Orson Welles, Volume 3

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Orson Welles, Volume 3 Page 21

by Simon Callow


  But despite this head-start, the shoot was problematic from the first day: ‘just anguish,’ he told Bogdanovich, ‘from beginning to end’.2 This is uncommon with Welles’s films. The high levels of adrenalin he generated normally swept everyone up. Mad and often physically arduous though the shooting of Othello had been, there was a kind of excitement, a sense of adventure, which, for all except diehard whiners like Robert Coote, made it at the very least a memorable experience. But Mr Arkadin was a joyless slog. Welles had little respect for his crew, who were resentful, slow and lacking in proficiency; for their part, they were unaccustomed to being told how to do their job by the director. After the experience of Othello, Welles knew exactly what he wanted and how it had to be achieved, however unorthodox it might be. He knew more about their cameras than the crew did, and could see little point in going through the charade of coaxing them into doing what he wanted: he simply cut to the chase and told them.

  The cinematographer was Jean Bourgoin, a Renoir veteran, and later director of photography for Jacques Tati, but he had no interest in Welles’s experiments and simply executed the angles and used the lenses that were asked of him. Then there was the red-tape. Post-war Europe was bedevilled by petty bureaucracy, constantly hemming Welles in and holding him up. The rushes were developed in a French laboratory. ‘Can you imagine’, he lamented in a piece he wrote for Film Culture with the somewhat grandiose title ‘For a Universal Cinema’, ‘that I had to have a special authorization for every bit of film, even if only 20 yards long, that arrived from Spain?’ He remonstrated with the authorities, but to no avail. ‘One might convince a tribal chief from Darkest Africa – but officialdom will remain as deaf to the oratory of Demosthenes as to the reasonings of Descartes.’ Even getting work permits for his international crew was a nightmare.3

  But the problems ran deeper than that, beginning with the screenplay. Screenplays for Welles were very much a starting point, and could – and would – be changed according to circumstances or fresh inspiration. Hitherto he had always worked from a source: a novel (The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai), an original screenplay (The Stranger, Citizen Kane), a play (Macbeth, Othello). In the case of Mr Arkadin the ur-material is almost as elusive as Gregory Arkadin himself. Since as early as 1951, Welles had been telling people that he was working on a novel about a famous arms-dealer; he had been seen typing what he said was the manuscript. He airily referred to this same novel in various interviews, and made a very clear public announcement, as we have seen, about making a film derived from it; he went to Casablanca to write it, after staying with Mike Olian, partly, no doubt, inspired by prolonged exposure to a real-life conman. But Basil Zaharoff – ‘Europe’s Man of Mystery’, as he was widely known – the international swindler and munitions dealer of Greek origins who ended his long and lurid life covered in honours, not least a knighthood of the British Empire – was the primary model. Welles had been fascinated by him since at least 1936, when, in Sidney Kingsley’s stage play Ten Million Ghosts, he had, as a twenty-year-old, played a character clearly based on him. Zaharoff was equally clearly the inspiration for one of the Harry Lime radio scripts Welles produced for Harry Alan Towers in 1952; the episode’s title, ‘Man of Mystery’, made the connection pretty explicit. For the radio script, Welles rechristened him Gregory Arkadian, with its obvious echo of Olian’s name, and he stands in the long line of powerful, unknowable, empty men Welles was drawn to portraying: Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Kane, Charles Rankin in The Stranger, Cagliostro, Mr Clay in The Immortal Story. He was equally drawn to these men in life, Olian and Fritz Mandl among them: simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

  Many of the Harry Lime scripts are journeyman work, redeemed only by the deftness of a hard-working cast, a sprinkling of self-knowing hokum and Welles’s unique throwaway charms, honed on radio shows in which he performed in the 1940s. ‘Man of Mystery’, broadcast in April of 1952, is on a different level. It opens with the curiously haunting image – somehow especially powerful on radio – of an empty plane flying in the skies above France, after which the plot is swiftly and skilfully established: Arkadian, a great international magnate, hires Harry Lime to find out about his past, so that, unbeknown to Lime, he can systematically wipe out anyone who had ever known him as the petty criminal he was, to prevent his daughter Raina from finding out about his shabby origins. It is virtually impossible to attribute authorship to any of the episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime, though Welles certainly edited them all, but it seems more than likely that Welles had had an idea for a movie and seized the opportunity to give it a dry run on radio. The question is whether this radio play derived from Welles’s purported novel, or whether it was simply whipped up by him and his team of writers as part of the production line of weekly broadcasts. Meanwhile, even before the transmission of ‘Man of Mystery’, Welles had completed a screenplay he called Masquerade, which is essentially an elaboration of the radio play, and indeed uses many lines from it. Or is it? Are they perhaps both taken from the mysterious novel-in-progress?

