At the End of the Street in the Shadow

by Matthew Asprey Gear

  Around the World finds Welles at a pivotal point in his long-term fascination with Spain – or, to be more accurate in this case, an archaic Pyrenees culture divided arbitrarily between fascist Spain and the French Fourth Republic. Just a few months earlier in Paris he had made the first test shots for his adaptation of Don Quixote, which would become his obsession for decades and evolve alongside changes in Spain. From now on Welles would frequently make films inside Spain.

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  [A] romantic strain lives on in the American character, and this finds expression in that minority among expatriates who do indeed make quite determined (if futile) efforts to participate in the social and cultural life of the country where they find themselves.

  – from Crazy Weather, a treatment by Orson Welles and Oja Kodar, circa late 197314

  Ernest Hemingway had vividly communicated his personal appraisal of Spanish culture in novels, non-fiction books, and journalism. In 1932, the year before Welles’s brief spell training as a torerito in Seville, Hemingway published Death in the Afternoon, his now classic book on bullfighting. Although widely mocked by Spaniards during his lifetime for his pretentions to the status of cultural authority,15 Hemingway served as a popular explicator of Spain for the English-speaking world. In his fictional protagonists and his ever-more frequent media appearances, he also created the prototype for the macho expatriate American aficionado. Of Hemingway and the corrida, Welles later joked, “He thought he invented it, you know.”16

  In Welles’s telling, their first encounter, during the recording session for The Spanish Earth in 1937, was marked by Hemingway’s easily provoked homophobia and his blustering machismo. They seem to have later mixed in the same social circles in Venice in the late 1940s and in Paris in the late 1950s.17 And even if in retrospect Welles dubiously claimed Hemingway as “a very close friend of mine” – he said he was “enormously fond of him as a man” for his humour – Welles’s public expression of his Spanish enthusiasms departed in significant and critical ways. Welles’s celebration of Spain was open and inclusive, typical of his cosmopolitan persona. Hemingway invited his readers to share his contempt for foreigners of less serious afición or for those who deviated from his code of stoic machismo. By 1959, in declining physical and mental health, Hemingway was trailing an entourage of sycophants while reporting on the bullfighting season for the mainstream American media. “I never belonged to his clan,” Welles explained, “because I made fun of him. And nobody ever made fun of Hemingway.”18

  Welles was interested in types of courage beyond macho physical posturing. In 1981 he told students at UCLA that he valued bravery above all other virtues, but insisted, “don’t call me a macho, that’s not what I’m talking about”.19 Nevertheless, he saw bullfighting at its best as an exhibition of bravery, and remarked that “it’s always rewarding to observe this rare commodity in action”.20

  A further distinction was that Welles proved capable of self-criticism and re-evaluation of his Spanish enthusiasms, particularly in relation to the corrida. He said in 1974:

  I’ve turned against it for very much the same reason that my father, who was a great hunter, suddenly stopped hunting. He said “I’ve killed enough animals and I’m ashamed of myself.” […] Although it’s been a great education to me in human terms and in many other ways, I begin to think that I’ve seen enough of those animals die. […] Wasn’t I living second-hand through the lives of those toreros who were my friends? Wasn’t I living and dying second-hand? Wasn’t there something finally voyeuristic about it? I suspect my afición. I still go to bullfights, I’m not totally reformed, and I can’t ask for the approval of the people who have very good reasons to argue about stopping it.21

  Welles’s growing disdain for the voyeuristic American macho in Spain had found expression in a string of related projects: The Sacred Beasts, The Other Side of the Wind, and Crazy Weather. But none of these projects – nor the Spanish-set Don Quixote, Mercedes, The Dreamers, or The Big Brass Ring – reached cinema screens. Neither were Welles’s earlier Spanish television documentaries broadcast outside Europe. Yet while Welles’s vision of Spain had none of the public visibility of Hemingway’s, it can be traced in Welles’s surviving papers and unfinished films as a long-term critical engagement. That vision informed how he came to reimagine Spanish cities in his work.

