Orson Welles: Hello Americans (49 page)

The finished film as edited by Welles lasted 115 minutes; the presently available version is a full twenty minutes shorter. The single greatest cut, imposed
by Spiegel and Goetz before shooting began, removed what would have been two complete reels depicting Meineke’s tortuous quest for Kindler in Latin America. But much more damaging are cuts removing the entire framework of the film. In the director’s cut, the film opens with the sound of a bell tolling, under the image of a demon silhouetted against a white screen. The camera pulls back and
we see that it is in fact nothing but the shadow of a tree in Mary Longstreet’s bedroom. She is asleep on the bed; a man’s voice tells her to get up and walk through fields, through the cemetery. She obeys, while the voice recites the names of members of her family who have died for their country. She goes trance-like to the bell tower, climbs up into the belfry, looks down and sees an angry mob below.
The mob looks up and sees two people fighting on a ledge of the belfry; they finally fall and die. Then, and only then, do we get the titles, followed, as in the present cut, by the scene in which Wilson tells his colleagues to ‘leave the cell door open’, and the scene of Meineke at customs entering an unspecified Latin American country. Then the two-reel
cut
followed: in these scenes Meineke
was shown going to a kennels, where he is given a truth serum under whose influence he says he believes that God delivered him from prison. He has, he tells them, a message from the All-Highest. They send him on his way, watched by a young woman working for Wilson. Meineke goes to the morgue, where he gets a new passport and a new identity; shortly afterwards Wilson’s young female agent is brought
in, dead, savaged by dogs. Meineke next visits a photographer, as in the released version, but a sequence is cut that explains Kindler’s new name – F(
Ran
)z (
kin
)dler. (Representative John Rankin, incidentally, was chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee – a sly touch, though whether it was Welles’s or that of one of the other screenwriters is hard to know.)

Whether the two cut
reels, and even the cut explanation of Rankin’s name, are a tremendous loss is hard to judge – everything depends on how they were done (and, as already noted, the scenes on board ship and at customs are among the most visually tony sections of the film). But from a narrative point of view, the opening dream sequence not only makes sense of a number of baffling elements in the released version – Mary’s
final-reel sleepwalk to the bell tower; Wilson’s constant reference to her unconscious (‘we have only one ally: her subconscious’); his otherwise incongruous final line – but also seems to turn the whole film into her nightmare. What could be more appalling for a pretty, nicely brought-up young woman in Harper, Connecticut than to find out that her fiancé is not at all who he seems to be, but
the monster of the death-camps, whose existence had only recently been revealed to the general public, and the horror of which may well have entered into the subconscious of many a suggestible individual. This is a curious and far-fetched premise, but it has a certain poetry about it, and it takes Welles into a territory where he was very comfortable as an artist: the dream- or nightmare-world in
which Expressionism resides. It also makes perfect sense of his own performance of Rankin as a baffled ogre, the stuff both of fairy tales and of nightmares.

There are further cuts that explain some of the narrative hiccups. Another seriously damaging one is the scene in which Mary and Rankin meet each other for the first time under the bell tower. Rankin says, ‘You know my first impression of
your town was the incongruity of a Gothic clock in a Connecticut church tower,’ dealing with that question, and also establishing him as a connoisseur of clocks, which is the only lead Wilson has on him. Rankin
then
speaks the lines first heard in voice-over at the beginning of the film, telling her to get up. Mary is frightened of heights, but he persuades her to cross a bridge; the screenplay
then intercuts Meineke on board ship for America with Mary announcing her engagement to Rankin. After this the screenplay continues substantially as in the released version, until after the scene between Noah and Wilson. The next scene between Mary and Rankin is another significant cut and a real loss: in it Rankin describes the ideal social system in terms of chronometry. ‘The force that runs the
clock, the spring or the weight, or whatever it is, is the head of the State. The pendulum is his government which transforms his inspirations into law. The train of gears are the working masses … formed into economic units which engage each other without friction … the teeth are individuals, just as these are of flawless metal, well ground and polished, so must the individual be of good blood,
trained and fit physically.’ It is a perfect example of Popular Front writing, and could almost have come out of Geoffrey Household’s
Rogue Male
; Welles must have done it superbly and it might have had the same impact in the film as Harry Lime’s amoral little aria in
The Third Man
. When Rankin finishes speaking, a spring breaks in the clock. Then the screenplay continues as in the released version
until after the screening of the death-camp films to Mary.

