by Michael Montag and Alyn Divine
| “Aside from ‘Citizen Kane’, all of Orson Welles’s films were severely criticized in their day, too poor or too baroque, crazy, too Shakespearean or not sufficiently so. Nevertheless, in the end, Welles’s reputation throughout the world is secure.” – Francois Truffaut |
It is sometimes difficult to separate a man’s art from a man’s personality. Oftentimes artists hide behind their work, and their true selves are never displayed to the public. Other times, artists throw themselves in front of their work and obscure their unique creativity, instead basking in the attention that their art produces. With a filmmaker like Orson Welles, it is difficult to decide what kind of a man he was. Marlene Dietrich’s final line of dialogue in Touch of Evil intimates at the futility of such an answer: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?” While she’s referring to Welles’s character, Hank Quinlan, she might as well have been talking about Orson Welles himself. Welles even admitted those lines were about himself, but sadly, in the end, the many things said about Welles had a detrimental effect on his career.
Orson Welles is a difficult subject. His career is complicated, he himself is complicated, and critically speaking, his work has been received oftentimes in a strange, unintended manner due to his inherently labyrinthine life. Welles made eleven official films, although we could say he made more, or less, depending on how we count them--even Welles was not completely sure. He is most often noted among the public, and in film schools around the world, for having directed Citizen Kane, a 1941 drama about a newspaper publisher that bears more than a striking resemblance to the real newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Citizen Kane was Welles’s first film; he was 26 years old when he made it, and today it is considered to be one of the greatest American films ever made.
There is a famous quote by Welles that goes, “I started at the top and worked my way down.” Unfortunately for him and the cinema itself, this was to some extent an accurate self-assessment of his career. It is not that he never made a film greater than his first; in fact, it should be argued that some of his greatest films are the ones that most will never see, either because they are not easily available or they have been irrevocably damaged (re-edited and changed in other ways by the Hollywood studios), they were never finished, or were never released due to legal reasons. This is the true tragedy of Welles’s career: he was a prodigy filmmaker, oftentimes decades before his time stylistically, and a not-so-genius businessman when it came to his career.
Because Kane is his most well known work, the focus of this article will not be on that film. Much has been said about it already, and diving into Kane as a focus would almost seem unnecessary. It will be important to briefly discuss it in terms of its visual style and its ambition in relation to its time, but it will be chiefly a setup to discuss some of his more interesting and more unseen work. Using Kane as a springboard, a consideration of some of his other films--The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, and Mr. Arkadin—will reveal the kind of filmmaker that Welles really was. That is, an artist who defiantly turned his head away from the aesthetic of his contemporaries and formed himself as one of the greatest American auteur filmmakers of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.
There is a famous quote by Welles that goes, “I started at the top and worked my way down.” Unfortunately for him and the cinema itself, this was to some extent an accurate self-assessment of his career. It is not that he never made a film greater than his first; in fact, it should be argued that some of his greatest films are the ones that most will never see, either because they are not easily available or they have been irrevocably damaged (re-edited and changed in other ways by the Hollywood studios), they were never finished, or were never released due to legal reasons. This is the true tragedy of Welles’s career: he was a prodigy filmmaker, oftentimes decades before his time stylistically, and a not-so-genius businessman when it came to his career.
Because Kane is his most well known work, the focus of this article will not be on that film. Much has been said about it already, and diving into Kane as a focus would almost seem unnecessary. It will be important to briefly discuss it in terms of its visual style and its ambition in relation to its time, but it will be chiefly a setup to discuss some of his more interesting and more unseen work. Using Kane as a springboard, a consideration of some of his other films--The Magnificent Ambersons, Journey into Fear, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, and Mr. Arkadin—will reveal the kind of filmmaker that Welles really was. That is, an artist who defiantly turned his head away from the aesthetic of his contemporaries and formed himself as one of the greatest American auteur filmmakers of the 20th century and perhaps of all time.
This article will not be useful as an introduction to these films in terms of their basic plot structure. In other words, the focus will not be on the stories themselves but on the visual style—cinematography and editing and mise-en-scene—as well as more general thematic notes. Welles’s presence within his films (whether he was in front of the camera or not, whether he was behind the camera or not) is unmistakable. There are films that Welles starred in but didn't direct, but they are sometimes still considered chiefly Welles’s work, or at least his contribution is what they are remembered for—Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Norman Foster’s Journey into Fear, and Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre, for example. All three films have very definite stylistic similarities to Welles’s own work in the forties and fifties, and while some of it may have been coincidence, if we examine the films closely, we can see more than just a casual homogeneity.
The War of the Worlds
Before we can explore Welles’s films properly, it is useful to get a sense of the man before he entered the world of cinema. Born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, his parents died when he was young, his mother soon after his birth, and his father when he was fifteen. He traveled around Europe from money he inherited and acted in small theater roles to great acclaim. He made it back to the United States and continued pursuing his talents in stage acting. He formed his own theater company and slowly moved into radio, doing readings of stage plays.
Welles’s initial notoriety came after his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938. In this alarming, pseudo post-modern radio show, Welles utilized his theater company to put on what some would call one of the most elaborate radio hoaxes ever conceived. He started this broadcast normally enough: the drama at first seems like a broadcast of big band show tunes being performed in a hotel somewhere in New York City. However, this ‘broadcast’ is constantly interrupted by news bulletins about Martians invading New Jersey and causing mayhem and destruction. It was a dramatic program performed without an inkling of sarcasm, and large portions of the public thought it was real, running for the hills and calling the police; the anxiety levels on the Eastern seaboard, and across the country, were at an extreme high.
Through this well-thought-out, unique radio production that was light years ahead of its time, Welles became known to the majority of Americans. He took an idea already well-known, War of the Worlds, and turned it into something of his own very easily, just with a little dramatic radio trickery. He was able to anticipate the public’s reaction and their gullibility regarding media influence. The public was not able to discern that the broadcast was fictional, even though there were several moments during the performance that referenced the hour as brought to you by the Mercury Theater, Welles’s theater company. Recalling this incident years later, when asked by Peter Bogdanovich if the Mercury Theater expected the type of response they received, Welles said, “The kind of response, yes—that was merrily anticipated by us all. The size of it, of course, was flabbergasting. Six minutes after we’d gone on the air, the switchboards in radio stations right across the country were lighting up like Christmas trees. Houses were emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there was wailing in the streets and the rending of garments. Twenty minutes in, and we had a control room full of very bewildered cops. They didn’t know who to arrest or for what, but they did lend a certain tone to the remainder of the broadcast.” Welles would go on later to make a film all about trickery and lying with F for Fake—he even discussed this very broadcast.
Welles’s initial notoriety came after his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938. In this alarming, pseudo post-modern radio show, Welles utilized his theater company to put on what some would call one of the most elaborate radio hoaxes ever conceived. He started this broadcast normally enough: the drama at first seems like a broadcast of big band show tunes being performed in a hotel somewhere in New York City. However, this ‘broadcast’ is constantly interrupted by news bulletins about Martians invading New Jersey and causing mayhem and destruction. It was a dramatic program performed without an inkling of sarcasm, and large portions of the public thought it was real, running for the hills and calling the police; the anxiety levels on the Eastern seaboard, and across the country, were at an extreme high.
Through this well-thought-out, unique radio production that was light years ahead of its time, Welles became known to the majority of Americans. He took an idea already well-known, War of the Worlds, and turned it into something of his own very easily, just with a little dramatic radio trickery. He was able to anticipate the public’s reaction and their gullibility regarding media influence. The public was not able to discern that the broadcast was fictional, even though there were several moments during the performance that referenced the hour as brought to you by the Mercury Theater, Welles’s theater company. Recalling this incident years later, when asked by Peter Bogdanovich if the Mercury Theater expected the type of response they received, Welles said, “The kind of response, yes—that was merrily anticipated by us all. The size of it, of course, was flabbergasting. Six minutes after we’d gone on the air, the switchboards in radio stations right across the country were lighting up like Christmas trees. Houses were emptying, churches were filling up; from Nashville to Minneapolis there was wailing in the streets and the rending of garments. Twenty minutes in, and we had a control room full of very bewildered cops. They didn’t know who to arrest or for what, but they did lend a certain tone to the remainder of the broadcast.” Welles would go on later to make a film all about trickery and lying with F for Fake—he even discussed this very broadcast.