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  Welles claimed to be that rare aficionado more interested in bulls than bullfighters. In the season of 1966, when interviewed by the novelist James A. Michener in Seville, Welles explained:

  What it comes down to is simple. Either you respect the integrity of the drama the bullring provides or you don’t. If you do respect it, you demand only the catharsis which it is uniquely constructed to give. […] What you are interested in is the art whereby a man using no tricks reduces a raging bull to his dimensions, and this means that the relationship between the two must always be maintained and even highlighted. The only way this can be achieved is with art. And what is the essence of this art? That the man carry himself with grace and that he move the bull slowly and with a certain majesty. That is, he must allow the inherent quality of the bull to manifest itself.22

  Norman Foster’s abandoned ‘My Friend Bonito’ aside, Welles first put a corrida on film for another 1955 episode of Around the World. In ‘Spain: The Bullfight’, Welles strides like a giant through the milling crowds outside Las Ventas in Madrid. He made insert shots in a studio that recreated his arena seat, from where he pretended to observe and film the action close to the alley ringing the arena.23 When Welles abandoned the series, writers Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy were subbed in to pad out the too-short episode with an introduction and commentary.24

  Compared to his stylistically inventive television travel documentaries of the 1950s, the nine episodes of In the Land of Don Quixote are conventional and largely tedious, and much less effective for the lack of Welles’s first-person presence as presenter and narrator. Welles exploited this commission from RAI in Italy as another piggyback ride for the ever-evolving Don Quixote and reportedly dismissed the series as “just a travelogue”.25 These silent 16mm movies of Welles’s family on vacation are not particularly successful even in that undemanding genre, despite their extensive view of the cities of Spain. Welles shot material in Madrid, Seville, Pamplona, Córdoba, Cádiz, Gibraltar, Algeciras, Granada, Ronda, Guadix, Jerez, Toledo, Aranjuez, Alcalá de Henares, Ávila, and Segovia.26 His executive producer Alessandro Tasca di Cutò recalled, “We had no script other than the one in his mind, and his idea of how he would assemble it in the cutting room.”27

  Welles worked on the editing at his wife’s family villa in Fregene outside Rome.28 His original material was supplemented by stock footage from the archives of NO-DO, Franco’s propaganda newsreel service.29 Individual segments within the episodes are divided by a repeated shot of a Quixotic windmill accompanied by a flamenco guitar punctuation. Most of the music was provided by the young virtuoso Juan Serrano.

  Welles’s notes indicate he planned to use bullfighting as the unifying theme of the series. In June 1961 he explained to an editorial assistant who was compiling reels of usable footage:

  The idea is not to do a single programme on bullfighting, but to use this theme in several of the programmes as we follow the different ferias. Following the ferias gives us an excuse to see the different towns and to examine the aspects of Spanish character and countryside.

  Bullfighting and its rituals are indeed prominent in the broadcast version, although the ultimate significance of each corrida is sometimes obscure within the casual assemblage and minimal commentary. Welles explained to the editorial assistant, “I just have a lot to say about bullfighting in general and in particular, and will use the best of the material to illustrate my remarks,”30 but in the end RAI commissioned another writer to provide an Italian narration that was voiced by actor Arnoldo Foa. It is unclear to what extent RAI tampered with Welles’s edit, although Tasca di Cutò called the final pro
duct a “flat, distorted ghost of the original”.31 Juan Cobos, the assistant director of Chimes at Midnight, said, “I cannot imagine that [Welles] ever approved the final cut that was shown on RAI-TV in 1964. I think he only partially cut the series, and he certainly didn’t want the spoken narration that was used.” Welles attempted to import the negative back into Spain later in the 1960s to reedit and record a narration but was impeded by Spanish bureaucracy.32

  Left-wing critics in Italy at the time of original broadcast criticised Welles’s lack of political engagement with the political situation under Franco.33 During the filming Tasca di Cutò encountered Franco in person at the Seville feria and was given permission to film the dictator, but the material did not make the series.34 The series expresses an American tourist’s point of view unlikely to have offended the regime or to have contradicted the folkloric image of Spain the dictatorship promoted to the world. In comparison to Welles’s later Spanish explorations, In the Land of Don Quixote is without much depth. Nevertheless, one city sequence rises above the mundane and is worth examining.

