At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  There is a brief return to the nearly deserted Praça Onze. ‘Farewell, Praça Onze’ plays in a minor key. A policeman carries the boy Pery home. Grand Otello wakes up and discards his broken tamborim.

  A short coda shows the jangadeiros returning by plane to Fortaleza after their heroic quest. Welles as narrator dedicates the picture to the late Jacaré and “to his dream of the future!”57

  * * *

  Benamou considers Welles’s ‘Carnaval’ treatment in the tradition of the international cycle of city symphonies, and singles out comparison with Man with a Movie Camera, which goes beyond presenting mere social contrasts to show the city as “a collective consciousness” in flux.58

  Welles’s treatment aims for an expansive reimagining of the city on screen. He approaches the challenge by proposing several innovative techniques. By mapping the passage of the music-making Carnaval revellers from the favelas – “this huge conservatory of the samba”59 – to Praça Onze, Welles illustrates the centripetal flow of Rio’s geographically marginal dwellers through the built passages of the city. This also radically asserts the cultural centrality of impoverished non-whites. Surviving Technicolor footage of the massed crowds moving through the streets, some shown at the conclusion of the 1993 documentary, depicts the happy and uninhibited mingling of races.60

  Then there are the stark, ideologically loaded juxtapositions between different spatial and social zones of the city: Grand Otello’s authentic creation of a song in the favela samba school matched with a tamer performance of the same song in a radio studio; and the four venues for bailes with clear distinctions of race and class.

  The dialogue with Donna Maria provides the film with a synoptic overview of the city as well as an ideological guide to interpreting that vision. The expansive point of view of the camera from the skyscraper roof in the centre of the city shows the Carnaval procession in its totality. The plaster model of the new Rio, including Avenida Getúlio Vargas, allows for an immediate visual comparison between the city of the present and the city of the future. The genial dialogue between Welles-the-outsider and Donna Maria as government official determines authoritatively the progressive significance of the urban changes.

  The memo is a typically persuasive sketch by a cinematic visionary, but Welles was overly optimistic to believe he could get away with it. RKO continued to withdraw financial and logistical support for It’s All True. Undoubtedly moved to pay tribute to the drowned Jacaré, Welles prefaced his memo on ‘Carnaval’ with the assertion that he was now by necessity at work writing a “wholly new attack on the Jangadeiro story… No effort will be spared to hasten its completion.”61 And although RKO stopped further shooting of the Carnaval segment in Rio, they allowed Welles to continue making the jangadeiros story in Fortaleza on a paltry budget of $10,000 with a tiny crew rather than risk bad press after the death of Jacaré.62

  * * *

  Years later Welles would recall the new regime at RKO blaming him for having tried to make a film in South America without a script. He said, “I entirely sympathized with them, but it wasn’t my idea or project.”63

  Even after It’s All True’s cancelation, Welles tried to persuade RKO to allow him to finish the film. He did some editing of the Carnaval and Rio-based jangadeiro material in Hollywood in September 1942,64 but plans for Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. to take over the release of the film fell through. In another treatment pitched to RKO in September 1943, Welles persisted in including images from the favelas, “the real jungle, which still makes long hopeless war on the capital of Brazil”.65 This pitch was not accepted by RKO’s executives.

  Welles kept trying. He bought the rights to the footage from RKO for $200,000 in 1944, and attempted to devise new fictional films that would draw upon the extant material.

  One thriller script, also titled Carnaval, involved an American fighter pilot with amnesia named Michael Gard who slowly pieces together his memories of the 1942 Carnaval. It turns out his Czechoslovakian lover had almost been killed by Nazi soldiers, and her survival and escape to Mexico had inspired him to sign up to fight in the war. Grand Otello appears as himself.66

  A treatment and production outline also survive for a mooted romance to be called Samba that was planned around 1945.67 Samba uses a framing narrative similar to that Welles planned for a contemporaneous film of Oscar Wilde’s Salome: a story told at a café table. The setting is a Copacabana all-night restaurant called the Samba School, which may have been inspired by the Café Nice on the Avenida Rio Branco, where, as Robert Meltzer had reported to Welles, many sambas were composed.68 By now, from afar, Welles perceived Rio as a romantic locale of foreign exiles, artists, and bohemians: “As we’ll learn, Rio de Janeiro is to the American hemisphere what Budapest is to Europe. This should partly help to explain ‘The Samba School’ and it’s customers.”69