Welles was known as a performer at this point. He acted in several plays (a lot of them Shakespeare) and managed a theater company full of people that worked well together. He had no preconceived notions about becoming a filmmaker. He was happy doing theater and radio, and was getting a lot of attention for it. Talking about growing up and his interest in films in an interview with Mr. Bogdanovich, Welles said, “I loved movies. It just didn’t occur to me to want to make ‘em…there are maybe dozens of people scattered over the world who care passionately about films and don’t want to direct. I was one of them.” Yet the calling of Hollywood become too strong for Welles to ignore after his War of the Worlds broadcast. Many studios in California were attempting to secure Welles for various projects, as he was seen as an interesting performer (and well-known) and an able manager of people. (He was also thought of as strangely out of touch with what the studios thought the audiences wanted, but in those days, Hollywood was willing to take more chances.) After refusing several deals, Welles finally decided to sign a multi-picture contract with RKO, one of the five big studios in Hollywood’s Golden Era.
Famously, Welles’s contract became known as one of the best contracts ever given to a filmmaker, and this filmmaker hadn’t even been in the movie business before. Welles had made a short-film years earlier entitled Hearts of Age, but it could hardly be considered proof of his talent. This contract was so good for one reason: for the first film he was to make, he could have virtually total control over the project; he could hire who he wanted, and he could make it the way he wanted, which included full control over the final edit of the picture. This aspect alone was something Welles would never have in his Hollywood films again.
As this analysis of Welles’s films and career is meant to stray into the more analytical and technical aspects of his filmmaking, it will be enough to say that Welles—after abandoning attempts to bring Heart of Darkness to the screen—decided to make his first film about an American giant. Citizen Kane was a film that closely mirrored the life of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mogul, but was not a biography. Welles would hint later on in his life that originally the story was supposed to be about Howard Hughes, an equally interesting sensational American businessman, but it was decided to go after Hearst instead.
Welles would write the film with veteran Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz—the older brother of writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, most famous for his Hollywood satire All About Eve. The older Mankiewicz worked on the screenplays for such films as Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, The Wizard of Oz, and many others. It is said that Mankiewicz wrote the first draft of Kane and sent it onto Welles, who made severe edits and added many of his own sequences.
Famously, Welles’s contract became known as one of the best contracts ever given to a filmmaker, and this filmmaker hadn’t even been in the movie business before. Welles had made a short-film years earlier entitled Hearts of Age, but it could hardly be considered proof of his talent. This contract was so good for one reason: for the first film he was to make, he could have virtually total control over the project; he could hire who he wanted, and he could make it the way he wanted, which included full control over the final edit of the picture. This aspect alone was something Welles would never have in his Hollywood films again.
As this analysis of Welles’s films and career is meant to stray into the more analytical and technical aspects of his filmmaking, it will be enough to say that Welles—after abandoning attempts to bring Heart of Darkness to the screen—decided to make his first film about an American giant. Citizen Kane was a film that closely mirrored the life of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper mogul, but was not a biography. Welles would hint later on in his life that originally the story was supposed to be about Howard Hughes, an equally interesting sensational American businessman, but it was decided to go after Hearst instead.
Welles would write the film with veteran Hollywood screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz—the older brother of writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, most famous for his Hollywood satire All About Eve. The older Mankiewicz worked on the screenplays for such films as Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, The Wizard of Oz, and many others. It is said that Mankiewicz wrote the first draft of Kane and sent it onto Welles, who made severe edits and added many of his own sequences.
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a landmark film. Some would argue that it was one of the most influential films of its time and that it still resonates in the 21st century. Critics, scholars, and cinephiles talk of its innovation in its camera technique and sound editing most specifically. Welles hired cameraman Gregg Toland to shoot the film and gave Toland top billing along with himself on the main title card, which was the first time any director had done that. Welles said, “up 'til then, cameramen were listed with about eight other names. Nobody those days—only the stars, the director, and the producer—got separate cards. Gregg deserved it, didn’t he?”
As a veteran of radio along with the rest of the Mercury Theater, the sound and sound editing in Citizen Kane is far ahead of its time and very complex. David Thomson, the author of Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, discusses some of Citizen Kane’s use of sound: “The variety of sound levels is always illustrating and fleshing out the visual depth of field. Sounds are emotional: they are intimate or remote. Many voices are edged with echo: Xanadu is a sound chamber where lines are theatrical or furtive, rarely level or normal…This is one reason why Kane didn’t ‘play’ for mainstream audiences in 1941. They were not accustomed to listening that intently. Another skill from radio is pitching the level of talk so that we may gauge the size of the room where the characters are. Films often neglected that fineness.” Citizen Kane was one of the first large American films where the point of the soundtrack was not just to be able to hear the dialogue. The distance, tone, and the ambient sounds around the voices are all very important to the story. We can close our eyes while watching Citizen Kane and just listen to the film and find it quite enjoyable. (That is not to say that the film isn’t visually important, because if the film is anything, it is visually innovative.)
Commenting on the visual style of Citizen Kane, Truffaut said, “Citizen Kane has both the look of a ‘first film,’ because of its grab bag of experiments, and a film of a director’s highest maturity, because of its universal portrait of the world.” For all intents and purposes, Citizen Kane is Welles’s first film. He did make two films before this, but neither was to be released to a large audience. (One, the aforementioned Hearts of Age, was a short eight-minute film he made in college, and the other was a short film that was to accompany a theater piece that the Mercury Theater put on called Too Much Johnson, starring Welles and Joseph Cotten.) In this film we see a generous use of deep-focus photography; in fact, with almost every shot, the camera maintains a narrow aperture in order to render everything within the frame in focus, whether that be an object in the very near foreground or an object in the far reaches of the background. This allows the viewer to focus on any aspect of the image that he or she wants to without being limited to looking at what the cameraman thought was important (in focus). This demanded quite a different style of shooting: in order to achieve such deep focus, a lot of lights were used to keep the image bright, and fast lenses and fast films would have to be used in conjunction.
In a scene in the middle of the film, after Kane meets Susan Alexander for the first time, Susan invites Kane in to wash himself off as he was just splashed with mud outside by a carriage. The camera is placed in the hallway of the building looking in on Susan’s apartment. Resembling the style of film noir, the hallway is completely black, with the door acting as a sort of sliver of light into which we can see. This creates a voyeuristic feeling, but before we get too uncomfortable, Kane closes the door, telling Susan to get her mind off the toothache that has been bothering her. When the door is closed, the camera pushes toward it, and it reopens with a swelling of the music, now more romantic in tone than before. (As this is 1941, Susan is of course not allowed to keep her door closed when she has male guests in her apartment.)
Commenting on the visual style of Citizen Kane, Truffaut said, “Citizen Kane has both the look of a ‘first film,’ because of its grab bag of experiments, and a film of a director’s highest maturity, because of its universal portrait of the world.” For all intents and purposes, Citizen Kane is Welles’s first film. He did make two films before this, but neither was to be released to a large audience. (One, the aforementioned Hearts of Age, was a short eight-minute film he made in college, and the other was a short film that was to accompany a theater piece that the Mercury Theater put on called Too Much Johnson, starring Welles and Joseph Cotten.) In this film we see a generous use of deep-focus photography; in fact, with almost every shot, the camera maintains a narrow aperture in order to render everything within the frame in focus, whether that be an object in the very near foreground or an object in the far reaches of the background. This allows the viewer to focus on any aspect of the image that he or she wants to without being limited to looking at what the cameraman thought was important (in focus). This demanded quite a different style of shooting: in order to achieve such deep focus, a lot of lights were used to keep the image bright, and fast lenses and fast films would have to be used in conjunction.
In a scene in the middle of the film, after Kane meets Susan Alexander for the first time, Susan invites Kane in to wash himself off as he was just splashed with mud outside by a carriage. The camera is placed in the hallway of the building looking in on Susan’s apartment. Resembling the style of film noir, the hallway is completely black, with the door acting as a sort of sliver of light into which we can see. This creates a voyeuristic feeling, but before we get too uncomfortable, Kane closes the door, telling Susan to get her mind off the toothache that has been bothering her. When the door is closed, the camera pushes toward it, and it reopens with a swelling of the music, now more romantic in tone than before. (As this is 1941, Susan is of course not allowed to keep her door closed when she has male guests in her apartment.)
