At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  In a 1975 conversation, Ambler recalled:

  [C]ertainly to anyone who came to maturity during the Fascist years the importance of papers became overwhelming. People are denied passports – that means now the right to travel freely – for often, it seems to me, illogical reasons. […] it’s a question of control to deny him freedom of movement. […] diplomatic documents, papers and such have become a 20th century means of control, and I make use of them in my work.25

  In the cinema the new category of European spy novel found an analogue in Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1940). Although Welles was critical of Hitchcock’s later work, at least in posthumously published private conversations, his early thrillers are firmly in the tradition of Hitchcock’s early work.

  Welles prepared two anti-fascist novels by Popular Front novelists as prospective projects at RKO: The Smiler with a Knife, by Cecil Day-Lewis (writing as Nicholas Blake, 1939), and The Way to Santiago, by Arthur Calder-Marshall (1940). Along with the later adaptation of Richard Powell’s Don’t Catch Me (1943), they make for a progressively sophisticated and entertaining trilogy of Hitchcockian thrillers. Welles did not restrain himself to realism but exploited the genre for its theatrical, carnivalesque, and comic potential. No script in this Hitchcockian trilogy was produced.

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  An unsigned memo, probably written by Welles (or possibly by John Houseman), makes a self-critical summary of an early draft of The Smiler with the Knife and gives insight into the creative process of adaptation. The memo confesses that one scene, written in haste, contains “just whatever I could get down on paper”.26 Such a provisional quality – rough assemblies of scenes, gestures towards structure – must be assumed of many other Welles scripts. What seems to be the latest draft, the 178 page “Revised Estimating Script”, is dated 9 January 1940, and bears no writer credit. Welles seems to have created about half the script’s plot and taken the rest from the source novel.27 Despite its anti-fascist orientation, this draft’s politics are not nuanced. The fascists are cartoon villains and the script is plagued by implausibilities. The dialogue is in the vein of the sometimes inscrutable banter that would characterise Welles’s later original scripts The Other Side of the Wind and The Big Brass Ring. There is a note that a “March of Time sequence”, a fictional newsreel, will be interpolated into the script as an expositional device. The idea would be revived for Kane.

  The action of Smiler commences at a wedding ceremony at the remote country house of a parson. The far-fetched MacGuffin is a locket in the beak of a crow. Two strange men separately chase the crow to the parson’s house, but newlyweds Johnny and Gloria evade surrendering the locket, which is engraved ‘S.S.’ and contains a vintage photograph of an old woman.

  The couple take the mysterious find to Johnny’s father, John Strangeways Sr, the head of the US Department of Justice in Washington, DC. He connects it to a secret fascist organisation about which nothing is known but its name: ‘S.S.’ stands for ‘Stars and Stripes’. Strangeways makes a speech for democracy. The politically indifferent Johnny wants to know what his father is yammering on about. The answer? “Shirts. I like to pick my own color. I like to go on a ballot with more than one name. Get it?”28 Strangeways lectures the newlyweds on similar international fascist conspiracies, such as the recent action by the Cagoulards against the French Third Republic. He worries about the USA because “one seventh of the munitions manufactured in this country can’t be accounted for. We don’t know how big this is, but we can guess. And the worst of it is we haven’t an idea in the world who’s behind it.” When Johnny protests, “The American people will never stand for a dictator,” his father rejoins: “You mean they’ll never give a politician that much power. How about a hero? We like heroes over here and this one won’t talk like a dictator. He’ll look like a movie star and everybody’ll love him.”29

  Shortly after, an aviator hero in the mould of Nazi sympathiser Charles Lindbergh lands his ‘stratosphere’ machine in Washington, DC, in an atmosphere of public ecstasy. The hero’s name is Anthony Chilton and he would surely have been played by Welles. He is feted on the radio by “militant Broadway columnist” and democracy defender Wally Winters (a barely disguised Walter Winchell).

