At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  The metropolitan air is what one misses. Neither the theatre nor its artists are at their best in a suburb. Or a gigantic trailer camp. Whether we work before a camera or behind the footlights, actors are, by nature, city people. Hollywood is most precisely described as a colony. (Colonies are notoriously somewhat cut off from reality, insular, bitchy and cliquish, snobbish – a bit loose as to morals but very strict as to appearances.) One expects a colony to be an outpost of empire. Hollywood might be called an outpost of civilization (a word which means, after all, ‘city culture’), but it’s also the heart of its own empire of the movies: a capital without a city, yet among its colonies are numbered the great cities of the world.

  What is best in any branch of theatre must always have a certain flavor of tradition. Dear, shabby old Times Square, for instance, has its roots in Rome and the Middle Ages. It was, after all, a kind of marketplace, and in the old tradition. The saloons and bars of the Broadway area are still the sorts of places where show folk have always gathered in Athens and Madrid, in London and Paris and Peking. But Hollywood, which boasts the largest population of actors ever concentrated in a single community, is also the first show town in history without a pub or a bistro in the traditional sense. In California the tradition of the Mermaid Tavern has given way to the country club. A rigidly standardized middle-class suburbia is replacing the raucous and circusy traditions of the recent past.

  Welles identified with a bohemian tradition of players:

  Right down to this last moment in a long, long history, show folk have been kept quite firmly segregated from respectability. Significantly, the theatre profession had no contact (or contamination) with the middle class. Indeed, it’s just recently that we began to employ that very middle-class word, ‘profession.’ This was when the mention of art began to embarrass us, and this was the beginning of our fall from grace: when we suddenly aspired to the mediocre rank of ladies and gentlemen. Before that, and in common with all other artists, we had no rank at all, and stood in our own dignity outside of protocol.16

  Around the same time Welles told Cahiers du cinéma that “sentimental bourgeois morality makes me sick”.17 In other words, he wasn’t really cut out for Hollywood. Despite his charismatic public diplomacy and his democratic inclusiveness, it’s not surprising Welles never found the enduring mass American audience that would have economically sustained his experimental work in film. Nevertheless, he continued angling for such success until the end of his life.

  Meanwhile Welles’s filmmaking proved less and less compatible with the expectations of the international film business, even as new funding opportunities appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. In later years he avoided binding contracts and traditional accounting. He always worked with astonishing energy, but his process of low-budget filming and intricate editing was drastically prolonged, particularly as he took on multiple projects. Welles seems to have responded to the situation in one of two ways, depending on the malleability of his production partners of the moment: either by trying to reconcile the differences, or else by pretending to conform to expectations of commercial practice while continuing to work in his own way. His game-playing didn’t always pay off. From this perspective, each completed Welles film must be considered the triumph of a maverick’s doggedness against varied oppositions.

  His uncompleted projects have often been assessed as evidence of failure rather than important (if fragmentary) parts of his oeuvre in their own right. Archival research of his many unfinished or unmade projects only reveals that each was subject to unique circumstances that made it impossible to realise within the realities of the international film industry.

  4.

  With such an unusual career, and with the steady appearance of archival discoveries and alternative editions since his death, how is it possible to establish an Orson Welles canon? This is not a new dilemma. James Naremore, one of Welles’s most insightful critics, acknowledges the provisional nature of most of Welles’s work and that “his reputation will always depend to some degree on fragments and traces”.18 To Rosenbaum, the “Wellesian oeuvre [is] in a perpetual state of becoming, where each new work or fragment thereof transforms our understanding of the rest”.19

  As only about half of the films released during Welles’s lifetime represent his final artistic intentions, it doesn’t make sense to disregard a posthumously discovered segment such as ‘New Wien’, which was essentially completed by the director without interference (like most of Orson’s Bag), even if not quite to the technical standards of broadcast television.

