THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART V: Rosebud

After THE TRIAL, Welles spent a few years making highbrow fare for the Europeans. In 1965, he made the film many Wellesians consider his masterpiece, FALSTAFF (CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT), an original script culled together from several Shakespeare plays about Falstaff, the disgraced old knight and “misleader of youth” Welles was born to play. In 1968, he directed, wrote, and costarred in a color adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s THE IMMORTAL STORY with Jeanne Moreau for French television. And in 1973, he directed F FOR Fake, an essay film that is part documentary, part creative nonfiction. It is a meditation on art and forgery—and one of his best films.

By then, however, the money had dried up in Europe. Welles may have been a great artist, but he was never box office gold. He was barely box office bronze. He returned to America and took roles in films that were beneath him. He channeled the money back into his projects like THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, a drama featuring John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich, and his buddy from his RKO days, JOURNEY INTO FEAR director Norman Foster.

He still dabbled in pulp and noir, too. He shot an adaptation of Charles Williams’s DEAD CALM called THE DEEP with Laurence Harvey, working on it until Harvey died. He planned an adaptation of Jim Thompson’s A HELL OF A WOMAN with director Gary Graver, but like almost all of his projects in the seventies and eighties, it had to be shelved for lack of funds. Hollywood, which had never liked Welles, had now forgotten him. He was old and broke in a town where only youth and money mattered. In 1985, at the age of 70, he died at home working on a script.

There is a heartbreaking bargain you have to make with Orson Welles. Much of his work—more than that of any other major director—comes to us in damaged shape. When you consider that he was making difficult films to begin with, the full picture begins to emerge.

Orson Welles was either too much of an artist or too much of an egomaniac—perhaps both—to ever fully commit to genre, even for the duration of a single film. He liked genre but viewed it as a beginning, a jumping off place. This was no less true for a thriller than for a Shakespeare adaptation. His instinct was to be, as he once angrily wrote Harry Cohn, “original, or at the least somewhat oblique.” Win or lose—and he lost often—his films were stamped with the conviction that cinema was an instrument of experimentation and poetry, not formula.

In some ways, this brings us back to his first film, CITIZEN KANE. A flop upon first release, it influenced, directly or indirectly, almost everyone and everything that came after it. After being studied with Talmudic intensity by film geeks for nearly seventy years, it’s been enshrined as something approaching the Ur-text of modern film. Yet its reputation as the so-called “Greatest Movie Ever Made” threatens to render it a museum piece, like something Charles Foster Kane would have boxed up in his warehouse—an odd fate for a film that crackles with a giddy delight in the possibilities of cinema.

It is neither a crime film nor a thriller—indeed part of its appeal is that it defies easy categorization—but it contains many distinctly noir elements: chiaroscuro lighting, slanted angles, narrative disorientation, a sense of futility, a downbeat ending. Its fundamental story of a poor boy gaining the world but losing his soul is the American Dream turned gothic nightmare. Welles didn’t invent film noir, but he got to the party early.

Indeed, his immediate impact on noir was profound. Consider the talent he helped bring to Hollywood: actors Joseph Cotton, Paul Stewart, Erskine Sanford, Ted de Corsia, Everett Sloane, Norman Lloyd, Agnes Moorehead; producer John Houseman; composer Bernard Herrmann; director John Berry. Consider his direct influence on noir directors like Berry, Norman Foster, and Robert Wise. Or consider the stylistic influence of CITIZEN KANE, The LADY FROM SHANGHAI, TOUCH OF EVIL and THE TRIAL.

Most of all, consider the worldview permeating almost all his work. Welles was an artist with something to say. From his first film until his last, his movies presented a distinct vision, a distinctly noir vision, of life as a strange place, one we’re all struggling to survive.

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART IV: Noir As European Art Film

After his work on TOUCH OF EVIL failed to produce any further opportunities in Hollywood, Orson Welles once again found himself in trouble. An unexpected offer to direct again came in 1961 when he was approached by independent producer Alexander Salkind and asked to choose from a list of properties to direct. Welles opted to make an adaptation of Kafka’s THE TRIAL. The result is a European art film suffused with his noir vision.

The setup is pure Kafka: a man named Joseph K wakes up one morning to find that he is being persecuted for some unknown offense. He stumbles from one bizarre confrontation with the law to another, but he is never told what he's charged with. Welles, unencumbered by a need to reflect reality, takes this surreal premise and runs with it.

