Orson Welles: Hello Americans (11 page)

As well as Hayworth, the broadcast starred Joseph Cotten, who had also adapted the original story. It was Cotten’s adaptation of
Journey into Fear
– presumably with fraternal input from Welles – that was now about to
start shooting alongside
The Magnificent Ambersons
. The declaration of war had added new levels of interference from the front office. In addition to the usual prissinesses from the Hays Office (‘there should be nothing sex-suggestive in the line: “Maybe he thought the sea air would do him good”’), the production team was inundated with memoranda from various RKO functionaries, offering strictures
and advice.
¹²
‘For your information and guidance, the war department is now exceedingly
critical
of any mention of itself,’ wrote one, William Gordon, always happy to share the fruits of his polymathy with them.
¹³
‘It is suggested that Josette refer to Rio rather than to Buenos Aires … I will be glad to give a dozen reasons why, if you want them.’ Another memorandum urged them: ‘Please please
have Gogo speak French or even possibly in the Basque dialect which no one on this earth can understand except another Basque. (This is one language which even the Russians cannot learn, unless raised in the Basque district.)’ Another from a different source suggests the diplomatic challenges of wartime filming: ‘if Haki is overplayed as a ladies’ man … he will be most offensive to the sensibilities
of the Turkish people … The Turkish Secret Police is considered one of the best in the world … Mme Matthis’ reference to the Reds and their having violated nuns and murdered priests is particularly unfortunate … not only to Spaniards – and some might not think it a better world if the Reds
had
won – but also the Russians whom we certainly don’t wish to offend today.’ As a parting shot, Gordon
picks holes in the archaeologist’s speech, citing Leonard Woolley’s
Ur of the Chaldees
as his authority. Between wartime censorship, industry censorship, expert pomposities and studio panic, the film was severely challenged to maintain any sort of identity, but that it does manage to achieve, albeit of a somewhat quirky kind.

The authorship – in the wider sense of the word – of
Journey into Fear
is something of a mystery. ‘There was a Mercury style of acting,’ Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, ‘and both Jo Cotten and I worked together perfectly in establishing that look and feel.’
¹⁴
The film evolved in an improvisatory manner out of the relationship between Welles and Cotten, Norman Foster and Karl Struss, the art directors Mark-Lee Kirk and Albert D’Agostino. A large number of the cast
were also appearing in
The Magnificent Ambersons
and, like Welles, shuttled between the two sets. Both films were shot almost in repertory: in addition to Cotten and Welles, Agnes Moorehead and Richard Bennett (as a drunken sea captain) appear, as well as the non-actors Moss, Meltzer and Drake from the Mercury office, and Welles’s long-suffering secretary, Shifra Haran. The Mercury stalwarts –
Ruth Warrick, Eustace Wyatt and Everett Sloane – are joined by other chums of Welles’s, like Hans Conried (later to become something of a cult star as Dr Seuss’s Dr Terwilliker) and Frank Readick (Welles’s predecessor as the Shadow); Dolores del Rio plays the role originally intended for Michele Morgan. All in all, it has the feeling of a party about it, a high-spirited jape, in which the cast must
have been on the point of breaking up at pretty well any time.

Cotten, in fact, is very well cast, much in the mould of Ambler’s Winston Graham: ‘He was a quiet, likeable sort of chap, and generous with his whisky. You couldn’t, of course, imagine yourself getting to know him very well … he was always friendly. Nothing effusive, just friendly, a bit like an expensive dentist trying to take your
mind off things.’ Cotten is perhaps a little more glamorous than Ambler’s character, whom ‘it is difficult to imagine a woman like Stephanie marrying … for anything except his salary’, but his even temper is well suited to the baffled, somewhat passive central character. Naturally, Graham has become American in the film, and his first name is no longer Winston – which would have seemed, in 1941,
the quintessential English name – but Howard. Dolores del Rio, too, is admirably suited to the part of Josette, the Serbian femme fatale, a dancer locked in a joyless marriage with her surly dancing partner, José. ‘She was a slim woman with beautiful arms and shoulders and a mass of gleaming fair hair,’ says Ambler. ‘Her heavily lidded eyes, almost closed as she danced, fixed in a theatrical half-smile,
contradicted in a curious way the swift neatness of her performance.’ (By odd chance, the character’s background is oddly similar to that of Rita Hayworth: she has been dancing since childhood, dominated by a bullying father who is also a dancer.) At a certain moment in the book, Josette’s expression is described as changing very quickly: ‘She became an international beauty humouring with
a tolerant smile the extravagances of a love-sick boy.’ Del Rio perfectly finds the equivalent moment in the film; she had some practice at it.