  He makes the case that he will be able to create a believable cinematic version of Rio by integrating the location-based Carnaval footage with new Hollywood material shot on cheap sets:

  The street fronts the beach. Enough stage space should be allowed for cutoffs of buildings (in forced perspective) and a feeling of real distance for the mountains painted on the sky backing. The cafe is never seen except by night and early sunrise, so there is no need for this to look at all phoney.70

  Welles notes what of the existing footage can be used for “processes and plates”71 (he also asserts his viability as a romantic lead: “If you don’t think I can play it, wait till I take off another 40 pounds!”72). In this treatment Welles revived key aspects of his earlier sketches. The ‘hill theory’ on the origins of samba is now voiced by that “dark cupid”, Grand Otello, who shines shoes at the café.73 ‘Ave Maria’ is sung as a samba, as it had been in the May 1942 treatment, and there is the juxtaposition of a new favela samba with its “slick and polite”74 interpretation on commercial radio. While the melodramatic love story is not particularly interesting, the treatment does provide insight into Welles’s practicality when working with very limited resources.

  Welles would never be able to finish any incarnation of the Carnaval material. The rights reverted to RKO in 1946 when Welles was in financial difficulties.75

  * * *

  First the city, then a contrasting pastoral. Welles spent weeks from mid-June 1942 in Fortaleza and other cities on the Brazilian coast filming a re-creation of the preparations and voyage of the four jangadeiros.76 In Fortaleza’s traditional fishing community, Welles found another pre-modern paradise to celebrate and romanticise, this time in the context of a dignified political struggle for basic social benefits. The footage of the fishing community scrupulously avoids depicting any aspect of Fortaleza’s urban modernity.77 The exclusive emphasis is on the jangadeiro rituals of the sea and the coast. The wild human processions from favela to city centre in ‘Carnaval’ would have been counterpointed by an austere jangadeiro funeral procession across the coastal landscape of north-eastern Brazil.

  Although Welles was never able to edit the jangadeiro footage, and never apparently even viewed the rushes, much of the original negative was rediscovered in 1981.78 Richard Wilson was behind the effort to edit the segment after Welles’s death, although he did not live to see it. An essentially complete silent film of almost fifty minutes named ‘Four Men on a Raft’, with sound effects and a score by Jorge Arriagada, provided the conclusion to the 1993 documentary. Despite somewhat lethargic pacing, this posthumous film is one of the most impressively realised items to emerge from the shadows of Welles’s oeuvre. It’s also a reminder that the canon of commercially released films does not give a full account of Welles’s artistic development. The segment was an adventure in the extremely low-budget, under-resourced, and improvisatory filmmaking Welles would not resume until he made Othello in Europe at the end of the decade.

  NOTES

  1 Benamou, It’s All True, 10.

  2 Benamou, It’s All True, 46–7.

  3 Surviving images are included in the do
cumentary It’s All True: Based on a Film by Orson Welles (Bill Krohn, Myron Meisel, and Richard Wilson, 1993).

  4 Benamou, It’s All True, 100–1, 235.

  5 Shores quoted in Benamou, It’s All True, 139.

  6 Quoted in Heylin, Despite the System, 134–5.

  7 Benamou, It’s All True, 47.

  8 Of such unrevised scripts by other writers, Welles scholar Bret Wood says that at best we can appreciate “the broad themes which attracted [Welles] to the project”. Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 181.

  9 Orson Welles ‘Note’, included in Uncredited [Elliot Paul], It’s All True: Jazz Sequence (July 1941), 18. Box 16, folder 17, Lilly Library.

  10 Uncredited [Paul], It’s All True: Jazz Sequence, 18.

  11 Uncredited [Paul], It’s All True: Jazz Sequence, 1.

  12 Uncredited [Paul], It’s All True: Jazz Sequence, 6.

  13 Uncredited [Paul], It’s All True: Jazz Sequence, 9.

  14 See Benamou, It’s All True, 121–2.

  15 Benamou, It’s All True, 325n27.

  16 Duke Ellington to Mercury Productions, 1 May 1942. Correspondence, 1942, May 1–6, boxes 1–4, Lilly Library.

  17 Benamou, It’s All True, 282, 361n21.

  18 Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 330.