  The screenplay starts, as does the radio play, with the puzzle of the empty plane. It then essentially follows the course of ‘Man of Mystery’, adding a couple of subplots and incidents from ‘Greek Meets Greek’ and ‘The Golden Fleece’, other episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime. Completely new is a spectacular first meeting between Arkadin (who in the translation from radio to screen has lost the third ‘a’ in his name) and the investigator he hires (who is now named Guy Dusmenil). Their rendezvous takes place at a fancy dress ball in Venice, obviously modelled on the legendary Bal Oriental at which Welles had been a guest two years earlier, and which gives the screenplay its title. It also includes excursions to the various figures of Arkadin’s past, now scattered across the globe. The screenplay bears an epigraph from Ralph Waldo Emerson – famous, haunting lines from his essay on Compensation (which also makes an appearance in Welles’s film The Stranger). They are words that powerfully express Welles’s own feelings about guilt:

  Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature – water, snow, wind, gravitation – become penalties to the thief.4

  The crucial difference between ‘Man of Mystery’ and Masquerade is that in the radio play the investigator is, of course, Harry Lime (Welles); for the screenplay, a new investigator was required. In Masquerade this is Guy Dusmenil, an elegant gentleman detective. By the time they started shooting, Masquerade had again become Mr Arkadin and Dusmenil had become Guy Van Stratten, a more rugged and troubled figure than his predecessor. Despite the glittering succession of cameo roles that the script calls for – the figures from Arkadin’s past who have to be eliminated – there is a triangle at the centre of the screenplay on which the film stands or falls: Arkadin, Van Stratten and Raina. Obviously Welles was going to play Arkadin, but he took a huge gamble on the other two parts. As Raina, the daughter whose love and respect Arkadin so desperately seeks to secure, he cast his lover, Paola Mori, who had had the slenderest experience of acting; and, as Van Stratten – the engine of the plot, and increasingly Arkadin’s prey – he cast one of the actors who had worked with him on the Harry Lime radio series, Robert Arden, who up to that point had had a very modest, if solid career as one of the small pool of American actors working in London. At the time, Arden was playing the supporting role of Rusty Charlie in the London production of Guys and Dolls; at first he assumed that the urgent messages left for him at the stage door of the London Coliseum were a prank, but eventually he called back and was astonished to be offered what he took to be the leading role (‘I was in every scene!’) in Orson Welles’s latest film. A day
later, Welles’s secretary sent him a one-way plane ticket for Madrid, with a request to buy himself an appropriate wardrobe for the part, for which he would, he was assured, be reimbursed.5 As always, Welles was supremely confident in his ability to draw what he needed from any actor. Arden had some film and television experience, but nothing that could possibly have prepared him for what was to follow.

  The moment he arrived at the airport, Arden was whisked away to Welles’s hotel; the door of Welles’s room was opened by the actor playing Jacob Zouk, Welles’s old colleague Akim Tamiroff – ‘welcome to Madrid, Spain!’ – and off they went, Arden, Welles, Tamiroff and Mrs Tamiroff (Tamara Shane, also in the movie) for a bibulous supper at Horcher’s, Madrid’s finest restaurant. Then, when it was well past midnight, they went straight to the studio and shot the scenes between Zouk and Van Stratten well into the small hours. When they reconvened the following afternoon, Welles announced that he had had an idea: he would reframe the film within a flashback structure – the whole film would in fact be a series of flashbacks, told by Van Stratten to persuade Jacob Zouk to run for his life. Arden, in his innocence, asked Welles whether that meant they would have to shoot the material again. No, Welles patiently told him, what they had shot was fine: he would just redub it.