As for Welles in the role of Colonel Haki (a character who had already made an appearance in Ambler’s earlier
The Mask of Dimitrios
), it was just the sort of part that Welles was drawn to and which he should have resisted at all costs. Given the opportunity
to play the charming but wicked
raisonneur
, he was irresistibly impelled to go for a theatrical stereotype, the exact opposite of what Ambler created. ‘He was a tall man with lean, muscular cheeks, a small mouth and grey hair cropped Prussian fashion,’ according to the author. ‘A narrow frontal bone, a long beak of a nose, and a slight stoop gave him a somewhat vultural air … his eyes were grey
and very wide awake.’ Ambler’s ‘somewhat vultural’ figure becomes, in Welles’s hands, and with all the lavish resources of his make-up box, a mountain eagle crossed with Count Dracula. One is reminded how inexperienced a film actor he was: this was only his second excursion into the medium, and he is cruelly exposed in a way that he was not, paradoxically, in the much larger role of
Kane.
That
role consisted of shards of character, pieces in a mosaic; for the younger Kane, moreover, he was able to draw extensively on himself. Here, he has only the stock types of the stage to turn to; one is very aware of a young man’s assumption of middle age. In the novel there is a droll moment in one of his exchanges with Graham. ‘A little melodramatic, aren’t you?’ asks Graham. ‘We have no proof that
what you say is true. After all, this is real life, not …’ Graham hesitates. ‘Not what, Mr Graham?’ demands Haki. ‘The cinema, I was going to say, only it sounded a little impolite.’ It is not the cinema to which Welles’s Haki belongs, but the theatre – specifically the theatre of Victorian melodrama to which Welles, in his atavistic heart, belonged. The characterisation might well have caused
raised eyebrows at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1930, but would have made his career at Henry Irving’s Lyceum fifty years earlier. Seeing the film by chance on television thirty years later, Welles was not proud of the performance. ‘I’m pretty awful in it,’ he told Bogdanovich.
¹⁵
‘The character was supposed to be a cynical sort, and that’s the way I played it – but I think I missed.’

The final,
crucial character in the story is Petre Banat, the killer; even here, in his description of him, Ambler the radical is unable to resist a dig at capitalism: ‘His approach to the business of killing would be that of the lavatory attendant to the business of attending to his lavatories or of the stockbroker to taking his commission – purely practical.’ The physical description fits Moss admirably:
‘short, broad-shouldered and unkempt, with a heavy jowl and a fringe of scurfy grey hair round a bald pate’. Welles identified a certain sinister quality in his manager, which he was to exploit brilliantly. (‘He had a smile,’ continues Ambler, in a characteristic aside, ‘fixed like that of a ventriloquist’s doll: a standing apology for the iniquity of his existence.’) Moss had agreed to play the
role on the condition that he would say nothing, a limitation that only increased his disturbing presence. In his hat, staring huge-eyed through his pebble spectacles, he is both disturbing and utterly commonplace. He almost steals the film. For the rest, there is a certain almost Expressionist character to Richard Bennett’s bunk-bound soused and roaring captain; Ruth Warrick’s glamorous Stephanie
Graham is pleasingly scatty; Hans Conried brings real vaudevillian flair to the part of the conjuror; and Welles’s chum Bob Meltzer is drily witty as the steward. As a group, they cohere into the sort of exotic ensemble that Warner Brothers so effortlessly fielded, and perhaps had the slight advantage that they were for the most part unknown, and thus apparently not acting, simply being.