  The newlyweds meet Chilton at a party where the guests play games. Chilton dresses in drag and, in one of the script’s heavier demands on the audience, will be recognised as a dead ringer for the woman in the locket photograph – his female ancestor. Chilton tries to romance Gloria, who quarrels with her husband; the newlyweds separate for the rest of the film. The structural conceit of separated newlyweds would be repeatedly revisited in Welles’s thriller scripts, although it made the screen only once, in Touch of Evil.30

  Gloria accompanies Chilton to Rosa’s restaurant, “a rather sinister establishment outside the city limits of Washington” (the script suggests as a model Ernie Byfield’s Pump Room at the Ambassador East in Chicago).31 This is the beginning of an extra-marital romance, although the political intrigue builds. The urban settings are briefly swapped for rural Kentucky, where Chilton owns a country house. There Gloria discovers Chilton to be the head of Stars and Stripes. He mobilises his organisation to capture her in a dash across the United States. In one car chase sequence through the country the visual action occurs off screen: a contrast between static shots and “wild screeching of police sirens in a constantly building pattern of sound. Big chase music.”32 The script comes most alive during a chase sequence in a crowded urban shopping street in Zenith, Pennsylvania. Gloria escapes capture by the very Hitchcockian solution of dressing as Santa Claus.

  Welles incorporates maps in a moment of Hitchcockian hokum. Gloria realises the miniature golf course on Chilton’s country property in Kentucky really represents a secret map of the United States indicating the fascist organisation’s “twenty-six secret arsenals and munitions dumps”. She annotates a map of the United States in an atlas with the locations – and “the resemblance of the map to the miniature golf course is striking enough to make the idea clear”.33 Chilton has also hidden secret papers inside a terrestrial globe. She sends it all to Strangeways in Washington.

  Although the action skips from the nation’s capital to the rural south, to Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio, to Zenith and even to the Welles’s alma mater, the Todd School for Boys (which was in Woodstock, Illinois), the urban settings would have been filmed in the studio using sets and process shots. The street scenes of Zenith would have been created on the RKO Ranch.34 It’s a challenge to imagine how Welles would have overcome the generic quality of the urban settings based on this draft of the script. In other ways The Smiler with the Knife would have needed substantial reworking to rise above this draft’s weaknesses and implausibilities. Welles would continue to marry serious and urgent political themes to screwball comedy and the carnivalesque, but this early exploration of a fascist conspiracy is not at all sophisticated. Welles abandoned the project and made Citizen Kane.

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  A superior stab at the fascist-infiltration suspense plot is Welles’s adaptation of Calder-Marshall’s The Way to Santiago. The title of the film adaptation never graduated beyond the working titles Mexican Melodrama or Orson Welles #4. What seems to be the latest draft, a ‘Third Revised Continuity’ script, is dated 25 March 1941, just over a month before the premiere of Kane. The practical purposes of this version of the script should not be overlooked: marked ‘For Budgeting Purposes Only’, it was also the version submitted to Mexican authorities for official approval to film on location in the country (which was granted). That said, this draft seems to represent an advanced state of development. James Naremore persuasively argues for Mexican Melodrama as a reworking of Heart of Darkness within a more commercial, less experimental form.35

  Welles doesn’t seem to have planned to direct the project, although he would have starred in the lead role. With this project Welles moved away from the USA as a setting. The
script is prefaced by the declaration that Mexico “shares with us the American dream of freedom”.36 Under President Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico had nationalised its oil in 1938, expropriating the assets of international firms. President Roosevelt maintained a pacific stance against retaliatory intervention in line with the Good Neighbor Policy.

  The Way to Santiago explored the fascist threat to Mexico in the period. One innovation in Welles’s script is its usual first-person subjectivity, which is distinct from the near-total observance of Marlow’s point of view in Heart of Darkness. The lead character – named ‘Me’ – wakes up naked in an anonymous empty room surrounded by representatives of “every race in the world, every color”. Me has no documents and does not remember who he is. The amnesia motif would be used in several future Welles films, including Mr. Arkadin, although in this story the condition is genuine.