During the moments when Kane “wiggles his ears at the same time”, the reverse shots of Susan are all filmed into a mirror, showing the front of her body as if the camera shot her straight on, but she is framed by the corners of the mirror and by other pictures and objects that help facilitate a sort of decorative garnish to her appearance. This device makes her look less ignorant and more high-class and elegant. When the camera reverses, Kane is shown looking down at her, giving him the authority and control of the situation, while she is shown as receptive to his control by laughing and smiling. Welles often uses extreme camera angles, placing the camera very near or even below the floor, shooting up at his actors to give them a sense of power.
We can assume that this is the way Kane sees Susan at this critical moment in the film, through the understanding of the shot/reverse shot apparatus. The theorist Kaja Silverman adequately summarizes this basic technique of film in her book The Subject of Semiotics: “the viewing subject, unable to sustain for long its belief in the autonomy of the cinematic image, demands to know whose gaze controls what it sees. The shot/reverse shot formation is calculated to answer that question in such a manner that the cinematic illusion remains intact. The gaze which directs our look seems to belong to a fictional character rather than to a camera.” In this instance, the image of Susan is being filtered through Kane’s internal exaggeration of Susan’s appearance. It’s the epitome of the kind of mental distortion that’s always prevalent in expressionism.
So much can be said about Citizen Kane’s visual style. It is curious, however: the deep-focus photography that is often talked about in conjunction with this film seems to be absent from many of Welles’s other works. He never again worked with Gregg Toland, which may be the reason, but it seems as if Welles eventually developed a visual style that relies much more upon editing and camera movement than extreme depth of field, as Kane does. However, Welles did reuse several stylistic elements that were cemented in this film, such as his obsession with mirrors, his extremely mobile and maneuverable camera (often done as trick shots), his oftentimes stark black and white photography which can come across as very rich and high-contrast, and his reliance on wider shots (not close-ups) to tell the story, using actors’ whole bodies as a strength and relying less on the expressions of their faces. As mentioned, his visual style would change considerably throughout his career (use of faster cutting, wide angle lenses, etc.), but these elements would remain a part of his repertoire.
We can assume that this is the way Kane sees Susan at this critical moment in the film, through the understanding of the shot/reverse shot apparatus. The theorist Kaja Silverman adequately summarizes this basic technique of film in her book The Subject of Semiotics: “the viewing subject, unable to sustain for long its belief in the autonomy of the cinematic image, demands to know whose gaze controls what it sees. The shot/reverse shot formation is calculated to answer that question in such a manner that the cinematic illusion remains intact. The gaze which directs our look seems to belong to a fictional character rather than to a camera.” In this instance, the image of Susan is being filtered through Kane’s internal exaggeration of Susan’s appearance. It’s the epitome of the kind of mental distortion that’s always prevalent in expressionism.
So much can be said about Citizen Kane’s visual style. It is curious, however: the deep-focus photography that is often talked about in conjunction with this film seems to be absent from many of Welles’s other works. He never again worked with Gregg Toland, which may be the reason, but it seems as if Welles eventually developed a visual style that relies much more upon editing and camera movement than extreme depth of field, as Kane does. However, Welles did reuse several stylistic elements that were cemented in this film, such as his obsession with mirrors, his extremely mobile and maneuverable camera (often done as trick shots), his oftentimes stark black and white photography which can come across as very rich and high-contrast, and his reliance on wider shots (not close-ups) to tell the story, using actors’ whole bodies as a strength and relying less on the expressions of their faces. As mentioned, his visual style would change considerably throughout his career (use of faster cutting, wide angle lenses, etc.), but these elements would remain a part of his repertoire.
After Citizen Kane was finished, its distribution became a problem. While Kane was fairly well received critically (especially in Europe, although the film was not seen in many parts of Europe until years later), its biggest problem was that it was not easily available to see. Newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst across the country boycotted the film as far as mentioning it in the papers, and most major theater chains rejected showing it out of fear of upsetting Hearst and his interests. Ironically, the film is now called one of the greatest American films ever made, but no one would have said that in 1941. Welles, reportedly, even received threats to his life and career for releasing the film. Welles, from an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, said “before Kane was released, I was lecturing—I think it was Pittsburgh, some town like that—and a detective came up to me as I was having supper with some friends after the lecture. He said, ‘don’t go back to your hotel. I’m from police headquarters. I won’t give you my name.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said, ‘I’m just giving you advice.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘They’ve got a fourteen-year-old girl in the closet and two cameramen waiting for you to come in.’ And of course I would have gone to jail. There would have been no way out of it.” Welles believed, along with the detectives, that some local Hearst goons set up the entire sting without Hearst’s permission to frame Welles and destroy his credibility. It was obvious that the release would be controversial. Although the film was nominated for several Academy Awards, its only win was for Best Original Screenplay, which went to Mankiewicz and Welles (this was the only Oscar he would ever win). The film did not make enough money to pay for its budget and was deemed a critical success by some but a financial failure by RKO, the studio.
The Magnificent Ambersons
Welles’s next project was to be an adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel, The Magnificent Ambersons. On its inception, Welles said, “we’d had success with it on radio; I played a recording of the show for George Schaefer (a producer for RKO and Welles’s champion there) and we agreed to it; Tarkington’s an extraordinary writer.” Welles had done the radio adaptation years before he made Citizen Kane and was familiar with the story. It’s worth noting he would write the screenplay himself this time instead of collaborating with another writer. It would also be made with many of the same actors from Welles’s first film. And Welles would also direct but not star in the film, though he did record the film’s narration.
The film opens plainly, title cards with the same font Welles used on Citizen Kane. Interestingly, there are no titles in the film except for this first card with the film’s title and reference to Booth Tarkington and the Mercury Theater. Yet, for the end credits, there are also no credits per se. Instead, Welles provides narration and reads off the cast's and crew members’ names while the film either shows the actor's face or, in the instance of a crew member, the technical device that they would use. For instance, when crediting the cinematographer Stanley Cortez (who is also responsible for photographing such classics as Night of the Hunter, Shock Corridor, and The Naked Kiss), he shows a camera. Welles’s visual credit was a boom microphone that receded into blackness.
The film opens plainly, title cards with the same font Welles used on Citizen Kane. Interestingly, there are no titles in the film except for this first card with the film’s title and reference to Booth Tarkington and the Mercury Theater. Yet, for the end credits, there are also no credits per se. Instead, Welles provides narration and reads off the cast's and crew members’ names while the film either shows the actor's face or, in the instance of a crew member, the technical device that they would use. For instance, when crediting the cinematographer Stanley Cortez (who is also responsible for photographing such classics as Night of the Hunter, Shock Corridor, and The Naked Kiss), he shows a camera. Welles’s visual credit was a boom microphone that receded into blackness.
Welles’s narration in Ambersons is soft and smooth, not similar to the loud and booming voice of Kane. He (the narrator) describes how times were different in the old days, and the first image is of the Amberson household with a horse-drawn streetcar pulling up in front of it. Welles’s narration unfolds as follows: “the only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once and wait for her while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the girl what to have for dinner, and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we're carried, the less time we have to spare.”
There is then an amusing scene where Welles continues narrating about the changing fashion trends from that time, and while this is going on, Joseph Cotten’s character is wearing various types of fashions, done through a careful series of cuts. Welles will have him walk out of the frame wearing one outfit and walk immediately back into it wearing a different one, the costume change and physical turnaround itself obscured by editing. This is an editing trick Welles often employed, especially in his earlier films.
There is another Welles trademark in these early sequences. As Cotten’s character is pursuing his love (Isabel), he sees her with another man, the man she would eventually marry. As he watches them walk down the street, we hear someone on the soundtrack say something about the couple, how mismatched they are and how it is a strange choice for Isabel. We do not see who is making this comment, but as Welles cuts to the next shot, there is a man getting a shave who turns around and, almost facing the camera directly, responds to the woman who made the comment (the story ultimately unfolds through the townspeople’s gossip). Welles has a tendency to mix in narration and on-and-off-screen character interaction. This is also seen in Citizen Kane and will be used to its fullest and most dynamic effect in F for Fake.
