Orson Welles: Hello Americans (26 page)

Seen in the context of the rest of the
Four Men on a Raft
material assembled in the released reconstruction of
It’s All True
by Richard
Wilson and his colleagues, the impact of this material is redoubled, in deliberate contrast to the material shot in Rio of the
jangadeiros
arriving at the end of their heroic voyage. Fortaleza is presented as a world of work rituals, of crosses and processions, of lean, muscular men and modest, vibrant women. The fishermen take to the sea with canny watchfulness, the epic wide-shots of the ocean
emphasising the simplicity and vulnerability of the tiny
jangadas
. Even when conditions are inclement, they maintain a steady focus; the film unflinchingly shows them in relation to the empty vastness all around them. Then, when they reach their destination, the whole energy of the movie changes: bravura shots introduce Rio in all its cosmopolitan diversity, the smooth Carioca beach-lizards reacting
to the arrival of the primitive barques manned by the four fishermen with their little white helmet-like hats, interlopers from another age, another world. Power-boats cut a swathe through the water around the
jangadeiros
. Suddenly the
formerly
sky-filled frame becomes crowded. Aeroplanes swoosh about overhead. The effect is almost as shocking to the audience as it must have been to the
jangadeiros
when they first sailed into the great port. The style of the film changes with the kind of society shown.

What is remarkable in the development of Welles’s work is that he deals here for the first time with an open-air world, a natural world a million miles away from the largely interior worlds of
Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons
and
Journey into Fear
, and that he does it with absolute
confidence and authority – an authority, however, that does not proclaim the identity of the director; it is, in so far as such a thing is ever possible, an objective world. His discovery of this manner of film-making arose because of circumstances – adverse circumstances, in fact. The lack of money and equipment, the unavailability of Technicolor (which he insisted right up to the last minute was
essential to
Four Men on a Raft
) and the relative simplicity of his surroundings taught him a new approach to filming, which he rapidly mastered; no one ever learned faster than Welles. His constant protests at not being allowed to experiment are the cry of the autodidact who has some catching up to do. His education – both as a film-maker and as a man – was always conducted in public. To some
extent this was inevitable. The luxury of self-discovery readily available to the artist in most other spheres – painting, writing and even, to a lesser extent, the theatre – is unavailable to the film-maker, except on the smallest scale, and Welles was never going to function in that way. Even when his films are short, they are big.

After he and the rest of the crew left Fortaleza, they returned
to Rio via Recife and Bahia, where they shot various sequences. Welles then planned to take in various other Central American countries on his way back to Hollywood. Lynn Shores, naturally, was against both of these ideas, claiming that ‘the Co-ordinator’s office bluntly told me over the telephone that they did not relish the idea of Welles coming back to Rio at all and the sooner he got out
of here the happier they would be’.
¹³
The detour to Recife and Bahia inflamed Shores even more. He wired Phil Reismann:
PROMPT ACTION NECESSARY YOUR END RECALL WELLES TO STATES IF IN ACCORD PLEASE APPLY ALL PRESSURE AND ADVISE COORD OFFIC OR MYSELF;
¹⁴
Reismann refused because it would have established contact with Welles. The situation could scarcely have been uglier, until, that is, Lynn Shores
decided unilaterally to take out an advertisement in
Aviso
stating that RKO refused to accept
responsibility
for ‘any act done by Mr Welles in Brazil’:
¹⁵
for this he was reproved, somewhat half-heartedly, by Walter Daniels at RKO, but not before the local newspapers – no doubt tipped off by Shores – reproduced a
Hollywood Reporter
article revealing that Mercury Productions had been expelled from
the RKO lot.