  Therefore, this study goes beyond Welles’s thirteen commercially released feature films to consider the oeuvre lurking in the shadows. It attempts, as much as possible with surviving and available evidence, to critically assess the more Wellesian pre-release versions of films, before they were altered by the studios. It also opens up the field of study to the numerous unfinished fragments and works-in-progress Welles left behind. I approach these materials with caution but in a spirit of inclusiveness appropriate to Welles’s unique work and difficult career. Of course, the study of unfinished work requires its own flexible methods of criticism. This is especially true in the case of unproduced treatments and scripts. Rosenbaum, in his study of Welles’s unproduced Heart of Darkness screenplay, acknowledges that “scripts are blueprints, not finished works, and even to discuss one that was never filmed is to give it an identity of its own that was never intended”.20 I have tried to always appreciate the role such provisional pre-texts played in Welles’s creative process. Comparison of his shooting scripts with the resulting films shows how ceaselessly he embraced contingencies during shooting and editing. He said:

  If you have a masterplan for what you’re going to do, exactly where the camera’s going to be, exactly where the scene is supposed to start, if you are locked into that you are depriving yourself of the divine accidents of movie making because everywhere there are beautiful accidents.21

  By necessity, this book is built on a foundation of previous scholarly research into Welles’s career, particularly regarding the unfinished works. It is also based on my archival research of primary documents and film materials at the University of Michigan, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and the Filmmuseum München.

  * * *

  This book is structured thematically rather than by strict chronology. There are also interludes which contextualise Welles’s changing position in Hollywood and the international film industry, and his evolving methods of production.

  Although distinct in mood, Welles’s first two features, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), are both ambitious efforts to mythologise American urban political and material developments in the long period following the American Civil War. The contexts of Kane and Ambersons are the industrialisation of the Midwest and the rise of the automobile; the battle between Wall Street capitalism and progressive reform; the birth of the US empire in the Spanish–American War; and the development of the mass media. In both of these films the American city is the site of the struggle for personal and political power.

  Part I examines these two films in relation to the documented histories of New York and Indianapolis, and explores how their weaknesses as history illuminate the tensions between Welles the political activist and Welles the poetic myth-maker.

  Part II examines a series of films with contemporary Pan-American settings Welles attempted to make from the late 1930s through the 1940s and sporadically thereafter. Not one of these projects was completed to Welles’s satisfaction, and most never reached production. It’s All True was an unfinished anthology project incorporated into the United States’ Good Neighbor Policy during World War II. Most of Welles’s other explorations of contemporary Pan-America were conducted within the thriller genre – what would later be classified as film noir – and concerned fascism. As Welles was squeezed out of his role of political insider after the war, symptomatic of the widespread sidelining of progressives, both his understanding o
f fascism and his transformation of found locations became more sophisticated. More and more he reimagined the cities of the United States and Latin America in ways that illustrated the operation of power.

  Part III looks at how Welles’s cosmopolitan sensibility and political concerns found expression in the contemporary films of his postwar European self-exile, Mr. Arkadin and The Trial. The cities in these films frequently reveal traces of a vanished, older Europe, and make a mockery of the political fictions of Cold War nationalism.

  Part IV explores Welles’s cinematic cities of a more distant and mythical Europe, his romantic nostalgia for the values and rituals of the past, and his long-term exploration of Spain. In the tales of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen he found static nineteenth-century settings for old-fashioned storytelling outside the trappings of the contemporary world. He found more profound resonance when he depicted the obliteration of the values of one era by another. He often used contrasting models of urban spaces to emphasize this transition. Welles called himself “a man of the Middle Ages”,22 and his tender view of the passing of that epoch appears in his adaptations of Falstaff and Don Quixote.

  Despite his lifelong romantic celebration of Spanish traditions, Welles became critical of twentieth-century Americans in Spain, particularly the macho enthusiasms of his sometime friend Ernest Hemingway. Until his death in 1985, he continued to plan films set in either a nostalgic Spanish past or a political Spanish present. This work is capped by his unproduced script for The Big Brass Ring, the tender and strange adventure of two desperate men in a memory-haunted modern-day Madrid.

