At dawn Meinike continues along a “high rampart above the city” en route to collect his passport from a Nazi who works in a morgue. Señora Marvales reports Meinike’s whereabouts to Wilson from a telephone in a basement. Meinike reaches the morgue on a deserted street. A woman appears leading a goat and selling milk. In the earlier temporary draft, however, Meinike was to have seen instead the shadow of a crucifix fall on the street. He falls to his knees and interprets it as a message from God. His subsequent comment to his passport photographer – that he comes in the name of the “all highest” – was meant to play on the photographer’s confusion between God and the Führer, an irony lost by the time of the shooting script (in fact, many of the script’s religious references were cut by the time of the release version).33
Señor Marvales, again observing Meinike from yet another convenient window, makes a telephone report to Wilson; by now, however, Señora Marvales has gone missing. Inside the morgue, the Nazi hands Meinike his new passport (still lacking an identity photograph) in the name of ‘Phillipe Campo’. Before Meinike departs, “two bruisers”, including the sinister dog trainer from the Farbright Kennels, wheel in the corpse of Señora Marvales under a “rough cloth”. The audience will identify her by a distinctive golden hoop earring. She has been savaged by wild dogs.
Now Meinike proceeds to a photographer’s studio to complete the passport. The release version of the film resumes here, skipping the kennels and morgue scenes entirely. Considering the excision of the intervening scenes, it is entirely possible the dissolve from Señor Marvales’s initial report to the photographer’s studio scene was not designed by Welles. Nevertheless, the matching framing of the silhouette of Marvales and the shadowy photographer perfectly suits this city of fluid identities.
The dissolve from Señor Marvales to the passport photographer
In the surviving three and a half minutes, Puerto Indio appears as a shadowy city of cavelike passages. The camera pans from low angles to follow Meinike and Señora Marvales in pursuit. Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty film silhouettes and Meinike’s monstrous shadow as it plays over rough walls. The pair would repeat this brilliantly expressionist use of shadows when they reunited for Touch of Evil.
* * *
Puerto Indio: city of silhouettes and shadows
The remainder of The Stranger takes place in the very different setting of Harper. Its pastoral qualities are established in the shooting script by the courtship of Rankin and Mary.34 “Let’s go through the fields,” he tells her at their first meeting. “It’s my favorite walk… It’s beautiful that way … through the cemetery, over the little brook and then the woods.” Rankin encourages her to cross the stream over a plank; in this way Mary temporarily overcomes her fear of heights (this scene was cut or possibly never filmed). Rankin will quickly pollute the town’s pastoral tranquillity by his murder and burial of Meinike in the woods.
Harper as postcard
The mythical smalltown setting with pastoral fringes had also featured in Huston and Veiller’s Killers script as Brentwood, New Jersey. But otherwise it was the rare setting of noirs such as Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). They all share narratives of murderous urban forces invading the peace of an idyllic small town. The Stranger, which uses the conceit in the context of a political rather than straightforward crime thriller, is surely inferior to each of these other films, but Welles is alone in introducing an ambiguous undertone to the small town setting.
He was not quite so eager to evoke the virtues of smalltown life as he had been four years earlier for Ambersons. Harper is a quirky but provincial town that has been too long closed to the sobering political urgencies of the world. In the shooting script (but cut from the film), the discovery of Meinike’s corpse prompts one of the baffled locals to wonder, “What would a South American … just off the boat … be doing in our incosmopolitan little town?”35
The broken clock crowning the church tower, found by the production at a Los Angeles museum,36 serves as both a plot point – repairing clocks is Rankin’s tell-tale hobby – and a flexible metaphor. In the shooting script, Rankin describes the “ideal social system in terms of a clock”.37 But it also represents the town’s stasis. When Rankin manages to repair the mechanism, one citizen complains, “Charles Rankin, I wish you’d left that clock alone. It was a nice quiet place until it began banging.” Mary’s naivety regarding the extremes of human depravity verges on a dangerous moral complacency. Even when Wilson confronts her with (real) documentary footage of a Nazi camp, Mary refuses to accept her husband’s true identity and moral responsibility for mass murder. She has a psychological breakdown.
* * *
Welles initially intended to construct the Harper town set from the plan overleaf at Twentieth Century Fox (the art director was Kane’s Perry Ferguson). That plan would have better established a concentrated sphere of action and a coherent spatial relationship between the film’s key settings – Potter’s drug store, the Harper Inn (where Wilson lodges), the church and cemetery bordering the woods, and the Rankin home.38 The centre of the town was intended to be the church and clock tower, which the shooting script describes as “fronting a green around which the township itself is clustered, cradled by the gentle slopes of the Berkshire foothills”.39
Welles had to compromise for budgetary reasons and shoot the film on the permanent Universal Studios smalltown set.40 Numerous other films had been shot there, and to moviegoers the familiarity of the town layout, based around a central square, would have only increased the mythical unreality of Harper. The town appears antiseptically clean with its polished gymnasium floors and its raked late autumn lawns. Once again Welles employs paper detritus to dress his setting: the high school boys’ paper chase through the woods, which almost leads to the accidental discovery of Meinike’s murder scene, temporarily litters the mise-en-scène. The shooting script has Rankin desperately tear pages from Meinike’s Bible to create an alternative trail leading away from the corpse. This audacious act of Bible destruction was abandoned when the film was shot.