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  Hemingway had made the fiesta of San Fermín famous in the English-speaking world with The Sun Also Rises (1926). Back in 1923 he had reported to the Toronto Star: “As far as I know we were the only English-speaking people in Pamplona during the Feria.” The encierro or ‘running of the bulls’, “the Pamplona tradition of giving the bulls a final shot at everyone in town before they enter the pens”, had “been going on each year since a couple of hundred years before Columbus had his historic interview with Queen Isabella in the camp outside of Grenada”. Hemingway claimed the amateur fight following the encierro created “a casualty list at least equal to a Dublin election”.35

  It has been said, probably apocryphally, that tickets for the 1961 fiesta sat on Hemingway’s desk in Sun Valley, Idaho, on 2 July, the day he took his own life with a shotgun. That summer’s fiesta began just four days later. Unless he relied entirely on a second-unit crew, Welles was on location in Pamplona, historical capital of the Basque country, to film the encierro for an episode of In the Land of Don Quixote. The coincidence of these events has been little noticed, but Hemingway’s suicide had a profound effect on Welles’s subsequent work. He used the date of Hemingway’s suicide for the date of Jake Hannaford’s death (and seventieth birthday) in The Other Side of the Wind.36

  The episode about the encierro of San Fermín is also one of the few parts of the travelogue series to have inspired Welles’s creativity.37 Cobos, who reports that Welles incorporated some stock footage, agreed that “here you can see him at his best on the editing room”.38

  The structure of the encierro episode suggests a revival of the spatial conceit of Welles’s unrealised samba sequence in ‘Carnaval’, the mapping of a city by illustrating human movement from the periphery to the centre in the context of a mass cultural ritual.

  In the encierro episode, three loose stages lay out a trajectory from the countryside to the city of Pamplona. The first begins with images of ancient paintings of bulls in the caves of Altamira. This is followed by footage of bulls chased, corralled, and branded on ranches, in encounters with humans in small rural bullrings, and marched through the countryside. The second stage depicts an encierro through the streets of a provincial town. Runners scramble to safety by hoisting themselves onto the grates of windows or ward off angry bulls with chairs. In the amateur fight in the Plaza de Toros, men are knocked aside and thrown, dozens of women face the bulls, and a range of spectators gawk with voyeuristic pleasure from the safety of their seats.

  The third stage is the longest: the encierro of San Fermín. It’s a stunning and terrifying montage lasting six minutes. The sequence has been too long obscure, buried within the nearly four hours of this generally unremarkable series. If not as magnificently realised as the Battle of Shrewsbury in Chimes at Midnight – its technical limitations are considerable by comparison, and the many clumsy edits and sound mix give the impression the sequence was never actually finished – it shares a little of that sequence’s energy and violence.39

  At the launch of a rocket flare, the bulls are released from their corral. In the rush several bulls knock each other over and slide on their backs before again finding their feet. Men are lifted by the horns, thrown aside, trampled underfoot. Welles creates a moment of macabre comedy by cutting away from a bull’s charge on a fallen man to a pair of nuns observing from the safety of a high window. The soundtrack is repetitive drumming and dubbed-in human screams.

  The density of the crowd mounts as it nears the entrance to the Plaza de Toros. Finally the charge compounds into a mass of bodies blocking the entry. The bulls leap and scramble across the writhing human mass. Welles explores an innovative visual concept by intercutting the live-action footage with dynamic still photographs. The stills pause on moments of fear or pain, when runners are crushed in the crowd or meet the horns of a bull. The camera either roves across these photographs or cuts to small details. Guitar music punctuates the drumming during these interpolations.

