beard would be off. The faster the boat whizzed, the faster Vasco worked. It took 8 to 10 minutes to get to the Hotel. It never took Vasco longer to change Borgia into Othello. When the driver slammed into reverse to stop the boat and the doorman stepped forward to hold out a helping arm, the Moor would emerge from the little cabin, step regally ashore, sweep one end of his floor length cape over the opposite shoulder and glide through the throbbing hall t
oward the elevator, curly head held high, beady jet black eyes staring straight ahead out of shiny black face.22

  Lea Padovani was waiting for him:

  Upstairs, after he had folded Desdemona into his arms while we others looked discreetly into another direction, everyone would start talking at the same time – in various languages, of course. Then we’d see the rushes of the night before, afterwards scramble into boats and gondolas which took us to wherever we were shooting. If it was in the Palace of the Doges, we’d walk across Piazza San Marco and I’d often see people quickly cross themselves or put a protective hand over their startled eyes – wasn’t that Venice’s own Othello and his beautiful Desdemona in her flowing pale blue robes, flanked by the Doges in bright red, surrounded by the Nobles, calmly making their way through the masses of tourists?23

  Padovani’s English was far from perfect, which didn’t matter yet because they were shooting without sound. Indeed, they were quite often shooting without Welles, who would be called away for days at a time to act in his Hollywood blockbuster, at which moments his stand-in – a giant of a man, Alfredo Lombardini, a local butcher – would substitute for him. On such occasions the shoot would be supervised by Michael Washinsky, whom Welles had appointed assistant director. The phantoms multiplied: a Welles who was not Welles, in a Welles film that was not being directed by Welles.

  Othello’s beautiful Desdemona was proving quite demanding. After ascertaining that the actresses would be allowed to keep their costumes, Padovani energetically objected to the lynx bordering on a cape that swept down into a long train. ‘I think it would look better if it were completely lined with the fur,’ she mused. ‘You are perfectly right, of course it would,’ replied Welles dotingly, and had it done. Obsessed by her, he ceded to her every demand, including appointing as his production manager Giorgio Papi, a married man with whom Padovani had been passionately involved throughout the period of Welles’s infatuation with her. Welles’s dawning realisation of this relationship was believed, by some of those who were around at the time, to be what fuelled his undentable determination to make a movie out of the most devastating account of jealousy in the whole of world literature.

  Shooting abruptly came to a halt in early November, when Alexander Korda snatched Welles away from Othello to shoot a two-week cameo role in a film for which he would be paid the substantial fee of $100,000 – much needed, if filming was to continue. Welles could have had 10 per cent of the gross of the movie instead, which would in time (since the film in question was The Third Man) have meant a very large amount of money indeed, a fact that Welles never ceased to lament. But he was in a hurry; he needed the cash. He knew straight away that it was a very good screenplay, with a very good part indeed for himself, which cast its shadow over the entire film, however brief the actual screen time (just over eleven minutes), and despite (or perhaps because of) making his first appearance two-thirds of the way through the film; he also knew that Carol Reed was an excellent director, riding high on the recent international success of The Fallen Idol. But despite all that, Welles was determined to give Alexander Korda a hard time. Though the great impresario had bailed him out three years earlier, at the time of his Broadway disaster Around the World, and had been subsidising him to the tune of 3 million lire since he had come to Italy, and though he still had an outstanding three-picture contract with him, either as director, actor-director or actor-director-writer, he felt ill-used by Korda. The cancellation of Cyrano rankled deeply with Welles, as did Korda’s subsequent resistance to his adaptation of Pirandello’s Henry IV, ‘USING ONLY REAL LOCATIONS, SO NO STUDIO DEAL NECESSARY,’ as Welles had telegrammed him: he had been ready to start lining up a cameraman and cast for it, but Korda had somehow remained unconvinced. So, out of sheer pique, though Welles had every intention of signing the contract, he made himself elusive when the time to do so arrived. Finally Korda sent his amiable brother Vincent to track Welles down.

  ‘Two days later,’ wrote Vincent’s son, Michael, in his engaging memoir Charmed Lives, ‘my father and I flew to Rome in pursuit of Orson.’ In Rome, they were told at the Grand Hotel that ‘Signor Welles had only just left for Florence.’ In Florence, the concierge informed them that Welles had just departed for Venice, where, at the Danieli, the reception desk conveyed Welles’s apologies: he had been obliged urgently to go to Naples. In Naples, naturally, they found that Welles had just parted for Capri. Once there, they saw a motorboat heading out towards the mainland at top speed. ‘In the back, waving grandly to us, sat Orson, surrounded by a mound of luggage, on his way, as we soon discovered, from Naples to Nice.’ They finally tracked him down to the Bonne Auberge in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where they found him ‘eating the small raw artichokes of Provence, which were served with an anchovy sauce, before plunging into a steaming bouillabaisse and a roast chicken’. Welles waved them to his table, ordered more food and wine and resigned himself to his fate. Paying someone to stand watch over his door through the night, they collected Welles the following morning and got him on the plane to London, where he signed the contract and then went straight back to Rome. By now, The Third Man was shooting in Vienna, and Welles failed to show up for his first scene. This time Bob Dunbar, the assistant to the associate producer, was sent to fetch him; and finally, after a few more practical jokes, eyes twinkling, Welles arrived. What a naughty boy he could be, when he felt like it. And his naughtiness was by no means at an end.