The original plan for the Harper town set Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Welles’s camera was becoming increasingly mobile, at least while he still had access to Hollywood’s ace technicians. There are many tracking shots of characters navigating Harper by foot, which emphasises its smalltown compactness, although the coherence of the spatial relationships between the settings beyond the central square was lost owing to the abandonment of the original town plan.41
Walking through Harper
* * *
Like Puerto Indio, Harper is dominated by surveillance. The shooting script repeatedly describes the act of looking. In a comment anticipating a more famous line in The Third Man, Rankin looks down from the clock tower on the mob and says he feels “like God looking at little ants”.42 Often the gaze is cast through obscuring windows. In a shot described in the script that didn’t make the final cut, Meinike hides from Wilson in the doorway of a store, behind the “plate glass windows” that “angle gently out from the deeply recessed entrance… He is able to look out through the glass cases and thus can observe the street without being seen.”43 The looking-through-windows motif was realised mostly in shots set in the vicinity of Potter’s Drugstore.
The act of looking in Harper
Potter’s Drugstore is both the nexus of social activity – it doubles as the town’s bus stop – and the central place of observation. Welles installed signs in his own handwriting, including “Gentlemen! Do Not Deface Walls!” (Potter is less passive-aggressive than the blind shopkeeper in Touch of Evil, whose sign warns “If you are mean enough to steal from the blind, help yourself”).44 The script describes Mr Potter as “an immensely fat New Englander, whose philosophy permits but one form of exercise – the punching of a cash register”.45 Potter is so lazy he insists his customers find their own items on the shelves an
d fill their own coffee cups, a novelty in those days. As portrayed by Billy House, the character enlivens the otherwise dull dramatis personae with a spark of Welles’s absurdist but homespun humour. Not as crafty as he imagines himself, Potter is the local gossip and ‘town clerk’, and, as he tells Wilson, “Town clerk runs the town, you might say.”46
Welles would never again return to so homespun a background as Harper. Political urgencies took him forever away from Main Street, USA.
NOTES
1 Orson Welles, ‘Good Neighbor Policy Reconsidered’, quoted in Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 186.
2 Welles, 4 December 1944, quoted in Denning, The Cultural Front, 395.
3 Denning, The Cultural Front, 395.
4 Orson Welles, ‘Moral Indebtedness’, Free World, October 1943, reprinted at http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-debut-as-political-commentator-on-moral-indebtedness/ (accessed 15 July 2015).
5 Welles quoted in McBride, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?, 95–6.
6 Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 184.
7 Patrick Marnham, Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of the Greatest Hero of the French Resistance (New York: Random House, 2000), 115.
8 Roland Perry, Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, the Only American in Britain’s Cambridge Spy Ring (Cambridge: Da Capo, 2005), 143.
9 Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans, 184.
10 To Roland Perry, “The actor was willingly being used as a front for communist propaganda dressed up as liberal international thought” (Perry, Last of the Cold War Spies, 144). A less damning judgment of Dolivet’s organisation comes from Callow: the International Free World Association was “straightforwardly social democratic with a particularly international bias” (Callow, Orson Welles: Hello Americans), 185.
11 François Thomas, ‘The Filmorsa Years’, lecture at ‘Orson Welles: A Centennial Celebration and Symposium’, Indiana University, 2 May 2015; streamed online at http://www.indiana.edu/~video/stream/liveflash.html?filename=cinema (accessed 2 May 2015).
12 Barbara Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography (New York: Limelight, 1995), 304.
13 Welles quoted in Leaming, Orson Welles: A Biography, 276.
14 Interview with Orson Welles in France (1982), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R15sIbtKhLk (accessed 15 July 2015).
15 Welles quoted in Tarbox (ed.), Orson Welles and Roger Hill, 102.
16 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 108, 376, 380.
17 Dennis Broe says that in the 1945–50 period, “ideas of the left were hegemonic [in film noirs] […] they formed the core of the genre”. Dennis Broe, Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), xxiv–xxv.
18 See Broe, Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood, xvii.
19 Broe, Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood, xxiv.
20 Agnes Moorehead was Welles’s original choice for the role of the Nazi-hunter, but the producers insisted on casting Edward G. Robinson. See Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 187.
21 Welles quoted in Bazin, Bitsch, and Domarchi, ‘Interview with Orson Welles (II)’, 63.
22 Andrew Spicer, Historical Dictionary of Film Noir (Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 45.
23 Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 233.
24 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 119.