Welles arrived in Rio on 22 July, spending five days there before embarking on his South American Grand Tour, conquering adoring and wondering new communities in, among other places, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela, leaving Lynn Shores behind to carry on the mopping-up operation. The Welles team had no doubts about Shores’s malign intentions.
‘Shores and gang,’ George Fanto, still in Fortaleza, wrote to Dick Wilson in his as-yet-imperfect English, ‘prepared a last dirty trick very unpleasant for Orson while friends and press appeared to show their appreciation for Orson.
¹⁶
From Shores injustified actions against Orson it is quite clear that he did everything as to make our expedition a failure.’ He describes an incident in which his
assistant had an accident with the camera, after Welles had left, damaging the camera a little. ‘But Shores already tried to make the allusions that Orson gave orders to brake it. So don’t let anybody be wise on you.’ Despite Shores’s vilifications and the newspaper reports he engendered, Welles was as well received as ever by the intellectual community, who continued to view the Giant Boy – a Rio
journalist’s phrase for him – as a fabulous curiosity, an improbable phenomenon, both physically and mentally.

He found a particularly fervent admirer in Ray Joseph, RKO’s man in Buenos Aires, to whom he gave a blow-by-blow account of the whole
It’s All True
saga, firing the first salvoes in a war of justification. Shocked by what Welles told him, Joseph agreed to write Welles’s side of the story.
The project was ‘hazed with more rumours than a senatorial cloakroom,’ wrote Joseph.
¹⁷
Welles explained away ‘some of the fancy yarns brewed up’. He didn’t deny, said Joseph, that there had been ‘harsh cablese Western Union between Rio and RKO’s office in Radio City’, but insisted that reports had been exaggerated. There was never any question of his going there for four weeks. Nine months was
always the intended period; he was to take as long as he needed. The budget was left open. He did not over-stay his time; such budget over-shoot as there might have been, he maintained, was because the budget for ‘a film called
It’s All True
’ was tacked onto ‘the Brazilian film’. The film itself, Welles roundly declared, was in splendid shape. ‘He
believes
one more sequence will be necessary for
the film, which he describes as not just one picture but as an evening at the movies.’

It is curious that Welles should have chosen to mount a long-distance propaganda counter-offensive, rather than simply going to Hollywood to defend himself. It is even more difficult to understand how it was that Welles felt able to mosey back to Hollywood by means of this huge cultural and geographical detour.
Possibly he truly believed that the quality of the material he had shot would be acclaimed – once he returned and it could be put into context – as masterly, and that all would be forgiven. In the case of
Four Men on a Raft
, it is just possible that some such sequence of events might have occurred. But by now the head of the studio for which he worked had been ousted, specifically on account of
his activities; his production unit had been very publicly ejected from the lot, under ignominious circumstances; and his current activities were a laughing stock in the press: ‘the movie that Welles, the incredible, has been shooting all over South America,’ reported the
Daily News
, ‘is entitled
It’s All True
.
¹⁸
One man was killed in its filming, while Welles tore out the wall of the State Theatre
in Rio for one scene, and shanghaied startled passers-by as extras for others. Some of it is in color, some in black and white and only a small portion of it is in Hollywood.’ Yet, despite Herb Drake’s good advice to come home ‘with trumpets and banners’, Welles chose not to take the first available flight back to Miami and thence to Los Angeles, but to cool his heels in Rio for a few days,
then spend nearly a month roaming South America as a self-appointed goodwill ambassador. This is one of the most remarkable of Welles’s absences, which were increasingly to characterise the pattern of his life, withdrawal at a critical moment. The definition of the psychiatric term ‘fugue’ or, more technically, ‘psychogenic fugue’, seems appropriate here: ‘a sudden and unexpected leaving of home with
the person assuming a new identity elsewhere’. Of course, Welles was not, strictly speaking, adopting a new personality, but retreating into an old one, one in which he was not required to deliver results, but simply to emanate charisma, for which he would be warmly acclaimed. In this environment, simply being Orson Welles was more than enough. In Hollywood, it no longer sufficed.