And what a vision he creates: the architecture is constantly closing in on Joseph K (Anthony Perkins), the camera forever angled so as to make the ceilings press down. Angles are sharpened like knives, and the film is full of sight lines of maddening symmetrical perfection. When K goes to work, it is at an office straight out of Vidor’s THE CROWD, with desks and florescent lights perfectly aligned and stretching off into infinity. Even in scenes shot outside, Welles emphasizes plain building facades with long lines of bare windows. K is like a man caught inside a machine about to crush him to pieces. Shot largely in and around Paris’s abandoned Gare d’Orsay, the film is full of huge spaces overhung with iron rafters. Welles makes an epic out of these caverns. His ambition is to give us a dreamlike world, a nightmare we can’t see through. He succeeds in this respect because the movie doesn’t seem placed in our world. It almost seems to have been shot on a gigantic studio set, every frame seeming wonderfully artificial. I say ‘almost’ and ‘seeming’, however, because it doesn’t have a studio look like Willy Wonka’s factory or the Emerald City in Oz, though it is every bit as offbeat. It seems real but not real. That it was filmed without many sets at all and still achieves this otherworldly quality is a testament to Welles’s ability to shoot on location, as well as a testament to the innate midnight weirdness of certain sections of Paris, Rome, and Zagreb.

Enjoying more freedom than he’d had on any film since CITIZEN KANE, Welles also perfected the uniquely disjointed mise-en-scène that had gotten him into such trouble in Hollywood. As his cinematographer Edmond Richard later explained it in ORSON WELLES AT WORK, “[Welles] had key positions where his actors would stop…In moving from one point to another, every eccentricity was permitted; in the key positions he wanted to see their eyes. This created an extraordinarily dynamic and syncopated rhythm: movement, pause; movement, pause. Even in complicated movements… of fifty meters, in an S shape, going up, going down, there would be infernal positions that had to be linked in a single movement."

The primary pleasure of an Orson Welles movie is the visual texture the director creates. THE TRIAL is, in some ways, the best example of this in his entire filmography. Because the story unfolds, as the film comments on itself at one point, with “the logic of a dream” Welles has the freedom to do whatever he wants in terms of creating a physical reality that hounds Josef K (Anthony Perkins). This movie was also one of the few times in his post-KANE career where he had the freedom to achieve his vision how he saw fit.

Anthony Perkins is a perfect choice to play K because he has that essential weirdness that seems totally at place in this type of story, which is to say that he seems completely incapable of figuring out what the hell is going on. He’s jittery and oddly funny, a maladroit constantly being thwarted in his desire to sort things out logically. His performance would be out of place in most movies, but this, wonderfully, isn’t most movies.

THE TRIAL is an odd addition to the Welles filmography. While visually and thematically the film has much in common with film noir, it also has a distinctly expressionist, allegorical quality that surpasses anything else in the director's body of work. If it lacks the emotional immediacy of some of his best work, it makes up for it in the evocative power of Welles's surrealist imagery. The scene of Perkins being trapped in a cage by a horde of screaming pubescent girls, for instance, seems like a harbinger not just of the sexual hysteria of Beatlemania (which, with all due respect to the Fab Four, had less to do with their beautiful music than with the fracturing of sexual repression that would lead to the sexual revolution) but also of the entire social upheaval of the 1960s. Likewise, Welles rewrites Kafka's ending to give us both a tinge of hope and a heaping of mushroom cloud paranoia. Where Kafka foresaw the rise of fascist powers in the thirties, Welles uses Kafka to invoke the splintering of Western culture and the dread of Cold War annihilation.

If THE TRIAL isn’t quite a noir, it emanates from the same dark region of the mind that produced something like the protonoir STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940). Whatever label you attach to it, it is one of Welles’s great achievements.

Next week: Part V: Rosebud

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART III: A Wild Night In A Sleazy Town

Despite his struggles directing in Hollywood, Orson Welles had stayed in business there as a movie star. Once he started really packing on the pounds in the fifties, however, he became a self-described "ham actor," a celebrity supporting-player enlisted to class up inferior productions with his marquee name. He was originally slated to perform this function in a cops and robbers picture called BADGE OF EVIL starring Charlton Heston, but when Heston suggestion to Universal that Welles direct the picture the studio reluctantly agree. Seizing this opportunity, Welles changed the title and rewrote the script, transforming the standard little thriller into something truly bizarre.