25 Heylin, Despite the System, 175.
26 Heylin, Despite the System, 175–6; see also Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 122.
27 For the first time Welles uses the plot device of an old man released from prison who is then murdered by a former criminal associate. The same premise kick-starts Mr. Arkadin, and a shot of Jakob Zouk (Akim Tamiroff) leaving his Munich prison was rumoured to have begun one lost cut (incidentally, actors Konstantin Shayne and Tamiroff were brothers-in-law).
28 The film as produced starred Welles as Kindler, Edward G. Robinson as Wilson, Loretta Young as Mary, Konstantin Shayne as Konrad Meinike, and Billy House as Potter.
29 Benamou, It’s All True, 247.
30 Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 388; see also Orson Welles, ‘Orson Welles’ Almanac’, New York Post, 30 January 1945, reprinted at http://www.wellesnet.com/orson-welles-almanac-the-new-yorker-ought-to-be-ashamed-of-itself/ (accessed 15 July 2015).
31 Welles quoted in Welles and Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, 186.
32 Uncredited [Orson Welles, John Huston, and Anthony Veiller], The Stranger (24 September 1945), 6–21 (with some inconsistent numbering). Box 21, folder 14, Lilly Library.
33 Heylin, Despite the System, 176–7.
34 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 36–8.
35 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 130.
36 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 124.
37 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 83.
38 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 120.
39 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 36.
40 See Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 122. The clocktower action and the dormant clock anticipate elements of Robert Zemickis’s Back to the Future (1985), which was filmed on the same town square set on the Universal lot.
41 Berthome and Thomas, Orson Welles at Work, 122.
42 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 160.
43 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 46.
44 See Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, 124.
45 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 42.
46 Uncredited [Welles, Huston, and Veiller], The Stranger, 57.
CHAPTER 7
PORT TO PORT
The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
Orson Welles in a publicity still as Mike O’Hara in The Lady From Shanghai
The Lady from Shanghai was based on Sherwood King’s novel If I Should Die Before I Wake (1938). In the spring and summer of 1946, while Welles worked on Around the World in Eighty Days in the theatre and the Mercury Summer Theatre on the Air for CBS radio, he developed the screenplay with writers William Castle and Fletcher Markle.1 A ‘Third Draft’ titled Black Irish was finished by 13 August. By then Welles was the sole credited screenwriter. Just four days later he had compiled a 164-page ‘Final Draft (for Estimating Purposes)’ retitled Take This Woman, a tightly conceived noir thriller. Censor Joseph Breen rejected Welles’s present conception on 19 August, necessitating revisions to an ending which saw the hero urging the femme fatale to suicide.2
A mere six weeks before production began, the film was still to be set in New York City and on Long Island. The principal changes made by the time of the ‘First Estimating Script’ of 20 September were to transfer the action to Cuba, Mexico, and the San Francisco Bay Area, following a set of establishing scenes in New York. Perhaps the international revisions were considered commercially sound after the success of the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946), set in Argentina but shot in Hollywood.3 For the first time since It’s All True, Welles was able work extensively outside the studio, although he later recalled, “In those days there was a deep distrust of all locations,”4 which he said led to the unit being recalled a few days too early. Whatever the reason for the revisions, the port city settings were more suitable for Welles’s political themes.
Shooting began in Hollywood on 2 October. The company moved to Acapulco for a month’s work, then on to San Francisco. Hayworth’s ill health meant that principal photography dragged on until 27 February 1947. Viola Lawrence’s editing began during production and generally worked in antagonism to Welles’s aesthetic vision. Many of Welles’s carefully choreographed tracking shots were not allowed to stand. He was ordered to make additional shots to allow the scenes to be edited along more conventional lines. Although Welles obliged, he continued to subvert conventionality in other ways, with close-
up performances verging on the absurd (particularly Glenn Anders as George Grisby) and sometimes near-surreal back projections.5
A record of a provisional cut of The Lady from Shanghai survives in a typed document headed ‘Scenes as Shot’, although a more accurate description would be ‘Scenes as Edited’. The document is an adaptation of Welles’s shooting script into a shot-by-shot breakdown of the edit as it stood around the end of February. Pages are individually dated from 16 November 1946 – around the time the company returned to California from Mexico – until 25 February 1947, indicating the chronology of Lawrence’s work.6 This provisional editing continuity gives the shape of the film before much of Welles’s material was altered or eliminated.
The action begins in New York’s Central Park. Irish sailor Mike O’Hara (Welles) approaches a beautiful woman (Hayworth) in her horse-drawn cab, offers her his last cigarette, and later rescues her from a gang of thieves. Her name is Elsa, and she tells him: “You’re a bit like Don Quixote yourself, Michael. The age of chivalry’s out of business, but I don’t think you believe it.” They each have international backgrounds. Elsa grew up in China, and Mike was imprisoned in the Spanish Civil War for killing a Franco spy. But when she reveals she is married to Arthur Bannister, “the world’s greatest criminal lawyer”, he bluntly refuses her offer of a job on Bannister’s yacht.
At the End of the Street in the Shadow Page 16