In the subsequent sequence, another cut, Rankin gives Mary a sleeping draught; she ‘brings her hands together in the immemorial gesture of blood guilt. Now her subconscious is in control and thus she acknowledges her complicity in the crimes of [Kindler].’ When she sends Noah to the bell tower in her stead, she realises he’s going to
his death and faints. Then comes the second most damaging cut, another more impressionistic dream sequence in which Noah climbs to the belfry: a rung breaks and he falls; rung after rung breaks; at last one stays intact. ‘Beneath it the two shafts of the ladder stretch down into space like a pair of cosmic stilts.’ Red, the dog (poisoned by Rankin), is at ‘the base of this lunatic machine’, howling
and barking. His barks merge with the music. Then Rankin is on the ladder. The camera dollies in on his eye until it fills the screen. Rankin says, ‘Failing to speak, you become part of the crime … with these hands. The same hands that have held you close to me.’ The pupil of his eye fills the screen, then turns into the face of the clock. After this the film would have proceeded as released until
the final dialogue, which was to have been between Wilson and old Potter of the soda fountain (Billy House), who says he’s had enough trouble, but ‘they say
accidents
come in threes’. ‘In threes?’ asks Wilson. ‘What about World Wars? Mr Potter, I devoutly hope and pray you’re wrong. Good night, Mary. Pleasant dreams.’

The dream sequences – which so strikingly anticipate the Hitchcock of
Spellbound
– are obviously tricky to bring off and may or may not have worked, though on the page they certainly add much-needed depth to the character of Mary Rankin. They also suggest an allegoric quality to the whole film. The film in the shooting script is a perfectly accurate reflection of two of Welles’s most pressing political concerns: the survival of fascism and the threat of a Third World War.
The film Welles wanted to make was in the nature of a warning: the evil that Hitler represented had by no means been expunged. The introduction of the element of the subconscious, and the revelation through it of Mary’s guilt at her innocent collaboration with Rankin, exemplifies another preoccupation of Welles’s: the complicity of the silent majority; it is another of his wake-up calls to America.
All these are potent themes. The question is whether the essentially melodramatic plot device could ever have made them serious points. (It is almost the mirror image of the plot of
Tomorrow Is Forever
, Welles’s most recent appearance as a film actor, where a war hero returns to his unsuspecting wife in disguise, instead of, as in
The Stranger
, a war criminal disguising himself in order to insinuate
himself into the heart of an innocent woman.) It is of course true that from the time the film was shot up to the present day, covert Nazis have been unmasked, and Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal have pursued them to the ends of the earth. Many of them have changed their names, married and had children. To be credible, however, the approach to such material would have to be rigorously
realistic, an approach that was never to be that of Welles. It underlines the difficulty Welles had in dramatising his ideas – his natural inclination was to melo-dramatise them, except (one can only monotonously repeat) in
Citizen Kane
, where of course he had the services of a remarkable writer at his disposal. However,
The Stranger
was clearly – at least potentially – a much better film than
the one released to modified rapture (but healthy sales) in 1946, and the missing reels are almost as great a loss as the original end of
The Magnificent Ambersons
.

The actual shooting of the film was, as indicated above, straight forward. Welles and Robinson, though political allies, seem not to have hit it off particularly well; Robinson’s performance is solid and clear, but not vividly engaged,
containing – for him – a rather high proportion of ‘ers’ and ‘ums’. The running business of his
pipe,
which breaks in the first scene and then reappears taped, is lumberingly done. For his part, Robinson found Welles (or at least the film) uninspiring. In his memoirs he writes: ‘Orson has genius but in this film it seems to have run out.’
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Loretta Young, that skittish young Catholic miss, simply
found Welles fun, laughing so hard with him in the make-up van that the make-up artists had to get stern with her; she may have had something of a crush on him.