The result, TOUCH OF EVIL, is one of the great pieces of cinematic trash. It’s a frantic film, wildly over the top, in love with its own squalor, infatuated with the feel and smell of decay. Among the director’s attempts at pulp, it is his masterpiece.

At its center is Welles himself, grotesque in the role of a bloated, degenerate cop named Hank Quinlan. In his small Texas border town, Quinlan is a legend, a redneck Sherlock Holmes who always gets his man. When a car bomb suddenly explodes on his side of the border, killing a rich developer and his girlfriend, Quinlan sets out to find the killer. Also investigating the bombing is a Mexican narcotics officer named Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), a newlywed in town with his wife Susie (Janet Leigh). Vargas thinks the bombing might have something to do with a high profile case he’s working on involving a Mexican drug cartel headed by a goofball named Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff). Quinlan doesn’t want Vargas messing around in his investigation, probably because he’s already decided the killer is the young Mexican who has been dating the dead man’s daughter.

The film is a boxing match between the two lawmen, one corrupt and disintegrating, the other upright and honest to a fault. Surrounding them, in a torrent of activity, is a sprawling cast of oddities headed by Quinlan’s fidgety, overly faithful sidekick Menzies (Joseph Calleia). The film has the feel—both visually and thematically—of a spiral. Action drifts back and forth across the border, characters and plotlines swerve in and out of focus, but at the center of it, circling each other like fighters, are Quinlan and Vargas, each convinced that he is right, each increasingly convinced that the other is a bigger problem than the killer. By the end, they’ve both compromised themselves, and one of them lies dead, sinking into a drainage ditch between their two countries.

TOUCH OF EVIL is, in many ways, a culmination of everything Welles thought about pulp art. He had struggled before to get his vision of noir to the screen, and he directed this movie as if it might be his last chance (which it was). Pushed along by Henry Mancini’s blistering score, the film is relentless. Camera setups—including, of course, the famous three minute opening shot—swing in and demand attention. Trash blows down streets, people scurry in and out of frames (Akim Tamiroff unspools pages of dialog while running). Crane shots swoop up and down, shadows splash across walls. The film is a whirlpool from start to finish.

Not only is it packed with visual details, it also indulges Welles’s affection for vignettes. Take the scene late in the film in which Quinlan crosses the border and stumbles across a house-of-ill-repute he used to frequent. Still manning the house, with steaming bowls of chili in the kitchen and a tinkling pianola in the parlor, is Tanya (Marlene Dietrich, laconic as ever). She takes one look at Quinlan and tells him the truth, “You’re a mess, honey.”

And he is. Hank Quinlan is one of Welles’s great creations. The director had always been obsessed with old men—they were a constant in his work—but he had a brutal ambivalence about their disintegration. Hank Quinlan is a monster—albeit a human one—and Welles is unflinching in his embrace of the big man’s fall.

A film this manic can’t be perfect. Dennis Weaver’s portrayal of the Night Man—the twitchy manager of an isolated motel where Susie Vargas is terrorized by thugs—is the oddest character Welles ever put on screen (which, given the director’s fondness for absurdist clowns, is saying quite a lot). But pointing out the excesses of a film that luxuriates in excess is like criticizing a musical for having too much singing and dancing. TOUCH OF EVIL is exactly what it wants to be, a wild night in a sleazy town.

Alas, Universal was not impressed. The studio had been sending Welles encouraging messages throughout filming, but when it all came together…the film was just too much. By that point, Welles had gone down to Mexico to work on Don Quixote, and the film was reedited in his absence. His triumphant return to Hollywood seemed to have come to nothing.

Over time, however, TOUCH OF EVIL was recognized as a masterpiece and restored to something close to Welles’s original cut. Paul Schrader in his influential 1971 essay “Notes on Film Noir” called it “film noir’s epitaph,” and many critics have followed his lead in regarding the film as the close of the noir cycle. While that’s up for debate, the film did mark the last time Welles was able to bring a thriller to the screen. It was not, however, his last voyage into the larger noir universe.