  This instability of the basic material was new in Welles’s work. In Othello he had adapted to changing circumstances and allowed himself to be inspired by what a location might offer. But the story of Othello is the story of Othello, whatever slant you might put on it, and the words are all by Shakespeare; in the case of Mr Arkadin, it was never entirely clear what story Welles wanted to tell, and since he never signed off on a definitive version of the film, it is virtually impossible to know how it might have ended up. There are, in fact, as Jonathan Rosenbaum has brilliantly established, seven versions of Mr Arkadin, some supervised by Welles, others not, many of them almost identical but for different dialogue dubbed over the same scene, without any real correlation between the words and the actors’ lips – a somewhat surreal experience. This multiplicity of versions makes the film hog-heaven for Welles scholars, affording endless opportunities for playing the great sport of ‘what if?’ More interestingly, it offers a glimpse of Welles in the act of creation, shaping and remaking his raw material as a sculptor or a painter might, searching for the form and meaning of what it is that he is creating. It is perhaps especially interesting that, with Mr Arkadin, he never seems quite to have answered those questions.

  What sort of film did the quondam collaborators Dolivet and Welles want to make for their first venture – apart, that is, from one that made money, a primary objective, since the whole point of their partnership was to subsidise the Foundation for a New Humanism? Did they intend the film to be politically challenging, a critique of capitalism? Or should we take seriously Welles’s later claims that Arkadin is really Stalin (like the Generalissimo, Akim Athabadze – Arkadin’s real name – is Georgian by birth)? But why would the former communist agent Dolivet want to make an anti-Stalin allegory during the bitterest phase of the Cold War? (Stalin had died in February 1953.) Or is the film simply supposed to amuse, a subversion of the detective genre?

  The Masquerade screenplay as it stands contains a number of highly suggestive elements, ideas and gestures to which Welles was always drawn. It is, for a start, hokum – an idiom that Welles loved. Throughout his radio career, up to and including The Adventures of Harry Lime, he had taken an innocent delight in yarns, especially thrillers, which provided opportunities for suspense, atmosphere and character acting of the ripest variety; Journey into Fear is a rare example of this among his films, though both at RKO and later on he had worked on a number of projects of a similar kind. These pieces are the radiophonic and cinematic equivalent of conjuring tricks – delicious, outrageous and leaving more than a whiff of chicanery behind them. Another, more sophisticated Welles could not fail to pick up on any deeper resonances that these artless tales might contain, and so from time to time there is a sudden modulation, a shadow of significance will fall, political or philosophical, but it is largely unexplored. It simply contributes another colour, another strand in the tapestry. Often this is achieved by the time-honoured mechanism of the introduction of a fable or exemplary tale into the piece: in Masquerade it is Arkadin’s famous speech about the scorpion and the frog, which has passed into the collective consciousness – often attributed to Aesop, though it seems to have been entirely original to Welles:

  This scorpion wanted to cross a river, so he asked the frog to carry him. No, said the frog, no thank you. If I let you on my back you may sting me and the sting of the scorpion is death. Now, where, asked the scorpion, is the logic in that? For scorpions always try to be logical. If I sting you, you will die. I will drown. So, the frog was convinced and allowed the scorpion on his back. But, just in the middle of the river, he felt a terrible pain and realized that, after all, the scorpion had stung him. ‘Logic!’ Cried the dying frog as he started under, bearing the scorpion down with him. ‘There is no logic in this!’ ‘I know,’ said the scorpion, ‘but I can’t help it – it’s my character.’6

  In the film this has the weight of a central illumination – a comment, it seems, on the immutability of character. But the film seems determined to disprove the proposition: is it in Arkadin’s character to kill himself? Is it in character for Van Stratten – the hard-boiled adventurer – to risk his own life by trying to save Jacob Zouk? Of course the question of identity had always been of deep interest to Welles, who had, from an early age, fantasticated his own past, inventing a family tree, mythologising his own childhood and casting doubt on his paternity, and suggesting to various people at various times that his mother had had affairs with King Edward VII (who died in 1910, five years before Welles was born) and the great bass Fyodor Chaliapin (nowhere near Chicago in 1914). A line from ‘Man of Mystery’ survived (with variations) in every version of the story: ‘Where did I come from? . . . that’s my real secret, Mr Lime. I don’t know who I am.’ Amnesia features in a number of Welles’s unrealised projects – Henry IV, from Pirandello, and Carnaval, the proposed framing device for the It’s all True footage, among them – and with it comes the crucial Wellesian question of authenticity. All stimulating, richly interesting ideas, but almost none of them come home to roost in Mr Arkadin in any of its versions.