  Scenes of the encierro at the Fiesta de San Fermín in Pamplona (In the Land of Don Quixote)

  One man died in the event that year, and Welles unflinchingly depicts on screen the exhilaration and violence of an old Spanish ritual that had become, thanks to Hemingway’s writings, a major international tourist attraction. Welles’s documentary reconstruction neither romanticises nor particularly criticises the encierro. But by beginning the episode with images of the Altamira caves he entrenches the ritual in ancient Spanish traditions. Welles emphasises the majestic natural force of the bulls, the fear they provoke, in images of raw nature flooding the streets of the city of Pamplona.

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  Still photographs used in the encierro sequence (In the Land of Don Quixote)

  Barely a month after Hemingway’s suicide, columnist Leonard Lyons reported in the Hollywood Citizen News that Welles was at work on a screenplay about a bullfighter that was probably an embryonic version of his project The Sacred Beasts.40 This script seems to be Welles’s first cinematic attempt to interrogate American interest in Spanish culture.

  Welles explained the project to documentarians Albert and David Maysles in the summer of 1966:

  It has to do with a kind of voyeurism, a kind of … emotional parasitism. And it has to do with the whole mystique … of the he-man. This picture we’re going to make is against he-men.

  [It’s about] the people who go to bullfights not occasionally as tourists do but who are passionately addicted to it as aficionados. That part of the aficionados who have the Hemingway mystique, who got hooked through Hemingway. And our story is about a pseudo-Hemingway. A movie director who belongs to that league that in Spain they call the macho … a fellow that you can hardly see through the bush of the hair on his chest.41

  Welles’s project evolved, lost its bullfighting background, and transplanted its drama to Los Angeles, where it was shot as The Other Side of the Wind. Nevertheless, the theme of American aficionados in Spain did not recede from Welles’s interest but reappeared in Crazy Weather, an unmade treatment project of the early 1970s.42 Oja Kodar remembered she began writing the story, and “whenever something had to do with Spain, [Welles] wanted to be involved … he managed to introduce something about bullfighting into the story although I hated bullfighting.”

  Kodar admitted that no ending was ever written. The surviving draft is a consistently numbered 144-page composite combining treatment and formatted screenplay material, often with variant versions of the same scenes and some missing parts. References within that draft date it to late 1973. Kodar remembers collaborating on the project in Paris while Welles was editing parts of The Other Side of the Wind.43 This would have been prior to his return to the USA to film John Huston’s performance as Jake Hannaford.

  Like The Sacred Beasts, Crazy Weather is a scathing attack on he-men, American ignorance, and cultural appropriation. There is also a new emphasis on women’s subjective
experience of urban space. The story centres on a love triangle. Welles and Kodar introduce Jim Foster, one of those romantic Americans who make “quite determined (if futile) efforts to participate in the social and cultural life of the country where they find themselves”.

  He lives and works in Spain, and he’s fallen head over heels with everything Spanish… Spain has a very strong appeal for his sort of American; their special vision of the so-called Spanish way of life seems to combine the prestigious dignity of an antique civilization with something of the tense simplicity of a good cowboy movie. Jim Foster never read Mérimée, but he’s well-grounded in Hemingway – a key to his character, he cherishes Spain as a ‘man’s country’. […]

  The corrida has never had so many fans among non-Spaniards. Hundreds of foreigners follow the bulls with studious enthusiasm from the beginning to the end of one temporada after another. Jim, of course, is one of these.44

  Despite his Spanish wife and years living in Spain, Jim speaks only “limited and rather stilted” Spanish.

  The key setting is an unnamed provincial town on the road to Madrid where Jim and his wife, Amparo, plan to attend a corrida. Amparo, driving towards the town, accidentally injures a nameless foreign youth with her car and offers him a lift. The boy’s arrogance and aggressive sexuality disrupt Jim and Amparo’s marriage. He taunts Jim about his misogyny and flirts with Amparo. Along the road Jim is forced to hike to a filling station to replace gasoline the boy has intentionally drained from the tank. The boy later sabotages the car’s tyres. It’s an open question whether Amparo and the boy committed adultery on the banks of a river. After driving Jim to the point of rage, the boy exits the car and limps off alone.