Next Week: Part IV: Noir as European Art Film

THE NOIR OF ORSON WELLES: PART II: On The Run In Europe

After THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, Welles swung by Republic Pictures on his way out of Hollywood to make his noirish adaption of MACBETH (1948), a fascinating experiment in combining the aesthetics of theater and cinema. The film was the darkest, most grisly adaptation of a Shakespeare play up to that point, but it did nothing to elevate Welles’s standing in Hollywood.

He left for Europe and pieced together financing for his four-years-in-the-making adaptation of OTHELLO (1952). Part of the funding came from a thriller directed by Carol Reed and starring his old pal Joseph Cotton, THE THIRD MAN (1949). It would turn out to be the biggest hit of Welles’s career, though he forewent a profit-sharing deal in favor of a flat fee which he channeled back into Othello.

Because THE THIRD MAN looks in some respects like a Welles film, speculation has existed for decades about the extent of his participation in its creation, but Welles himself remained insistent that he was merely a happy actor-for-hire on the project. What is beyond question is that while he only appears in the film for about fifteen minutes, his character, Harry Lime, dominates the whole of it. Reed gives him perhaps the best entrance in movie history, and Welles’s one verified contribution to the script—Lime’s speech about the cuckoo clock—is the most famous scene in the movie. In just a few minutes onscreen, Welles is able to nail the amoral charm of Harry Lime, but what often goes unacknowledged is that aside from the scene by the Ferris wheel, Welles gives an almost entirely silent performance. The last ten minutes of the film—as he runs through the sewers trying to elude capture—are largely dialog free, yet his acting here is vital. As his boyish face gives way to panic, his fear doesn’t illicit pleasure from the viewer but rather a strange kind of sympathy. Behind his bluster and mystery, Harry Lime is revealed to be a mere mortal. When Welles wordlessly beseeches Cotton to put him out of his misery, the moment is tragic rather than triumphant.

While Welles was by all accounts a bad businessman, he was able to spin off the massive success of THE THIRD MAN into a new revenue stream. He recorded (and helped write) fifty-two episodes of a weekly radio program called THE LIVES OF HARRY LIME wherein the drug-dealing murderer became a kind of rakish international adventurer. For one of the episodes he concocted a mysterious European businessman named Arkadin. He liked the character so much that Arkadin became the basis for his next film.

No one is quite sure how many different versions of Welles’s 1955 crime drama MR. ARKADIN are floating around out there. The film was taken away from Welles by producer Louis Dolivet before he had the chance to edit it, and over the years many different versions (at least seven) have surfaced in different formats. In 2006, the Criterion Collection released a box set featuring three versions of the film, one of which was a new “comprehensive version” integrating material from different sources. While Criterion’s box set is a spectacular piece of scholarship and restoration, there is one problem: MR. ARKADIN isn’t a particularly good movie.

The plot is structured as a mystery told in flashbacks. A shady character named Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) is hired by an even shadier character named Gregory Arkadin (Welles), a billionaire with underworld connections who claims he suffers from amnesia. He wants Van Stratten to investigate his past and discover his true identity, but the deeper Van Stratten looks into the past, the more dead people start showing up. Turns out Arkadin is using the investigation to find and knock off anyone who could reveal the truth of his identity. Van Stratten begins to suspect he might be next on Arkadin’s hit list.

This suspense plot lacks forward momentum because we never much care about the thinly drawn characters. While Akim Tamiroff, Michael Redgrave, and Mischa Auer have fun in comically grotesque supporting roles, the center of the film is dragged down by the uninspired performances of the central cast, particularly Robert Arden and Welles himself.

Of course, the primary pleasure of a Welles film is the visual texture of the thing, and MR. ARKADIN, for all its faults, is always interesting to look at. The opening shots of Arden trekking through a ruined city in the falling snow have an ominous beauty, and Akim Tamiroff’s weird attic hideout is a juicy bit of demented set design. Visually, the highlight of the movie is a masquerade ball at Arkadin’s mansion, a tour de force displaying Welles’s ability to blend artifice and anarchy.

But what does this all add up to? Not much. Since Welles was never able to edit his film, MR. ARKADIN never assumed its final shape, but even an editor of his skill would have had trouble breathing life into the central story. Even in its restored form, MR. ARKADIN remains Welles’s weakest film.

Luckily, however, his pulp triumph was right around the corner.

Next Week: In Part III Welles returns to America for "A Wild Night in a Sleazy Town"