The Magnificent Ambersons is stylistically different from Citizen Kane in several aspects. For one, Ambersons is a much more somber film, not just in plot and character but also in its look. Characters walk across several rooms illuminated only very casually by shafts of light from dim light sources. Their identifiable yet ghostly silhouettes sometimes seem more prominent then their faces. Having actors walk around and act in silhouette also lends itself to this kind of a story that shifts through time (always forward in a linear fashion, rare for a Welles film). It also makes it more plausible as the characters themselves are always at a distance visually. Welles was not able to get Gregg Toland back as cinematographer but instead used Stanley Cortez, who beautifully shot the film, albeit without Toland’s never-ending depth of field. Ambersons doesn’t suffer because of it; it is beautifully choreographed, especially within the Amberson household itself. There are tracking shots that go on for minutes at a time, which give this film a very calculated and organically paced feel. Truffaut comments on the film’s small number of shots: “in The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles uses less than two-hundred shots to relate a story which spans twenty-five years [as opposed to 562 in Citizen Kane], as if the second movie had been shot in a fury by a different director who hated the first and wanted to give Welles a lesson in modesty… Many of Welles’s recent films give the impression that they were shot by an exhibitionist and edited by a censor.” Indeed, The Magnificent Ambersons is probably one of Welles’s slowest looking films as there are just not that many cuts, but because it is choreographed so well, it almost never loses its own energy and skips along at an amazing pace.
There is then an amusing scene where Welles continues narrating about the changing fashion trends from that time, and while this is going on, Joseph Cotten’s character is wearing various types of fashions, done through a careful series of cuts. Welles will have him walk out of the frame wearing one outfit and walk immediately back into it wearing a different one, the costume change and physical turnaround itself obscured by editing. This is an editing trick Welles often employed, especially in his earlier films.
There is another Welles trademark in these early sequences. As Cotten’s character is pursuing his love (Isabel), he sees her with another man, the man she would eventually marry. As he watches them walk down the street, we hear someone on the soundtrack say something about the couple, how mismatched they are and how it is a strange choice for Isabel. We do not see who is making this comment, but as Welles cuts to the next shot, there is a man getting a shave who turns around and, almost facing the camera directly, responds to the woman who made the comment (the story ultimately unfolds through the townspeople’s gossip). Welles has a tendency to mix in narration and on-and-off-screen character interaction. This is also seen in Citizen Kane and will be used to its fullest and most dynamic effect in F for Fake.
The Magnificent Ambersons is stylistically different from Citizen Kane in several aspects. For one, Ambersons is a much more somber film, not just in plot and character but also in its look. Characters walk across several rooms illuminated only very casually by shafts of light from dim light sources. Their identifiable yet ghostly silhouettes sometimes seem more prominent then their faces. Having actors walk around and act in silhouette also lends itself to this kind of a story that shifts through time (always forward in a linear fashion, rare for a Welles film). It also makes it more plausible as the characters themselves are always at a distance visually. Welles was not able to get Gregg Toland back as cinematographer but instead used Stanley Cortez, who beautifully shot the film, albeit without Toland’s never-ending depth of field. Ambersons doesn’t suffer because of it; it is beautifully choreographed, especially within the Amberson household itself. There are tracking shots that go on for minutes at a time, which give this film a very calculated and organically paced feel. Truffaut comments on the film’s small number of shots: “in The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles uses less than two-hundred shots to relate a story which spans twenty-five years [as opposed to 562 in Citizen Kane], as if the second movie had been shot in a fury by a different director who hated the first and wanted to give Welles a lesson in modesty… Many of Welles’s recent films give the impression that they were shot by an exhibitionist and edited by a censor.” Indeed, The Magnificent Ambersons is probably one of Welles’s slowest looking films as there are just not that many cuts, but because it is choreographed so well, it almost never loses its own energy and skips along at an amazing pace.
This film is the first in a long line of Welles’s films that was not released the way that he wanted. In fact, after Citizen Kane, there were only one or two films that Welles made where he had total control, especially in the final edit of the film. (The Trial would be an example of a film he did maintain total control over.) There is a certain obsession that comes over Welles’s fans about this aspect of his career, the mutilation of his films after he made them. Welles’s death in 1985 made a lot of these issues moot, since the man is no longer capable of defending his work and any further edits or changes to his films cannot be his own. Since his death, there have been at least three of his films re-edited or changed significantly: Othello, Touch of Evil, and Mr. Arkadin. However, for each of these, the intent was to modify them to be closer to what Welles wanted in the first place, but at best, these intentions are just good guesses by the people involved. Unfortunately, it seems as if the cinema will just have to deal with the fact that nearly all of Welles’s films were out of his control, and that almost all of them were changed after he made them but before they were distributed. The only objects we have to work with are the cinematic texts that exist now, whether this is the way he intended them or not.
RKO famously cut over forty minutes of material from The Magnificent Ambersons, mostly in the third act of the film. They also re-shot scenes without Welles there and changed the ending of the film to make it happier and more conclusive, matching the original book more than Welles had. There are entire books written about this film and the problems after Welles finished it, the differences between the versions and other problems surrounding its production. Suffice to say, RKO burned the original negatives of the film to make room in their vaults, so the truncated 88-minute version is all that exists today. However, even in its truncated form, the film is a masterpiece. The editor Robert Wise, who also edited Citizen Kane and became an important director in his own right, kept ensuring the public even years later that the original version of the film was no better than the version that was eventually released, and some others there at the time agree with him. Welles would go on to say that if the studio had not tampered with the film, it would have been better than Kane. Although it was nominated for Best Picture and Best Cinematography, the film did not do well with audiences, and didn’t make the money that RKO hoped for after their losses with Citizen Kane. Welles’s future as an auteur working in Hollywood was now in jeopardy.
RKO famously cut over forty minutes of material from The Magnificent Ambersons, mostly in the third act of the film. They also re-shot scenes without Welles there and changed the ending of the film to make it happier and more conclusive, matching the original book more than Welles had. There are entire books written about this film and the problems after Welles finished it, the differences between the versions and other problems surrounding its production. Suffice to say, RKO burned the original negatives of the film to make room in their vaults, so the truncated 88-minute version is all that exists today. However, even in its truncated form, the film is a masterpiece. The editor Robert Wise, who also edited Citizen Kane and became an important director in his own right, kept ensuring the public even years later that the original version of the film was no better than the version that was eventually released, and some others there at the time agree with him. Welles would go on to say that if the studio had not tampered with the film, it would have been better than Kane. Although it was nominated for Best Picture and Best Cinematography, the film did not do well with audiences, and didn’t make the money that RKO hoped for after their losses with Citizen Kane. Welles’s future as an auteur working in Hollywood was now in jeopardy.
Journey Into Fear
During the time that Welles was finishing up shooting The Magnificent Ambersons, he was also shooting another picture that he did not direct, per se, but it was a Mercury Production and involved a lot of Welles regulars. “For almost the last half of the actual shooting of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson was directing that film during the day and acting most nights in Journey into Fear, a film he suddenly decided to activate in order to get rid of all of his commitments with RKO by the time he left for Rio” (from the Peter Bogdanovich interviews). Welles was to go to Brazil and make a film called It’s All True. This film would never actually be finished and would compound Welles’s troubled relationship with Hollywood, but at the time, it created interference with the two projects he was trying to finish in the United States. The timing prevented him from staying in Hollywood to assist in the final edit of Ambersons (although he explicitly trusted Robert Wise and had given him extremely detailed instructions). It also caused this little-known film Journey into Fear to be quickly finished, preventing Welles from directing it; instead he would have his friend Norman Foster direct. There is some controversy about this because when watching the film, it seems that in certain parts the film is very Wellesian, looking like he had more to do with it than just acting. In truth he did; he storyboarded much of the movie and worked heavily in pre-production, so the film’s style does have a look of a Welles film, filtered through another artist’s intentions. When asked about who really directed the film, Welles responded, “I wasn’t even in the country for most of the picture. I was only there for three weeks. But I did the sets and I supervised the planning of the way it was going to be done. That picture was also ruined by the cutting…they just took out everything that made it interesting except the action—trying desperately to turn it into an action-B.”
Journey into Fear starts silently with a standard Welles angle (slightly canted, camera low to the ground and pointing upwards) on a street corner looking up into an apartment building. The camera, attached to a crane, booms upwards and spots a man in the window of an apartment cranking up a phonograph player, and a slightly distorted opera record begins to play. The man begins to comb his greasy black hair, and the phonograph begins to skip and gets locked into a repeating loop (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3). This is a purely radio device, Wellesian to the last. The man seems disinterested in the fact that the record is not playing correctly. He casually finishes combing his hair, picks up a gun, loads it with ammunition, and then turns off the phonograph record. He then walks to the back of the room (still all done in one shot), opens the door and steps out. As soon as he closes the door, there is a hard cut to the title card (extremely reminiscent of the title cards from Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons): “RKO RADIO PICTURES, INC. Presents JOURNEY INTO FEAR.” The screenplay is credited to Joseph Cotten from a novel by Eric Ambler. The third credit is “A Mercury Theater Production”.