  Me is helped by a newspaper man named alternately Gonzalez or Johnson; the draft is evidently an indecisive composite of versions. They are in Mexico City, and Gonzalez/Johnson mysteriously offers to take Me to a party at the presidential palace to “get friendly with the most beautiful girl in the world”. Me’s presence makes a shocking impression on the guests, including the beauty, Elena. She identifies him as Lindsay Keller, a fascist connected with a Mexican revolutionary group, led by one General Torres. Gonzalez/Johnson’s stunt at the palace is designed to pry further information from the General about his fascist plot to take over Mexico. Torre’s organisation has stockpiled ammunitions and set up a radio station on the island of Santiago. We later discover Keller is the charismatic fascist radio personality ‘Mr England’, who has been brought to the Americas to propagandise to the “hundred and thirty million people [who] speak English in this hemisphere”. Mr England was based on the English Nazi broadcaster William Joyce (aka Lord Haw Haw).37

  Me and Gonzalez/Johnson leave the presidential palace and walk into the city’s zócalo, its enormous central square. The mob scene as sketched promises grand spectacle and threatening overtones: thousands of patriots enjoying the Mexican Independence Day ritual of the presidential grito, a cry of “Viva Mexico! Viva la República! Viva la Revolución!” There is “a hurricane of voices – a typhoon of confetti – and finally, fireworks”.38 In a particularly Hitchcockian moment, Gonzalez/Johnson is shot as the fireworks explode; the bullet was surely intended for Me. The police allow Me to leave, but the “unanimously sinister” crowd suspects Me’s guilt.39 The ecstasy of the patriotic mob turns threatening. Me briefly hides among a busload of gauche American tourists.

  Me meets Elena at the city’s El Chango, a nightclub featuring flamenco entertainers in exile from Spain. Me learns that Elena is not part of Torres’s conspiracy, but instead a Mexican spy. The amnesia has left Me with total naivety about fascism itself, so Elena provides him (and the audience) a definition: “It means tyranny. It means everything that isn’t human or beautiful. It means the ant hill, darkness, and death.”40 Me accepts her definition and confesses, “I can’t remember what I liked about it. I guess fascism is something that happens to you – like disease. I guess everybody is born innocent. Well, I was born this afternoon.”41

  And so Me and Elena conspire to destroy the fascists’ munitions dump in Santiago. Me makes a long and dangerous journey out of the teeming capital city to Santiago, with a side adventure in a remote jungle village saloon, where since the oil nationalisation, “business is so bad nobody’s drinking”.42 Further along Me meets the real Keller (his physical double) and is captured.

  Later the cadre of conspirators sit on the sundeck of General Torres’s yacht and rather didactically share their theories of fascist rule. A Spanish aristocrat states: “the lesson we learned from Spain was that a military minority with the help of foreign sympathizers and the principal of non-intervention can overthrow a government which had strong support at home and institute a military dictatorship in its place.”43

  The real Keller adds:

  The terrorist provocation must break out simultaneously all through the country so that the public will be stunned and bewildered. They’ll realize that only a strong man with dictatorial powers can save them. … Mexico at last a country where the rich can live in security.44

  But Me’s voice interrupts from a loudspeaker. He has escaped and infiltrated the radio station in Santiago to broadcast a passionate anti-fascist message, “another Grito”, which we see reach listeners across the Americas. Me participates in capturing General Torres, but Mr England drowns trying to reach a submerging German submarine.

  Unlike The Smiler with the Knife, the Way to Santiago project was to have been shot extensively on location. Despite some initial resistance from the Mexican government,45 pre-production was underway in Mexico in the second half of 1941. RKO editor Jose Noriega, representing Mercury Productions in Mexico City, successfully negotiated with the Secretary of State for the authorisation to make two films in the country: ‘My Friend Bonito’ and the Way to Santiago project. Although Welles had yet to sign up to officially represent the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, Noriega was already arguing that Santiago would “enhance the better ethical and social values of Mexico by the light of the policy of Continental and democratic solidarity that Mexico is pursuing”.46 Authorisation was granted and both scripts were approved with the proviso of the presence of an on-set representative from Mexico’s Department of Cinematographic Supervision – in other words, a censor.47