  What Welles didn’t know was that his getting the part of Harry Lime at all – the part that was to be the most popular he ever played, in the most successful film in which he ever participated – had been very touch-and-go. Reed and Korda were keen (Korda in part because he wanted to redeem at least some of their three-picture deal contract), but Korda’s American partner on the film, David O. Selznick, was bitterly opposed to Welles’s involvement from the beginning. Cary Grant, Noël Coward and David Niven had already been proposed as alternatives; finally, when the two central male characters were reconceived as Americans, Robert Mitchum was keenly championed as Lime by Selznick. Welles was saved by the bell on that one when Mitchum, one of America’s top grossers, was arrested for possession of marijuana, though Selznick continued to insist that casting Welles would be ‘a detriment’ to the picture: he was box-office poison – specially commissioned Gallup polls had proved it. ‘While I do not profess knowing as much as Mr Gallup about box office values,’ replied Korda in the feline tone he deployed when dealing with his pesky American running mate, ‘I cannot believe him being a detriment . . . Carol thinks Orson could give a tremendous performance in this part. Picture greatly depends on Lime being extraordinary in attraction and superior in intellect.’24

  Selznick seemed to accede, at which point Welles’s Macbeth opened in America to villainously bad reviews, causing Selznick to exclaim that Welles would be a far more damaging name ‘than has been in our worst fears to date’. How about Rex Harrison for the part? Korda drily informed Selznick that it was too late: Welles had been signed. Which, as it happened, he hadn’t, though he would be soon enough. Korda was satisfied; as early as 1947 he had written a memo in which he stated his intention of making ‘a photoplay, as yet untitled, to be directed by Carol Reed, starring Orson Welles’. The irony of these casting shenanigans is that the description of Harry in the novella Graham Greene wrote, before embarking on the screenplay and long before any casting was contemplated, is an almost precise description of Welles: ‘Don’t picture Harry Lime as a smooth scoundrel,’ says Major Calloway. ‘The picture I have of him on my files is an excellent one: he is caught by a street photographer with his stocky legs apart, big shoulders a little hunched, a belly that has known too much good food for too long, on his face a look of cheerful rascality, a geniality, a recognition that his happiness will make the world’s day.’25 On the other hand, Selznick’s doubts about Welles’s box-office appeal were not unfounded – that is, until The Third Man, which made him an international star.

&
nbsp; Meanwhile he finally turned up, in a freezing wet Vienna in November, a week late. Reed and his first assistant director, Guy Hamilton, had filled in the time while they were waiting for Welles by shooting everything in which they could use a stand-in for Harry – Harry running away, Harry in the middle-distance, Harry and the cat; they even shot Harry’s shadow. Either Hamilton or Otto Schusser, the butcher – another butcher! – who was Welles’s stand-in, donned the heavy overcoat and hat in which they had chosen to disguise themselves; one or other of them would wear Harry’s shoes, with Reed himself on one occasion volunteering his fingers for the shot of Harry’s hand emerging from the ventilation slats of the sewer.26 It has been estimated that Welles himself does not feature in a little over 30 per cent of the shots in which Harry appears. This may have set Welles a very useful precedent for his own film of Othello, in which, as he said, ‘if you can’t see the actor’s face, you can be pretty certain it’s not him.’ In fact it would be his usual modus operandi from now on. Similarly, because of restrictions on filming in post-war Vienna, Reed and his art directors had been obliged to shoot sequences in which the geography was entirely artificial; in the immortal scene in which Harry makes his first appearance in Schreyvogelgasse, for example, when he turns the corner – except that it isn’t actually him, of course – the street he appears to turn into was in reality half a mile away. This too would prove to be a very useful model for Welles.

  His first shot in Vienna was to be in the sewers. When Welles realised what that entailed, he refused point-blank to descend. ‘I come from California,’ he is alleged to have cried. ‘My throat! I’m so cold!’ It is true that he suffered from various chronic respiratory conditions – asthma, hay fever, sinusitis – but the film crew was not inclined to be unduly sympathetic: the unending night-shooting, the logistical difficulties of the city itself, the non-cooperation of the various occupying authorities and the shortage of time meant they had been working around the clock, operating three units, with three cam-eramen, but just the one director. ‘Somehow,’ said Guy Hamilton, ‘for 7 weeks, 3 hours sleep here, and three hours there, and lots of Benzedrine, Carol directed the whole sodding thing.’27 A small thing like an intransigent star was not going to unsettle his calm. In the face of Welles’s fastidiousness about going down into the sewer, the decision was rapidly made to reconstruct the sewers in Shepperton, where Welles was scheduled to film for a week in January. All he shot that week in November in Vienna was his first appearance in the doorway – the scene so brilliantly described in the original novella: ‘a window curtain was drawn petulantly back by some sleeper he had awakened, and the light fell straight across the narrow street and lit up the features of Harry Lime’28 – and a walk with Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) to and from the Great Wheel in the Prater.