There are many other moments in the film that point to Welles and his influence. After Cotten’s character is introduced, Everett Sloane (who played a central role in Kane) brings him to a bar where a magician is doing tricks. In addition to filmmaking, Welles was known to be a master magician. This magician is very over the top, filled with showmanship just as Welles would be. The magician eventually picks Cotten from the audience to participate in a magic trick that entertains everyone and embarrasses him. The magician ties Cotten up to a giant X that looks almost like a crucifix. The magician then gets into a box and, with the fire of a gun (and a blacking of the lights), the two switch places. But something has gone wrong, the magician has been shot in the dark, and he is dead. Cotten is found alive in the box, claiming “that was a good trick!” Sloane is worried and takes him back to the Secret Police Headquarters for protection. This is there where they meet Welles’s character, Colonel Haki, camouflaged in makeup as Welles always was in movies.
Journey into Fear starts silently with a standard Welles angle (slightly canted, camera low to the ground and pointing upwards) on a street corner looking up into an apartment building. The camera, attached to a crane, booms upwards and spots a man in the window of an apartment cranking up a phonograph player, and a slightly distorted opera record begins to play. The man begins to comb his greasy black hair, and the phonograph begins to skip and gets locked into a repeating loop (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3). This is a purely radio device, Wellesian to the last. The man seems disinterested in the fact that the record is not playing correctly. He casually finishes combing his hair, picks up a gun, loads it with ammunition, and then turns off the phonograph record. He then walks to the back of the room (still all done in one shot), opens the door and steps out. As soon as he closes the door, there is a hard cut to the title card (extremely reminiscent of the title cards from Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons): “RKO RADIO PICTURES, INC. Presents JOURNEY INTO FEAR.” The screenplay is credited to Joseph Cotten from a novel by Eric Ambler. The third credit is “A Mercury Theater Production”.
There are many other moments in the film that point to Welles and his influence. After Cotten’s character is introduced, Everett Sloane (who played a central role in Kane) brings him to a bar where a magician is doing tricks. In addition to filmmaking, Welles was known to be a master magician. This magician is very over the top, filled with showmanship just as Welles would be. The magician eventually picks Cotten from the audience to participate in a magic trick that entertains everyone and embarrasses him. The magician ties Cotten up to a giant X that looks almost like a crucifix. The magician then gets into a box and, with the fire of a gun (and a blacking of the lights), the two switch places. But something has gone wrong, the magician has been shot in the dark, and he is dead. Cotten is found alive in the box, claiming “that was a good trick!” Sloane is worried and takes him back to the Secret Police Headquarters for protection. This is there where they meet Welles’s character, Colonel Haki, camouflaged in makeup as Welles always was in movies.
As Cotten later boards a steamer to Batumi (so he can escape his Nazi assassins), Sloane gives him a gun. Cotten admits to never having fired a gun, even though he is a ballistics expert. Sloane tells Cotten, “It’s very simple, you just point and pull the trigger.” Welles’s character in The Lady from Shanghai would say something almost verbatim to Rita Hayworth’s character not too many years later.
At the end of the film, Cotten is finishing up a letter to his wife with Welles drinking in the background. Cotten finishes the letter, signs it, and tears it up. He says he’s tired of running away, throws the pieces on the floor and walks out of the room. The film fades to black and THE END triumphantly flashes onto the screen. This is a recurring motif in Welles’s real life—him finishing projects, whether they are films, paintings, other writings, then abandoning them by destroying them or losing them over time. Welles was not a pack rat and didn’t want his possessions to own him, he would say. It is even said that Welles wrote a book about politics and then destroyed the manuscript, believing that it wasn’t very good.
Journey into Fear is a difficult film. Not because it is extremely complex or deals with intricate subject matter; in fact, the plot of the film, while farfetched, is rather simple. Cotten plays an American munitions expert that is at some sort of conference in Turkey. Cotten’s life is threatened by Nazis and Colonel Haki swears to protect him by sending him on a ship out of Turkey by way of the Black Sea. There are numerous characters on the boat, including the assassin that we see in the pre-title sequence, who is after Cotten. The film is difficult because it is only 68 minutes long and feels heavily truncated and messy. The pacing begins normally enough, but as soon as Cotten gets onto the boat (about twenty minutes into the film) it seems like some scenes were arbitrarily left out or moved around, and the pacing itself becomes very jerky and inconsistent. This remains a problem for most of the middle of the film, and begins to level out towards the end when there is a shootout at a hotel in Batumi with Welles, Cotten, and the Nazi agent. The film attempts to hold itself together with a very strange narration by Cotten that is supposedly from a letter he is writing his wife to explain the events that happen within the film. The film feels clunky, though, and it would not be surprising if a significant portion was cut out by the studio to make it shorter, to fit it to the bottom of a double bill.
Norman Foster is credited as the director of Journey into Fear, and Welles himself states in This is Orson Welles (the Peter Bogdanovich interviews) that Foster did direct it and he only acted in the picture. Some argue that the film looks so much like Welles’s other works that he must have really been the man behind the camera. If it is a Welles picture, it is not a very good one. While it certainly has its moments (the beginning and the end, plus some great scenes on the ship in the second act, especially with Joseph Cotten and Mexican film star Dolores del Rio) it ultimately falls flat. While reminiscent of some of Welles’s style, it doesn’t maintain the pacing in the editing or the cinematography as his other films, even some of his more butchered ones.
At the end of the film, Cotten is finishing up a letter to his wife with Welles drinking in the background. Cotten finishes the letter, signs it, and tears it up. He says he’s tired of running away, throws the pieces on the floor and walks out of the room. The film fades to black and THE END triumphantly flashes onto the screen. This is a recurring motif in Welles’s real life—him finishing projects, whether they are films, paintings, other writings, then abandoning them by destroying them or losing them over time. Welles was not a pack rat and didn’t want his possessions to own him, he would say. It is even said that Welles wrote a book about politics and then destroyed the manuscript, believing that it wasn’t very good.
Journey into Fear is a difficult film. Not because it is extremely complex or deals with intricate subject matter; in fact, the plot of the film, while farfetched, is rather simple. Cotten plays an American munitions expert that is at some sort of conference in Turkey. Cotten’s life is threatened by Nazis and Colonel Haki swears to protect him by sending him on a ship out of Turkey by way of the Black Sea. There are numerous characters on the boat, including the assassin that we see in the pre-title sequence, who is after Cotten. The film is difficult because it is only 68 minutes long and feels heavily truncated and messy. The pacing begins normally enough, but as soon as Cotten gets onto the boat (about twenty minutes into the film) it seems like some scenes were arbitrarily left out or moved around, and the pacing itself becomes very jerky and inconsistent. This remains a problem for most of the middle of the film, and begins to level out towards the end when there is a shootout at a hotel in Batumi with Welles, Cotten, and the Nazi agent. The film attempts to hold itself together with a very strange narration by Cotten that is supposedly from a letter he is writing his wife to explain the events that happen within the film. The film feels clunky, though, and it would not be surprising if a significant portion was cut out by the studio to make it shorter, to fit it to the bottom of a double bill.
Norman Foster is credited as the director of Journey into Fear, and Welles himself states in This is Orson Welles (the Peter Bogdanovich interviews) that Foster did direct it and he only acted in the picture. Some argue that the film looks so much like Welles’s other works that he must have really been the man behind the camera. If it is a Welles picture, it is not a very good one. While it certainly has its moments (the beginning and the end, plus some great scenes on the ship in the second act, especially with Joseph Cotten and Mexican film star Dolores del Rio) it ultimately falls flat. While reminiscent of some of Welles’s style, it doesn’t maintain the pacing in the editing or the cinematography as his other films, even some of his more butchered ones.
Another reason there is an aura of mystery surrounding the film is that it is almost completely unavailable in the United States. Only on very rare occasions is the film screened on television and there has never been a home viewing release. With Journey into Fear, Welles officially finished off his contract with RKO, and in the end the studio would look at their relationship with Welles as a failed one. Three films (and one unfinished, It’s All True) that didn’t recoup their budgets. Undoubtedly, Welles was left in a very precarious situation.
The Stranger
Welles would not get to direct another film for four years. His next project would be a film called The Stranger from 1946. He was asked to star in the film opposite Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. Welles was to play a Nazi war criminal that made a safe haven for himself in Connecticut as a professor. Robinson’s character works for the United States government, hunting down ex-Nazi war criminals and becoming suspicious of one living under his nose. Welles was not very involved in the script, and he directed the film with a very light hand; that is, this is the least Wellesian picture that he ever made.