  19 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 176–7.

  20 Uncredited, untitled (jazz script), 72. Box 22, folder 24 (Films – Untitled), Lilly Library.

  21 Uncredited, untitled (jazz script), 10, 16.

  22 Uncredited [John Fante], It’s All True: Love Story ‘1st Draft Continuity’ (8 August 1941), 36. Box 16, folder 1, Lilly Library.

  23 Benamou, It’s All True, 31.

  24 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 180.

  25 Benamou, It’s All True, 31, 325n32. Benamou also cites James Naremore, ‘Between Works and Texts: Notes from the Welles Archive’, Persistence of Vision, No. 7, summer 1989, 21–2.

  26 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 195.

  27 Benamou, It’s All True, 57.

  28 Benamou, It’s All True, 311.

  29 Translation is taken from the subtitles of the documentary The RKO Story: Tales from Hollywood (episode 4: ‘It’s All True’) (Charles Chabot and Rosemary Wilton [producers], 1987).

  30 Wilson quoted in Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 183.

  31 Uncredited, ‘Transformation of the City from Its Founding to the Present Time’, It’s All True Research Materials, 19. Box 20, folder 1, Lilly Library.

  32 Robert Meltzer, memorandum to Orson Welles, ‘Subject: The Genealogy of Samba and Other Aspects of an Unquiet Life’, n.d., It’s All True Research Materials, 14. Box 20, folder 7, Lilly Library; Benamou, It’s All True, 114.

  33 Alex Viany, ‘Samba Goes to Town’, n.d., 3–4. It’s All True Research Materials, 14. Box 20, folder 7, Lilly Library.

  34 Benamou, It’s All True, 47–51.

  35 Welles quoted in Heylin, Despite the System, 135.

  36 Benamou, It’s All True, 37.

  37 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 1–11.

  38 Benamou, It’s All True, 51–2.

  39 Orson Welles in Spain (Albert and David Maysles, filmed 1966 [unreleased]). Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3gcp9-_bfI (accessed 28 June 2015).

  40 Welles quoted in Juan Cobos, Miguel Rubio, and J. A. Pruneda, ‘A Trip to Quixoteland: Conversations with Orson Welles’, in Estrin (ed.), Orson Welles: Interviews, 100.

  41 Benamou, It’s All True, 113.

  42 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 13–14.

  43 Rui Costa, ‘The Truth About The Samba’, n.d., It’s All True Research Materials, 1–2. Box 20, folder 7, Lilly Library.

  44 Meltzer, memorandum to Orson Welles, 16, 21.

  45 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 14–15.

  46 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 17.

  47 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 21.

  48 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 22.

  49 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 23–7

  50 Benamou, It’s All True, 240.

  51 Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 74.

  52 Benamou also warns about reading the treatment as an “isomorphic reflection of the authorial text”. Benamou, It’s All True, 114. The scene with Donna Maria would endure in the 2 September 1943 treatment Welles submitted to RKO for ‘Carnival’; it is this incarnation to which Callow refers.

  53 Benamou, It’s All True, 240.

  54 This shot can be seen in the 1993 documentary.

  55 Benamou, It’s All True, 45.

  56 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 34–8.

  57 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 42.

  58 Benamou, It’s All True, 113.

  59 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, 14.

  60 Benamou, It’s All True, 109; RKO vice president Phil Reismann claimed to have given Welles the idea of using the hills-to-city samba trajectory as a narrative device (Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 71).

  61 Welles, ‘Carnaval’, unpaginated.

  62 Benamou, It’s All True, 52–3.

  63 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 161.

  64 Benamou, It’s All True, 131.

  65 Welles quoted in Heylin, Despite the System, 137.

  66 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 188–90.

  67 Wood, Orson Welles: A Bio-Bibliography, 176.

  68 Meltzer, memorandum to Orson Welles, 19.

  69 Uncredited [Orson Welles], Samba ‘Screen Treatment and Production Outline’, 9. Box 16, folder 24 (Films – It’s All True), Lilly Library.