  Nor do they need to – if Welles was making, as he seems to have set out to make, a delicious diversion, a black comedy that comes to a climax, of all the good days in the year (as Dickens would say), on Christmas Day. Creative artists often divide their work up into categories: François Truffaut spoke of his left-handed and his right-handed films; Éric Rohmer contrasts his fables with his realistic stories; Jean Anouilh has pink plays and black plays; Graham Greene categorises some of his works as entertainments, others as novels. Welles’s films, too, fall into different genres. Few of them are out-and-out comedies, pure light entertainment. But Welles loved to entertain, and much of his art, like his conversation, can be considered a series of provocations, none of them to be probed too deeply. So with Mr Arkadin. Almost everything about the film – the visual vocabulary, the musical score, the cameo performances – is a manifestation of what Bertolt Brecht contemptuously called ‘the culinary arts’: its purpose is to tickle the palate, to delight and to divert. Its essential problem is in its execution, the absence of a ‘Lubitsch Touch’, or the naughty wit of a Billy Wilder. This is partly to do with the tiresome circumstances in which the film was made and the inadequacy of the crew; partly because of Welles’s preferred method of filming, where close-ups were left to last, making interplay between him and the other actors impossible; partly because of the way in which he reconceived the film as it went on. Mostly it is to do with the writing. The dialogue is for the most part formulaic, and often clumsy, but more importantly, there seems to be no clear through-line, so the film resolves itself into a series of attitudes – gestures that have no coherent meaning.


  As it happens, we have a clue as to what kind of film he wanted to make in the form of a novel that appeared under his name, first in serialised form in French in France-Soir and then, translated into English, in the London Daily Express, until it finally came out in hard covers in 1955 – again first in France, then in England, translated by the journalist Robert Kee. ‘It is perhaps surprising’, says the blurb for the English edition, ‘that Orson Welles, so phenomenally active and versatile in the arts, has not written a novel before.’7 Indeed it is, but Mr Arkadin: The Novel was not it. The book was written in March of 1954, when filming had been under way for over a month, by Welles’s chum and sometime publicist, Maurice Bessy, an homme de lettres at large who had written additional dialogue for a number of films. He had approached Dolivet for permission to write the novel on the basis of the then-current screenplay, a copy of which he had; Welles would get sole credit for authorship. The novel Bessy ghosted gives us, therefore, a glimpse of Welles’s thinking about the film at the time of shooting.

  Narrated by Van Stratten, it reads remarkably well, and illuminates things in the film that are otherwise unexplained or unmotivated. In the novel, for example, the strangely cryptic shot of Van Stratten’s ex-girlfriend Mily lying immobile on the beach (which in some versions is the opening shot of the film) is fully explained: there is a knife between her shoulder-blades, exactly the death Arkadin has just inflicted on Jacob Zouk. Likewise, the oddly arbitrary appearance of the penitentes, pilgrims dressed, as Mily says in the movie, in Ku Klux Klan hoods and gowns, is made equally clear in the novel: they are votaries of San Tirso, the patron saint of the village where Arkadin has his castle. The procession honours Our Lady of Despair for saving the saint, who had doubted God’s mercy. ‘You will spend the rest of your life in repentance,’ Our Lady had told Tirso, ‘in regaining that mercy of which you had doubted.’ In the novel the procession of pilgrims is followed by the arrival of the consecrated Host ‘amidst a brilliance of white candles. There was always a remission for the sins of man,’ says Van Stratten, narrating – something that Welles devoutly hoped was true. This moment of grace does not occur in the film, where there is guilt, but no absolution. It seems this is another theme that Welles would have liked to have explored, another autobiographical resonance: towards the end of the film, during Arkadin’s encounter with Van Stratten in Munich in the Frauenkirche, Arkadin asks whether he’s gone there to pray ‘for both of us’. In the novel, like Scarpia in Puccini’s Tosca, even as Arkadin engages in a menacing exchange with Van Stratten, he is crossing himself like a good Catholic. This eschatological framework continues to the very end of the novel: ‘My father was my father,’ says Raina. ‘That’s all. And I loved him.’ Van Stratten comments that ‘Arkadin, who knew everything, who could do anything, hadn’t understood that. Like Tirso, who had doubts about divine mercy and divine love, he didn’t put faith in the indulgence and tenderness of a daughter. Like Tirso, he threw himself into emptiness.’ Is this Bessy, or Welles? Either way, it is absent from the film, to its great disadvantage. There is no evidence that Welles believed in God, but ample evidence that he had an essentially religious cast of mind, not so very different from Graham Greene’s. He may have been shy of expressing it; certainly in the film it is largely absent.

 

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