The film opens with a generic title sequence that could have been used for any film in the period. Instead of the black background with outlined white credits that were used in his previous three (or two depending on how you count them), The Stranger’s titles put a clock tower (which is featured heavily towards the end of the film) clumsily in the background with boring titles and bombastic credit music laid over.
There are only a few scenes that stand out as compositions in and of themselves. One is a few minutes into the film, showing Konrad Meinike—a former Nazi leader—entering America and going through customs. This scene is drenched in shadows, and a large portion is done in one take with complex camera movement that goes from medium, to long, to medium, all while floating through the immigration station. (This is a Welles visual motif that would be prominent in his films from the '40s and '50s.) The other scene that stands out is a tracking shot just a little over three minutes long, where Welles’s character is talking to Meinike and decides to strangle him in the woods. The camera begins with a medium close-up of the two men talking, they enter the woods and the camera pulls back and even rises above them, looking down at them in an omniscient mode. The camera then comes back in for the rest of the conversation, and the shot finally cuts after Welles murders his old acquaintance. Shortly after this shot, there is another long tracking shot on the way back out of the woods, where Welles covers his tracks. The camera is in a long shot looking down, following him as he stumbles out of the area.
The film opens with a generic title sequence that could have been used for any film in the period. Instead of the black background with outlined white credits that were used in his previous three (or two depending on how you count them), The Stranger’s titles put a clock tower (which is featured heavily towards the end of the film) clumsily in the background with boring titles and bombastic credit music laid over.
There are only a few scenes that stand out as compositions in and of themselves. One is a few minutes into the film, showing Konrad Meinike—a former Nazi leader—entering America and going through customs. This scene is drenched in shadows, and a large portion is done in one take with complex camera movement that goes from medium, to long, to medium, all while floating through the immigration station. (This is a Welles visual motif that would be prominent in his films from the '40s and '50s.) The other scene that stands out is a tracking shot just a little over three minutes long, where Welles’s character is talking to Meinike and decides to strangle him in the woods. The camera begins with a medium close-up of the two men talking, they enter the woods and the camera pulls back and even rises above them, looking down at them in an omniscient mode. The camera then comes back in for the rest of the conversation, and the shot finally cuts after Welles murders his old acquaintance. Shortly after this shot, there is another long tracking shot on the way back out of the woods, where Welles covers his tracks. The camera is in a long shot looking down, following him as he stumbles out of the area.
These are beautiful scenes, and to be fair, the film does have other striking moments. The performances are uniformly strong, especially from Billy House, the great character actor who acts as the checkers player and druggist that ties up all the characters together in the middle of the film. Welles would later say that this was his least favorite film that he worked on as director. He would relate that he had no control over the editing; the studio cut about 25 minutes of footage that he wanted included, but he had no authority over the final edit. He felt limited by the studio and was walking on eggshells due to the financial failures of his past projects. He needed to prove that he could be a commercial director, and he was successful in that respect. The Stranger is the only Welles film that turned a profit after its release, and it is ironic, because despite being an above average studio picture, the film just does not have the unique touch that Welles gave his other films save for the two sequences mentioned above.
The Lady from Shanghai
Welles’s next project proved to be much more interesting, as he was able to stamp his own visual style over much of the picture. That film is The Lady from Shanghai, from 1947. With a story told in many places around the world, Everett Sloane playing a sort of heavy, Welles providing narration (in an outrageous Irish accent), and other strange characters that seem to come and go from the story at will, this film played much more to Welles’s talents. It is said that he was contractually obligated to make the film for Columbia after he borrowed a large amount of money from the studio to finish a theater project he had been working on—at least that is how Welles liked to tell the story, outlandish as it sounds.
Immediately the look and feel of this film harken back to The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane: the camera is free-flowing, handheld for many shots, unheard of for its time. Welles shoves his camera into actors’ faces, so close that many of the close-ups are out of focus—a technique he would use frequently and which has been picked up by other directors, such as David Lynch in Inland Empire.
The first scene in the film, as Welles is walking through Central Park, has his own narration played over the images to give a little of the back story. He encounters Rita Hayworth in a carriage and Welles, the narrator, begins to talk about her. The narrator recounts, “I asked her if she’d have a cigarette.” Then Welles cuts to a close-up of himself, in the scene, looking at Hayworth. He says, “It’s my last one, I’ve been lookin’ forward to it so please don’t disappoint me.” The interaction between narration and dialogue is a motif that he put into almost all of his more personal films, the last time being in The Magnificent Ambersons. This has a way of propelling the narrative forward, the interaction between narration and on-screen action. It gives the story a very deliberate and dramatic pace, all elements coming together to tell the story quickly. This film moves very fast and the first time one watches it, it may be difficult to completely follow the plot—especially the legendary “hall of mirrors.”
Immediately the look and feel of this film harken back to The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane: the camera is free-flowing, handheld for many shots, unheard of for its time. Welles shoves his camera into actors’ faces, so close that many of the close-ups are out of focus—a technique he would use frequently and which has been picked up by other directors, such as David Lynch in Inland Empire.
The first scene in the film, as Welles is walking through Central Park, has his own narration played over the images to give a little of the back story. He encounters Rita Hayworth in a carriage and Welles, the narrator, begins to talk about her. The narrator recounts, “I asked her if she’d have a cigarette.” Then Welles cuts to a close-up of himself, in the scene, looking at Hayworth. He says, “It’s my last one, I’ve been lookin’ forward to it so please don’t disappoint me.” The interaction between narration and dialogue is a motif that he put into almost all of his more personal films, the last time being in The Magnificent Ambersons. This has a way of propelling the narrative forward, the interaction between narration and on-screen action. It gives the story a very deliberate and dramatic pace, all elements coming together to tell the story quickly. This film moves very fast and the first time one watches it, it may be difficult to completely follow the plot—especially the legendary “hall of mirrors.”
Another interesting sequence is a little less than fifteen minutes into the picture. At this point Welles and the rest of the characters are on a yacht, traveling from New York to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal. They have stopped at a cove and another character is about to be introduced—George Grisby, played by Glenn Anders in one of the strangest one-of-a-kind performances to ever grace a film. What follows is a shot-by-shot analysis of this scene:
| It begins with the frame filled with a silhouetted image of Hayworth diving off of a rock face. It is not just an image of Hayworth, however. It is supposed to be the view from a telescope, and thus Welles frames it within the circle of the apparatus, with the background behind the telescope extremely out of focus. This is evidently an optical trick and not a real reflection of what the telescope is seeing. Grisby, who is holding the telescope, brings it down and his face completely fills the frame, there is a rack focus to bring him sharply into focus. It is almost like peeling layers off of an onion, as the background behind his face is now extremely out of focus. He smiles maniacally and directly at the camera. We cut to a handheld shot of Hayworth climbing the rocks to dive again. This gives the audience the feeling they are on the boat and that it is the perspective of a voyeur. Reverse to a medium shot of Grisby, bringing the telescope back to his eye and smiling. Now we see that he is in a small speedboat, but we were given that idea in the previous shot due to the handheld camera. As soon as the telescope is brought up to his eye, there is a reverse shot of Hayworth framed in a circle. This time we see nothing besides this circular image, thus we are inside the telescope so to speak, closer to Grisby’s character as we now know what he is doing. There is a fade to a different shot of Hayworth while we are within this telescopic sight. This is the only unusual shot of this sequence; since the second shot of Hayworth is a standard Hollywood-style beauty shot, it would not be surprising to learn that the studio cut this into the picture later on, as a fade within a point of view shot within a telescope is an awfully awkward visual device. There is now a reverse to a medium shot of Grisby, lowering the telescope and smiling that distinct maniacal smile once again. Cut to a shot of Hayworth lying down, now from a more cinematic perspective and not from the voyeuristic mode from before (the telescope is lowered, thus…). Welles now cuts to a close up of Grisby, swallowing and blinking, obviously engaged with what he is seeing. Welles comes behind Hayworth as she is lying down to show the larger boat (where Welles’s character is standing) in relation to Hayworth’s location. Welles cuts to a medium shot of Grisby starting his speedboat. We are finally brought onboard the larger boat where Welles’s character is studying the sea and the rocks, looking at him from behind. Then he cuts to an out-of-focus, close-up profile shot where he is smoking a cigarette. Grisby’s speedboat becomes prominent in the frame as he approaches. This out-of-focus shot of Welles’s character does something very important. In a strange way, it brings the audience closer to his character, because it is so odd and because he has such an inquisitive expression on his face, we know the encounter he is about to have with Grisby is going to be dramatic and strange, and it is. |
Welles puts together the aforementioned sequence in eleven shots, for a total of 37 seconds of running time. That is roughly three and a half seconds a shot, which is fairly quick for 1948. In comparison, The Magnificent Ambersons roughly holds onto each shot for twenty-six seconds. We also begin to see with the sequence (and many others within the film) Welles’s obsession with violent shot-reverse shot formulation. He takes this concept to a new level in Chimes at Midnight during the famous battle sequence. He tends to get away from the classical definition of shot-reverse shot a bit (from Silverman’s definition above); instead of using this technique solely for establishing suture and character geography, Welles, in his later films, uses this type of cutting to imply a sense of personal violence between characters and situations, whether it be voyeuristic violence or real, physical violence. As Welles progressed as a filmmaker, the complexity of his editing increased, and the length of time that he held onto any given shot decreased. “When I made Kane, I didn’t know enough about movies, and I was constantly encouraged by Toland, who said, under the influence of [John] Ford, ‘Carry everything in one shot—don’t do anything else.’ In other words, play scenes through without cutting, and don’t shoot an alternate version…I only learned about cutting when I got to Europe and had people who didn’t speak English—or people who weren’t even actors in the roles, wearing wigs and standing with their backs to the cameras—so that I had to fake things, and learn how to cut in order to cover troubles I was in. Now I’m in love with cutting.”