  NOTES

  1 Welles quoted in Simon Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans (London: Vintage, 2007), 63.

  2 Krohn quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 217.

  3 This part of the narration didn’t make the surviving cut but can be found in draft pages of the script, which uses the working title ‘New Wien’. In Orson’s Bag (1968–70) (subseries), Draft pages (various scenes) (typescript, carbon, and photocopy, annotated), 10 April – 11 September 1969 (folder 2). Box 17, Orson Welles–Oja Kodar Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan.

  4 Welles quoted in 1967 in Kenneth Tynan, ‘Playboy Interview: Orson Welles’, reprinted in Mark W. Estrin (ed.), Orson Welles: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 131.

  5 Orson Welles’s Sketchbook (Orson Welles, 1955). Episode 4, 14 May (UK: BBC TV).

  6 This scripted narration was slightly edited for the surviving cut.

  7 Welles quoted in Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum (London: Harper Collins, 1993 [1992]), 100.

  8 Surviving script pages and production notes at the University of Michigan note the Zagreb location and filming dates in early November 1969. Welles’s fully edited and partly mixed workprint of ‘New Wien’ survived; the Munich Film Museum restored it under the title Orson Welles’ Vienna in 1999. Viewed 17 June 2013 at the Filmmuseum München, Germany. The museum has also restored other parts of Orson’s Bag/One-Man Band in varying states of completeness.

  9 Welles interviewed by Huy Wheldon on Monitor (UK: BBC TV, 1962). Transcript reprinted at http://www.wellesnet.com/trial bbc interview.htm (accessed 16 August 2015).

  10 Welles quoted in 1958 in André Bazin, Charles Bitsch, and Jean Domarchi, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (II)’, reprinted in Estrin (ed.), Orson Welles: Interviews, 63.

  11 Mike Davis, ‘Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow’, in Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 33–4.

  12 The Too Much Johnson film material was ultimately not used for the stage production, and was long considered lost. A partially edited workprint was found in Italy and restored by George Eastman House and the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2014. See Scott Simmon, ‘Too Much Johnson: The Films Reimagined’, National Film Preservation Foundation, at http://www.filmpreservation.org/userfiles​/image/preserved-films/TMJ-press-photos/​TMJ-reimagined-essay.pdf (accessed 17 August 2015). See also Joseph McBride, ‘Too Much Johnson: Recovering Orson Welles’s Dream of Early Cinema’, Bright Lights Film Journal, 24 August 2014, at http://brightlightsfilm.com/too-much-johnson-orson-welles-film-recovering-orson-welless-dream-of-early-cinema (accessed 7 June 2015).

  13 Filming ‘Othello’ (Orson Welles, 1978).

  14 Mark Shiel, ‘Cinema and the City in History and Theory’, in Shiel and Fitzmaurice (eds), Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, 5–6.

  15 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 269.

  16 Orson Welles, ‘Twilight in the Smog’, Esquire, March 1959, reprinted at http://www.welle-snet.com/twilight-in-the-smog-by-orson-welles-esquire-march-1959 (accessed 11 May 2015).

  17 Welles quoted in Bazin, Bitsch, and Domarchi, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (II)’, 63.

  18 James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 263–4.

  19 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 225.

  20 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 38.

  21 Filming ‘Othello’.

  22 Welles quoted in Bazin, Bitsch, and Domarchi, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (II)’, 71.

  PRELUDE

  A NUISANCE IN A FACTORY

  Hollywood: 1939–48, 1956–57

  For several spells in his long career, Orson Welles tried to accommodate his filmmaking to the industrial model that had dominated the international movie business since the 1920s. Working without interference on Citizen Kane at RKO, he quickly mastered existing Hollywood studio techniques and, demanding perfection, pushed his studio collaborators into major innovations. But in 1959, freshly wounded from another lost battle over artistic control, Welles dismissed the maverick in Hollywood as “an outright nuisance in a factory”.1 Years later he would lament “how many great people that town ha[d] destroyed since its earliest beginnings”.2

  How did he wind up in Hollywood? It was another temporary stop on this vagabond’s colourful world journey. In Welles’s telling, he came from an aristocratic and eccentrically bohemian background. He was a Midwesterner, born 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, home to automobile manufacturers such as Nash Motors and Thomas B. Jeffery. Welles later suggested his father, Richard Head Welles, the inventor of a bicycle lamp adopted by the automobile industry, had been the inspiration for Eugene Morgan in Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons (1918).3 Father and son travelled the world together. His mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, had been a radical suffragette and a pianist. Her son, supposedly a musical prodigy, claimed he never played the piano again after she died in 1924. Welles’s father died a lonely alcoholic death just after Christmas in 1930. His orphaned son was fifteen, wracked with guilt, and left in the care of his reliable guardian, Dr Maurice Bernstein.