Typically,
he turned the story of his missing month into a comic escapade, a deliciously absurd anecdote. He had ‘a marvellous three-week trip among head-hunters’, he told Peter Bogdanovich, many years later;
¹⁹
he was pretending to be a leprosy doctor because there was only one free seat on the plane, and a young Jesuit priest had
congratulated
him on the release of
The Magnificent Ambersons
– ‘and that
was the first word I’d heard of it’. There are enough little smatterings of truth in this account to give it an aura of authenticity – and no doubt Welles did take a brief trip up the Amazon at some time during those three weeks of sub-continental peregrinations, and no doubt he was mistaken for a doctor at one point (as he told a friend at the time), but his acquaintances in the intellectual communities
of Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago and Bogotá, where he spent most of his time, might have been surprised and a little hurt to find themselves described as ‘head-hunters’. The detail of his three-week
Wandermonat
, though amusing, is scarcely the point. What is extraordinary is that he should even have contemplated going up the Amazon to look at head-hunters or sipping cocktails and munching canapés
with the gilded intellects of South American café society when his life was falling apart. It is inconceivable that no one in the Mercury office had thought to tell him that
The Magnificent Ambersons
had been released, or that his colleagues had been ejected from their suite at RKO. He knew very well that he and
It’s All True
were in deep trouble. Instead of facing it, he chose to play truant.

A week before Welles’s return to North America,
The Magnificent Ambersons
– the film Welles and all his associates believed would eclipse
Citizen Kane
– had been released to an incurious world, mutilated, on a double bill with the Lupe Velez vehicle
Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost
. There was no fanfare of any sort: ‘[RKO] didn’t even hold a cocktail party for the critics,’ said Herb Drake. The symbolism
was not lost on the press. ‘A spanking is an inspiriting thing,’ said
Time
.
²⁰
‘Last week [RKO] rubbed it in by premiering
The Magnificent Ambersons
at two local movie houses with a Lupe Velez screechie. From a studio where good pictures have been even scarcer than United Nations victories, these goings on were high low comedy.’ The reviews themselves, as it happens, were for the most part good,
though Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
(not yet the only opinion-forming newspaper in the city, but highly influential) wrote the words RKO had, since Pomona, dreaded seeing in print: ‘Welles has a picture that’s distinctly not attuned to the times … the focal point of the emotion is so inconsequential as to be ludicrous.
²¹
With a world inflamed, nations shattered, populations in rags, with
massacres and bombings, Welles devotes 9,000 feet of film to a spoiled brat who grows up as a spoiled spiteful young man.’ The film’s underlying theme, the development of the automobile and the mixed blessings that it brought – the critique
of
Fordism, potentially a great American theme – must indeed have seemed bizarrely irrelevant at a time when the United States was gearing itself up for massive
production of mechanised transportation of every kind. The
Herald Tribune
had its reservations about the film, but nonetheless insisted that it was ‘packed with cinematic power …
The Magnificent Ambersons
is a lot of motion picture.
²²
It is only a pity that it is always going off at loose ends.’ The
Times
returned to the picture the following week, again noting the unhappy timing: ‘In a world
brimful of momentous drama beggaring serious screen treatment, it does seem that Mr Welles is imposing when he asks moviegoers to become emotionally disturbed over the decline of such minor league American aristocracy as the Ambersons represented in the late Eighteen Seventies.’
²³

The review in Henry Luce’s
Time
magazine, by contrast, was a Mercury dream come true, on every count; indeed, Jack
Moss wired Welles – still in South America – to that effect:
TIME THE MAGNIFICENT REVIEW FOR AMBERSONS WONDERFULLY ALSO BEAUTIFULLY SPANK RKO FOR RECENT ACTION.
²⁴
It was in fact less a review than an assault on RKO:

The Magnificent Ambersons
is a magnificent movie.
²⁵
It is also Round Two of the Orson Welles v Hollywood set-to. The upstart young producer-director-author-actor won Round One in
a walk with his first picture,
Citizen Kane. Ambersons
is not another
Citizen Kane
but it is good enough to remove Director Welles for keeps from the one-picture-prodigy class. Despite … faults,
Ambersons
is a great motion picture, adult and demanding. Artistically, it is a textbook of advanced cinema technique … side-lighting creates a visual suspense in the very act of clarification … 350 [
sic
] degree turn-around in the ballroom … gives the narrative subtle, succinct meaning.