The sequence that is talked about the most in The Lady from Shanghai is the funhouse sequence at the end of the film. As he says in the narration, “I came to in the crazy house. And for a while there, I thought it was me that was crazy!” Welles’s film techniques in this sequence are extremely advanced and experimental for his time. The sequence begins with a distorted, cropped image of Welles’s face, which is racked out of focus. As the image is blurry, he zooms into his face even more and racks it back into focus, creating the dreamlike atmosphere that is to follow. He uses endless shadows on the walls, dancing from the left to the right, as he himself seems to float through the scene. Welles also uses camera techniques that would become a staple of his style in the 1950’s; that is, booming camerawork where the camera literally swings into a scene, usually at a canted angle, and swings out of it matching the angle in the next take. This is a very dizzying technique that works perfectly in the funhouse, and generally works for Welles’s films as many of them have dizzying storylines with heavy amounts of dialogue, so the viewer is literally thrown into scenes without knowing what they are all about. That is to say, his camerawork began to match the idiosyncratic style of his plots.
As the funhouse sequence progresses, the characters eventually find themselves in a hall of mirrors. “The hall of mirrors is a superb metaphor for the movie career of Orson Welles,” according to auteurist film scholar Andrew Sarris. In this sequence, the audience is unaware (like the characters) of what is real and what is not. Hayworth and Welles are exponentially multiplied through the mirrors as they talk to each other, harkening back to the mirror shot in Citizen Kane. The sequence becomes even more complex as the Everett Sloane character enters the scene. Welles begins to use camera tricks on top of the mirroring effect to give a truly surreal sense to the scene. He uses superimposition to create violent framing of the characters. Close-ups on Hayworth’s eyes as Sloane stumbles from the right of the frame to the left—sometimes his mirroring is going under the Hayworth image, sometimes over. “With these mirrors, its difficult to tell. You are aiming at me, aren’t you?” says Sloane. These characters (as they are compared to sharks earlier in the film—creatures who will eventually even destroy themselves since they have no sense of who is the enemy and who is not) are trapped in a visual metaphor, not knowing exactly what they are aiming at when they fire their guns, themselves, reflections of others. As they start firing, the glass in the room begins to shatter, the mirrors begin to come down, but even with most of them destroyed it is still difficult to understand the reality of the situation, which works perfectly within the confines of the story. In fact, in a beautiful shot that may be misrecognized as a mistake (but it is doubtful that it is), Hayworth leaves the scene, wounded, and the camera swings to the right to follow her out the door. The frame is still shattered, but it is obvious that it is the lens on the camera that is broken, as the shattered effect statically moves with the movement of the camera.
As the funhouse sequence progresses, the characters eventually find themselves in a hall of mirrors. “The hall of mirrors is a superb metaphor for the movie career of Orson Welles,” according to auteurist film scholar Andrew Sarris. In this sequence, the audience is unaware (like the characters) of what is real and what is not. Hayworth and Welles are exponentially multiplied through the mirrors as they talk to each other, harkening back to the mirror shot in Citizen Kane. The sequence becomes even more complex as the Everett Sloane character enters the scene. Welles begins to use camera tricks on top of the mirroring effect to give a truly surreal sense to the scene. He uses superimposition to create violent framing of the characters. Close-ups on Hayworth’s eyes as Sloane stumbles from the right of the frame to the left—sometimes his mirroring is going under the Hayworth image, sometimes over. “With these mirrors, its difficult to tell. You are aiming at me, aren’t you?” says Sloane. These characters (as they are compared to sharks earlier in the film—creatures who will eventually even destroy themselves since they have no sense of who is the enemy and who is not) are trapped in a visual metaphor, not knowing exactly what they are aiming at when they fire their guns, themselves, reflections of others. As they start firing, the glass in the room begins to shatter, the mirrors begin to come down, but even with most of them destroyed it is still difficult to understand the reality of the situation, which works perfectly within the confines of the story. In fact, in a beautiful shot that may be misrecognized as a mistake (but it is doubtful that it is), Hayworth leaves the scene, wounded, and the camera swings to the right to follow her out the door. The frame is still shattered, but it is obvious that it is the lens on the camera that is broken, as the shattered effect statically moves with the movement of the camera.
Mr. Arkadin
The next film that this article will look into is Welles’s 1955 film, Mr. Arkadin. Welles made this film after bringing Shakespeare to the screen, namely with his films Macbeth (the last he would make in America until Touch of Evil) and Othello. Mr. Arkadin is perhaps Welles’s most misunderstood film, due in part to the fact that the film was completely butchered in the editing room by the producers, more so than even Ambersons. In 2006 there was a reconstruction of the film based on many different versions out there performed by Welles experts, and that is the version that is now considered the official one. However, like all of Welles’s posthumously re-edited films, it is hard to say whether the man would have approved of them or not. Taking this into consideration, one can easily see that in this film Welles took all of his visual and storytelling style to the limits.
From a section in Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema: “The key to the director (as well as Mr. Arkadin) is revealed when Orson Welles (alias Gregory Arkadin) tells the story of a frog and a scorpion meeting by a river. When the scorpion asks to ride across the river on the frog’s back, the frog demurs: ‘If I take you on my back, you will sting me, and your sting is fatal.’ The scorpion responds with a plausible argument: ‘Where is the logic in that? If I sting you, we both will drown.’ The frog, a logical creature, then agrees to transport the scorpion, but he no sooner reaches the middle of the river than he feels a deadly sting in his back. ‘Where is the logic in this’ croaks the dying frog as he begins to sink below the surface. ‘This is my character,’ replies the doomed scorpion, ‘and there is no logic in character.’” Sarris makes the argument that Welles, the great artist that he is, can be nothing less than exactly that, a great artist. This does not always translate to a great compromiser, or a great businessman.
Many people believe that Orson Welles damned himself when it came to his own films, and their being finished the way he wanted them to be. Welles proved with The Stranger that he was capable of making films that made a profit; they just weren’t the films he wanted to make. When Welles left to go to Brazil before he finished his second (and arguably third) film, he left his own work open to destruction, and was too far away and preoccupied with his next project, to be able to ensure that what he had already finished would be preserved. It is true that many of the changes to his films were out of his control, contractually, but he could have compromised a bit, and maintained a personal involvement in the butchering of his own films. Sarris’ comment also pertains to Welles’s style. Mr. Arkadin is a story told through flashback, like many of his other films. The flashback structure (which has been reconstituted in the 2006 cut of the film) was so complex originally that the studio that financed the film re-edited the film into a linear order, thereby destroying the fabric of the film itself, as it was meant to be told in flashback. By changing this, the movie, in plain terms, doesn’t make any sense. The pacing is terrible, character interactions seem to have no basis, and the story plods along without any understanding of itself. He considered Mr. Arkadin to be the worst experience of his career, but in truth there is a lot about this film that is worth considering and, on purely visual terms, it is a masterpiece.