  70 Uncredited [Welles], Samba, insert page between 8 and 9.

  71 Uncredited [Welles], Samba, insert page between 36 and 37.

  72 Uncredited [Welles], Samba, 6.

  73 Uncredited [Welles], Samba, 7.

  74 Uncredited [Welles], Samba, 37–8.

  75 Benamou, It’s All True, 133.

  76 Benamou, It’s All True, 54.

  77 Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles, 219.

  78 Benamou, It’s All True, 278.

  CHAPTER 6

  RATLINE TO MAIN STREET

  The Stranger (1946)

  Back in the United States, Welles resumed a typically heavy schedule but was temporarily estranged from directing films. Aside from his ongoing work in radio drama, his performance as Rochester in Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943), and magic performances for the military in the Mercury Wonder Show, his activities were political. He gave anti-fascist lectures, campaigned for President Roosevelt’s 1944 re-election, broadcast political commentaries, and wrote a daily column for the New York Post that was syndicated across the country through much of 1945.

  He continued to support the Good Neighbor Policy. In March 1944 he wrote:

  [I]n spite of all the dictators supporting it, in spite of its stumbling caution, its blind snobbishness, in spite of itself, the Good Neighbor Policy is an anti-fascist alliance, a community of nations bound together in the name of democracy. As such it is a preliminary sketch for world organisation.1

  Later that year, Welles defined fascism as “always … some form of nationalism gone crazy”.2 Welles’s post-national vision of world government after World War II in some ways overlapped with Soviet-style internationalism, although he pushed a progressive rather than revolutionary agenda.3 At a 1943 convention sponsored by the United Nations Committee to Win the Peace, Welles had said:

  The scaly dinosaurs of reaction (if indeed they notice what I’m writing here) will say in their newspapers that I am a Communist. Communists know otherwise. I’m an overpaid movie producer with pleasant reasons to rejoice – and I do – in the wholesome practicability of the profit system. I’m all for making money if it means earning it. Lest you should imagine that I’m being publicly modest, I’ll only admit that everybody deserves at least as many good things as my money buys for me. Surely my right to having more than enough is canceled if I don’t use that more to help those who have less. This sense of humanity�
��s interdependence antedates Karl Marx.4

  After the war, Welles aggressively denied he had ever been a communist and sued the vice president of the American Federation of Labor for claiming he had communist tendencies. When grilled by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in July 1947, he insisted he was “opposed to political dictatorship” and that “organized ignorance I dislike more than anything in the world”.5 By now everybody should have realised that Orson Welles wasn’t to be easily tamed by any organisation. However, throughout the 1930s and 1940s Welles had many Communist Party associates and participated in the campaigns of various front organisations.

  In fact, Welles’s key political mentor, close friend, and future producer of his ill-fated Mr. Arkadin was Louis Dolivet, a secret Soviet agent. Born Ludovicu Brecher in Polish Galicia, Dolivet spent his childhood in Romania.6 He was in the service of the French Comintern from 19297 and was also an operative of the KGB. For a time in the 1930s and 1940s Dolivet was married to the sister of Michael Straight, an aristocratic communist spy within the US State Department who was also connected to the Soviet spy cell at Cambridge University.8 Dolivet seems to have first encountered Welles in Hollywood around 1942.9 He invited the young director to join his International Free World Association. Welles became an editor and penned articles for the association’s journal. It is not certain whether Welles knew about Dolivet’s covert Soviet activities, or that the International Free World Association was a Comintern front. Nevertheless, whatever its hidden objectives, the public message to which Welles lent support was progressive anti-fascism with the aim of international political cooperation.10

  For a time Welles was mooted as a statesman and politician. Surviving letters between Dolivet and Welles testify to the mentor’s enduring belief in the young man’s extraordinary potential to be a key figure of the age.11 Dolivet supposedly believed that Welles would make an ideal Secretary-General of the nascent United Nations; Welles later claimed he’d been unenthusiastic about the idea.12 Welles later recalled, “Oh, he had great plans! He was going to organise it so that in fifteen years I was going to get the Nobel Prize.”13 Dolivet wasn’t alone in his optimism. If Welles is to be believed, President Roosevelt personally encouraged him to run for political office. Welles also considered running for the senate in his home state of Wisconsin in 1946 against newcomer Joseph McCarthy, the eventually disgraced politician who would come to define the reactionary mood of the coming years.14