Welles himself, to judge from a grumpy interview he gave to Hedda Hopper on the set, was not wholly engaged by the work in hand. ‘Tell me, Orson,’ she asked, vexingly, ‘what is it you really want to do?
⁴
First it’s one thing, then another
– radio, movies, painting, the stage, dabbling –’ ‘No,’ he barked, ‘not dabbling. I’m no dabbler. Sometimes I wish I were. Dabblers have all the fun. But I’m constitutionally unable to do anything but take my jobs seriously.’ Alexander Woollcott, he tells her, had asked him, ‘I wonder if you really want to go places in show business?’ Welles had replied, ‘I don’t think I do.’ ‘My real interest
in life is in education,’ he told Hopper. ‘I want to be a teacher. All this experience I’ve been piling up is equipping me for that future … I shall know how to dramatise the Art of imparting knowledge.’ Welles told Barbara Leaming that he had approached the foundations and offered himself to spearhead an education drive. He had no takers. ‘And will you be leading the people to a way of thinking?’
continued Hedda Hopper, smelling a political rat. ‘No. The people can be trusted to do their own thinking … masses of people are never wrong. They’re always right. The public’s judgement on a play is always right, though the critics may be wrong. I shall try only to help people to the knowledge that will aid them in forming correct conclusions.’ Abandoning this slightly dubious line of thought,
he speaks of Todd School, in which he says he has a personal and a financial interest. ‘One day I shall leave all this behind me, go back there, and give full rein to my ideas. That’s when life will really begin for me.’ It is an unlikely vision – Welles as a prep-school master – but a charming one. ‘Rita thinks my idea is swell.’ No doubt she would have done, had she believed it for a second – had
she indeed had any recent conversation at all with Welles. Bringing the interview to an end, he puts his finger precisely on his problem. ‘The truth is, I’m a sweat guy. I hear that Noël Coward can write a play in a week. Not me. If I can write a play at all, or a radio script, or a scenario, a newspaper column or anything, it’s only by virtue of sweating it out. I will fight to the last drop of
sweat – but believe me, I do everything the hard way.’ It was true enough.
All
the early work was achieved by audacity and adrenalin, sheer exuberance and delight in the work of his colleagues. Now, at the age of thirty, adrenalin was harder to command, and audacity not enough. The magic touch that had so sustained Welles in his twenties had disappeared: now it was just hard, hard work, and he
was no longer sure that he enjoyed the job. But what to do instead? It is a question that many a performer has asked himself or herself when the honeymoon of their early career is over – can it really only be this, over and over again? Actors and directors are not, generally speaking, well qualified for any other job; most hit on their vocations precisely because they seemed no good for anything
else. This is the moment at which character and power of endurance – what the Victorians used to call ‘bottom’ – becomes almost as important as talent, and much more important than luck.

There was still politics, of course, but Welles appeared quite reconciled to never entering that arena full time. He couldn’t afford it, for a start. And he felt he had missed his moment; had he stood in 1944,
he told Barbara Leaming, instead of ’45 or ’46, he might have been elected. He was discouraged from standing in California by his doughty research assistant Geneva Cranston, who told him that he’d never carry Los Angeles because of the communist opposition to him. How bewildered the FBI – still busily monitoring his every move – would have been to hear that. ‘There were a lot of card-carrying fellows,’
he told Learning, ‘never forget that – and I was very much not of their group.’ He contemplated standing in New York and then in his home state of Wisconsin, but the Republican candidate had the support of the dairy workers, so Welles did not bother to challenge him. The man’s name was Joseph McCarthy. ‘And that’s how there was a McCarthy. That’s a terrible thing to have on your conscience.’

Welles was, in fact, somewhat depressed politically. Truman had been a bitter disappointment to him, both as a man and in terms of what he stood for. He was loyal at first. Shortly after Truman succeeded Roosevelt, Welles had written a column in which he said, ‘Our new President has taken over the biggest job there ever was in the world.
⁵
For our sake, let’s make it a little easier for him than
we did for the great man who died for us last week.’ This moratorium did not last long. While shooting
The Stranger
, he wrote a column (one of his last) in which he described a nationwide presidential broadcast: everyone on the set stopped filming to listen. No one was impressed, Welles says, and they were from all points on the political compass. One of the grips was
called
‘Missouri’ because
– like Truman – he came from there: ‘He says he’s the only registered Democrat from his state who hasn’t got a job in Washington. This is, of course, bitter and unfair … maybe Roosevelt’s heir is as good a man as he looked for a while there. A lot of good Americans who voted for him are saying they’ve got to be shown.’