The compositions in Mr. Arkadin are quite striking, but in an entirely different way than Ambersons or Kane. Those films are beautiful and singular, they are carefully and painstakingly constructed and the camera movement is well thought out. Mr. Arkadin is almost the exact opposite; the sets are bare, or at least simple. The camera can seem to the viewer sometimes like an untamed wildcat, ferociously swinging and swaying out of control, but always with a rhythm that is thoughtful and purposeful. The editing structure (as much as can be preserved from what Welles edited) is whimsical and complex. Like many of his past films, Mr. Arkadin works on two levels, a visual level and a sonic level. Much of the story is narrated by the radio actor Guy Van Stratten, as he tells his elaborate tale to a man whom the audience does not know until much later in the film, after Guy’s story is told. Like Kane, Ambersons, and The Lady from Shanghai, the interaction between on-screen narration and on-screen action is complex and intertwined. Oftentimes in the film, Guy’s narration could easily double for Guy’s actual dialogue in a scene that the viewer is watching; characters within the scene may respond directly to the narration as if Guy says the lines directly to them.
Early in the film, as Guy begins to tell his story, Welles frames him from below (classic Welles) and Guy turns to the left and begins to walk as he is talking. The camera follows him, but instead of simply tracking to the left, or panning to the left, Welles pivots the camera to the left to give the viewer a sense of distortion. There is a visual transition in the film at this point as he is telling his story, a wipe from right to left, which works well with the direction Welles is pivoting the camera. This goes into a shot which is also pivoting, but the camera is turned to its other side (the beginning of the motion that occurred in the shot before), thus, it looks as if the camera pivoted around and entered into a completely different space. With this maneuver, it seems as if the camera pans around more than 360 degrees, which is of course impossible, but it is a very nice way to transition a scene. This type of motif is often repeated in this film and the films Welles would make afterwards, such as Touch of Evil and The Trial.
Many people believe that Orson Welles damned himself when it came to his own films, and their being finished the way he wanted them to be. Welles proved with The Stranger that he was capable of making films that made a profit; they just weren’t the films he wanted to make. When Welles left to go to Brazil before he finished his second (and arguably third) film, he left his own work open to destruction, and was too far away and preoccupied with his next project, to be able to ensure that what he had already finished would be preserved. It is true that many of the changes to his films were out of his control, contractually, but he could have compromised a bit, and maintained a personal involvement in the butchering of his own films. Sarris’ comment also pertains to Welles’s style. Mr. Arkadin is a story told through flashback, like many of his other films. The flashback structure (which has been reconstituted in the 2006 cut of the film) was so complex originally that the studio that financed the film re-edited the film into a linear order, thereby destroying the fabric of the film itself, as it was meant to be told in flashback. By changing this, the movie, in plain terms, doesn’t make any sense. The pacing is terrible, character interactions seem to have no basis, and the story plods along without any understanding of itself. He considered Mr. Arkadin to be the worst experience of his career, but in truth there is a lot about this film that is worth considering and, on purely visual terms, it is a masterpiece.
The compositions in Mr. Arkadin are quite striking, but in an entirely different way than Ambersons or Kane. Those films are beautiful and singular, they are carefully and painstakingly constructed and the camera movement is well thought out. Mr. Arkadin is almost the exact opposite; the sets are bare, or at least simple. The camera can seem to the viewer sometimes like an untamed wildcat, ferociously swinging and swaying out of control, but always with a rhythm that is thoughtful and purposeful. The editing structure (as much as can be preserved from what Welles edited) is whimsical and complex. Like many of his past films, Mr. Arkadin works on two levels, a visual level and a sonic level. Much of the story is narrated by the radio actor Guy Van Stratten, as he tells his elaborate tale to a man whom the audience does not know until much later in the film, after Guy’s story is told. Like Kane, Ambersons, and The Lady from Shanghai, the interaction between on-screen narration and on-screen action is complex and intertwined. Oftentimes in the film, Guy’s narration could easily double for Guy’s actual dialogue in a scene that the viewer is watching; characters within the scene may respond directly to the narration as if Guy says the lines directly to them.
Early in the film, as Guy begins to tell his story, Welles frames him from below (classic Welles) and Guy turns to the left and begins to walk as he is talking. The camera follows him, but instead of simply tracking to the left, or panning to the left, Welles pivots the camera to the left to give the viewer a sense of distortion. There is a visual transition in the film at this point as he is telling his story, a wipe from right to left, which works well with the direction Welles is pivoting the camera. This goes into a shot which is also pivoting, but the camera is turned to its other side (the beginning of the motion that occurred in the shot before), thus, it looks as if the camera pivoted around and entered into a completely different space. With this maneuver, it seems as if the camera pans around more than 360 degrees, which is of course impossible, but it is a very nice way to transition a scene. This type of motif is often repeated in this film and the films Welles would make afterwards, such as Touch of Evil and The Trial.
Mr. Arkadin seems to have inspired the French New Wave directors quite a bit; it is certainly Welles’s most new-wavy film. It is a patchwork of quickly cut scenes with a very deep and strange narrative that is partially flashback, and part present time. It is said that Jean-Luc Godard loved this film more than any of Welles’s other works, and put it on his top-ten list for films of that year. Truffaut finds Welles’s visual style to be consistent, yet one all its own: “Welles might well find all other films slack, flat, static, because his are so dynamic. They unroll before the eyes the way music moves in the ear.” This is a brilliant comment, as the pacing of Welles’s films (especially in Mr. Arkadin) is completely his own.
It would be nearly impossible to closely scrutinize all of Welles’s films within the confines of this article. As he got older, Welles’s budgets for his films dropped significantly. He was often making films with a scant crew of no more than a handful of people, so he concentrated on his editing techniques, creating explosive collisions of meaning and providing insight into his characters and stories just through the cutting. F for Fake, for example, is a film that could be called an exercise in editing, as he took footage that had already been shot and combined it with his own footage to create a dazzling essay-format documentary on art fakers. It is barely a documentary at all, and in fact it is in a genre on its own. Despite the fact that F for Fake is the only film in his canon from the 1970’s, he was constantly working on projects, doing little bits at a time, endlessly searching for funding, but usually coming up dry.
In the end, it is important to recognize that there was more to Orson Welles than War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane. Peter Bogdanovich relates a story about himself sitting down with Welles and Norman Mailer at some point for dinner: “the first thing Norman did after we sat down was to ask Orson about a particular shot from Kane, and Orson said with a groan, ‘Oh, no, please, Norman, not Citizen Kane!’ Mailer looked surprised for a moment, then nodded and said, ‘Oh, yeah, OK—it’s like me and The Naked and the Dead.’ ‘Yeah,’ Orson said, and roared with laughter. The one picture everyone always asked him about was the one he least wanted to discuss, mainly perhaps because it was the only one anybody ever brought up.” It is easy to commiserate with Welles on the subject of Kane, but for the sake of Orson Welles’s legacy—it’s still worthy of discussion.
It would be nearly impossible to closely scrutinize all of Welles’s films within the confines of this article. As he got older, Welles’s budgets for his films dropped significantly. He was often making films with a scant crew of no more than a handful of people, so he concentrated on his editing techniques, creating explosive collisions of meaning and providing insight into his characters and stories just through the cutting. F for Fake, for example, is a film that could be called an exercise in editing, as he took footage that had already been shot and combined it with his own footage to create a dazzling essay-format documentary on art fakers. It is barely a documentary at all, and in fact it is in a genre on its own. Despite the fact that F for Fake is the only film in his canon from the 1970’s, he was constantly working on projects, doing little bits at a time, endlessly searching for funding, but usually coming up dry.
In the end, it is important to recognize that there was more to Orson Welles than War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane. Peter Bogdanovich relates a story about himself sitting down with Welles and Norman Mailer at some point for dinner: “the first thing Norman did after we sat down was to ask Orson about a particular shot from Kane, and Orson said with a groan, ‘Oh, no, please, Norman, not Citizen Kane!’ Mailer looked surprised for a moment, then nodded and said, ‘Oh, yeah, OK—it’s like me and The Naked and the Dead.’ ‘Yeah,’ Orson said, and roared with laughter. The one picture everyone always asked him about was the one he least wanted to discuss, mainly perhaps because it was the only one anybody ever brought up.” It is easy to commiserate with Welles on the subject of Kane, but for the sake of Orson Welles’s legacy—it’s still worthy of discussion.
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