  Around the same time a tentative shooting schedule and detailed budget were drawn up for Santiago, presumably by Noriega. A month of location work would begin in April 1942, followed by inexpensive Mexico City studio filming. Noriega essays the possibilities of location filming in the capital itself. El Patio bar, supposedly the inspiration for El Chango, would either be used as found or reconstructed on a stage; a custom-made neon sign would have to be fitted to the exterior. Perry Ferguson, the art director for Kane, seems to have been already lined up. No director was yet locked in, but it is noted that “a man like [Norman] Foster” should be paid about $15,000. Mexico’s eminent Gabriel Figueroa was pitched as cinematographer.48

  In September Welles visited the Yucatán to scout locations for the Santiago project; 16mm footage, possibly shot by Welles himself, has survived from this expedition.49 That same month Norman Foster began shooting ‘My Friend Bonito’ on location with ‘co-director’ status. Foster was also probably set to direct the Santiago project the following year, but Welles’s plans had to be changed after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On 10 December, between takes of The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles wrote to Foster in Tlaxcala about ‘Bonito’: “On the phone tonight I’m going to try to tell you how really and truly beautiful and important is the picture you’re making [but also that] war has broken out and I have broken down.”50

  Foster was withdrawn from Mexico to direct the Welles-Cotten script of Journey into Fear, allowing Welles to wind up his Hollywood commitments faster. In early February Welles went to South America to make the Brazilian portions of It’s All True, now officially under the umbrella of the Good Neighbor Policy.

  Around the same time this draft of the Way to Santiago project was completed, in early 1941, Welles showed interest in another Mexican-set anti-fascist screenplay, by Paul Trivers, with the working title Unnamed Mexican Story. The story involves striking labourers on a Mexican ranch who battle a military force employed by the cruel ranch owner. It is difficult to ascertain the extent of Welles’s involvement in this strongly Marxist screenplay’s development.51

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  Welles’s departure from RKO following It’s All True did not put an end to his work in the thriller genre. In fact, the most enjoyable of his early unmade antifascist screenplays, and the third of his Hitchcockian trilogy, is Don’t Catch Me, “a farce melodrama” based on a 1943 novel by Richard Powell that had been serialised in American Magazine. A press release was drafted by Mercury Productions in April 1944 to announce imminent production and that Welles would write the
final shooting script.52 The most realised version of the script is an undated 103-page draft that credits Welles alongside co-writers Bud Pearson and Les White.53 This time the story varies the device of a separated newlywed couple by allowing their joint adventure to prevent the consummation of their marriage.54

  The script begins with an evocative night scene as a German submarine dispatches Nazis in rubber rafts to New York City. By the next morning the Nazi agents are dispersing into the United States via Penn Station, where their conspiracy intersects with the reunion of the soon-to-be-married Arab and Andy. Like Susan Alexander in Kane, Arab suffers a “coothache”.55 James Stewart would have been well cast as Andy, a hapless army lieutenant and antiques dealer. But except for the regularly employed New York Harbor and the scenes at Penn Station, Don’t Catch Me is mostly set around rural Long Island. The settings actually closely resemble those of Welles’s less cosmopolitan early drafts of The Lady from Shanghai.

  Don’t Catch Me was promised but not delivered. In 1945 Welles announced a radio version starring his wife, Rita Hayworth, on the CBS show This Is My Best, but the show’s official director was unhappy with Welles’s choice – and possibly his conflict of interest as rights holder – and cancelled the promised broadcast.56

  The scripts for Welles’s Hitchcockian trilogy, thematically unified around the threat of a fascist conspiracy, were prepared for very different approaches to creating urban space on screen: Hollywood studio re-creations in the case of The Smiler with the Knife, authentic Mexico City locations and studio work for the Way to Santiago project. It’s difficult to determine what approach Welles would have taken with Don’t Catch Me had he been able to progress with production.

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  The Mercury production of Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear was exceptional among Welles’s early 1940s run of anti-fascist thrillers because its settings were not transferred to the Americas. It was also the only one of Welles’s thriller projects to be actually filmed and released to theatres during Welles’s stint at RKO, albeit in a much mutilated and censored form.