Filming
was more than usually chaotic, a striking contrast to the stately pace imposed by Stanley Cortez on
The Magnificent Ambersons
. The atmosphere was Welles’s favourite: one for all and all for one. When Bogdanovich asked Welles who was responsible for the penultimate scene in the film – Banat and Graham crawling round the highest ledge of a tall building in driving rain – he answered: ‘Whoever was
nearest the camera.’
¹⁶
Everyone involved, he remembered, had been up for twenty-four hours and was light-headed with exhaustion – ‘rocked’, he says. Welles’s own deadline to start work on
It’s All True
created huge pressure to finish the sequences in which he was involved – he had to be in Rio in advance of the start of Carnival, on 9 February. ‘It was very dangerous but we were feeling no pain,
and we were all helping … it was a collaborative effort.’ Everyone involved in the creative team had strong opinions and they freely pooled their ideas; a film duly evolved that is full of flair and talent, but narratively uncertain and stylistically unfulfilled. (It was, however, certainly Welles’s idea to open the film with a long pre-credit sequence that features Banat, silent apart from the
scratchy old gramophone churning out the tune that becomes the hired killer’s leitmotiv. Welles thought, he charmingly confessed, that he was making film history in so doing, until he found out, long afterwards, that Lewis Milestone had got there before him, in
Of Mice and Men
’s opening sequence two years earlier.) On the whole, though, apart from its set-pieces, the film lacks visual ambition.
Politically neutered by wartime restrictions, manically pressured because of Welles’s need to get to South America, its narrative all but incomprehensible,
Journey into Fear
turned into a quickie done with intermittent flair, a mere shaving off the Wellesian woodblock.

Principal photography on
The Magnificent Ambersons
ended on 20 January 1942; Cortez had been released from the film a day before.
Neither he nor Welles ever commented on this petty slight. Indeed, Cortez only ever spoke well of his time working with Welles, whom he pronounced (along with Charles Laughton) the only director he had worked with who understood light. The whole visual gesture of the film is Cortez’s; the few additional shots scarcely amount to a major contribution to the cinematographic achievement. But Cortez
had certainly riled Welles; the moment he could be dumped, he was. Robert Wise told Carringer that by the end of the shoot Cortez had been demoted to the second unit. There is some evidence that later sequences, including the death of Isobel, were at least in part shot by Harry J Wild, a staff cameraman, and some by Russell Metty; Wise’s memory of events, if not strictly
accurate
, is an indication
of Cortez’s low standing within the team. Certainly when in the months ahead scenes were reshot, there was never any attempt to use him to execute them. After the completion of principal photography, there were pick-up shots over the remaining ten days; the cameraman for these was the solid RKO staffer, Harry Wild. The last shots of
The Magnificent Ambersons
that Welles himself directed were taken
on 31 January, just two days before his departure for Brazil.

Earlier in the month, he had had his first production meeting for
It’s All True
, and it was a stormy affair; one catches a glimpse of quite how combative Welles could be in establishing his authority. It was a formidable group. Those present included representatives of the United States government (Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s right-hand
man no less, creator of the Works Progress Administration and hence the Federal Theatre Project, there in his capacity as Special Advisor on Foreign Affairs), of RKO and of Technicolor. Welles immediately establishes that the film is to be an RKO production, facilitated by the government, and not the other way round. His prime anxiety is about the use of Technicolor. Hopkins insists that it is
very important to the government that the carnival section should be in colour; clearly their expectation of the movie – which had so far only one idea, simply to catch the Carnival on film – is that it will celebrate, in the most vivid and attractive way possible, the famously flamboyant climax of a neighbour’s year. The purpose is to flatter. Welles reluctantly submits to their insistence on the
use of colour in this sequence, but refuses to commit himself as to how much of the rest will be; he was to remain sceptical about colour until the mid-sixties, and even then only used it for a television film. The question of ‘the Color Technician’ is raised. ‘Who’s he?’ asks Welles.
¹⁷
The Technicolor representative explains that he is ‘trained and knows interpretation’, but Welles will have
none of it: he hates the idea of this man. ‘If you know anything about colour –’ he erupts. ‘I used to be a painter. I can crib now and then … I think we can do without this fellow.’ The last thing he wants is an expert telling him what he can and can’t do. In fact, Technicolor had just taken a leap forward with their new monopack system, using only one negative instead of three, which resulted in
much lighter equipment altogether, but it was a new system and one that they were understandably keen to monitor. None of this impressed Welles in the least.