  The Todd School for Boys in rural Illinois offered a serious education alongside sailing, flight instruction, travel, and dramatics. Welles, who had enrolled at the age of eleven, found another surrogate father and lifelong friend in headmaster Roger ‘Skipper’ Hill. With the Todd Troupers, Welles staged a number of productions, including his Shakespeare extravaganza The Winter of Our Discontent (1930), based on Henry VI and Richard III. This was a preliminary second part of Welles’s epic Five Kings; the first part, focusing on the character of Falstaff, would be produced on stage in 1939, again in 1960, and eventually as Welles’s classic film Chimes at Midnight.

  Welles briefly studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then bargained with ‘Dadda’ Bernstein for a solo painting tour of Ireland. Here is the myth, frequently told by Welles: turning up impoverished at the Dublin Gate Theatre in September 1931, he persuaded director Hilton Edwards that he was already a star of the New York stage. He was immediately offered the part of Duke Karl Alexander in Leon Feuchtwanger’s Jew Süss. Now he really was a theatrical star. “I�
�ve been working my way down ever since,” Welles would later quip.4 He continued in numerous productions at the Gate into 1932.5 Meanwhile, back in the United States, ‘Skipper’ Hill was promoting Welles to Cornell College:

  Nearly everyone connected with the arts, the opera, or the stage in Chicago knows him and they have all done their best to spoil him, but I think he is very sound and very sensible, although he is definitely talented to the point of genius.6

  But by then Welles was already off and running, hardly tameable by institutions of any kind.

  His theatrical stardom in Ireland was not immediately matched in the United States. He returned to Todd in 1933 to stage Twelfth Night with the current generation of students. It was that year he went to live for a short period in Triana, then still the Gypsy barrio of Seville. Welles claimed to have prospered on the proceeds of pseudonymous science fiction or detective stories written for American pulp magazines and to have trained as a torero, albeit only by buying his own bulls.7 Ernest Hemingway’s bullfighting study Death in the Afternoon had been published a year earlier and The Sun Also Rises (1926), which cast Spain’s traditional culture as a virtuous remedy to the spiritual emptiness after the Great War, had initialized a new American school of españolada. Spain, its myths and traditions, was to become a central preoccupation in Welles’s life and art.

  Returning to the US, he began to act in repertory theatre. His series of Everybody’s Shakespeare, a collaboration with ‘Skipper’ Hill, began publication in 1934. Around the same time he made a lark of a short film, Hearts of Age, in one afternoon with a friend and he began to perform small parts on radio.

  Welles acquired American fame with a series of controversial projects and a flair for publicity. He made his place in the culture at a fortuitous moment. As the Depression endured, the Roosevelt administration initiated the Federal Theatre Project as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). One unit was the Negro Theatre Project, headed by John Houseman in Harlem. In 1936, Houseman gave Welles the opportunity to direct an all-black cast in Macbeth, substituting a nineteenth-century Haiti-like setting for medieval Scotland, witch doctors for witches. It proved a sensation. Welles and Houseman subsequently formed their own unit within the Federal Theatre, for which Welles directed Horse Eats Hat (1936, an adaptation of Eugène Labiche’s Italian Straw Hat) and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1937). Welles began to play the nationally popular role of ‘The Shadow’ (in the radio drama of the same name) for the Mutual Broadcasting Company and narrated Archibald McLeish’s radio play The Fall of the City, which personified fascism as a machine-like dictator “in the end of the street in the shadow”.