Orson Welles: Hello Americans (65 page)

No doubt the answer lies in the condition of the film industry: its cost-intensiveness means that it is in the hands of those who can best raise and make money. Occasionally, a George Schaefer or a
David O. Selznick will emerge who is responsive to the idea of art; in the case of Selznick, this brought with it massive interference. Welles had a further difficulty, which was that for all his appreciation of popular culture, he was at heart an experimentalist: to keep him interested, each film had to be a challenge. The point of genre was to play with it, invert its conventions, challenge it from
within. This has never been the route to popularity. In
The Lady from Shanghai
he had, because of a personal connection, access to one of the greatest icons of the screen. To expect that he would
be
allowed to deconstruct and reinvent her at the expense of her owner (because that is what, in effect, Harry Cohn was) was an unrealistic notion. To assume that the machine of Columbia Studios would
put itself behind him and attempt to realise his highly idio-syncratic vision was to surrender to fantasy. It is fascinating to find, then, that the central character of
The Lady from Shanghai
is just such a figure, a dreamer, a romantic, who explicitly associates himself (or did before Harry Cohn made his cuts) with the figure of Don Quixote – whose bony profile was to cast such a long shadow
over Welles’s life and work.

The film that we have – compromised, butchered, coarsened, cheapened – is still a remarkable and a highly personal work.
The Lady from Shanghai
is the story of Michael O’Hara, just as
Carmen
is the story of Don José. Welles had done some intensive work on his version of the Prosper Mérimée story while preparing
The Lady from Shanghai
; James Naremore persuasively suggests
that he may have used it as his model. Something happens to both Don José and Mike O’Hara; by the end of their respective stories, both are changed, whereas Carmen and Elsa Bannister remain what they always have been: spiderwomen, catching men in their webs. They both die, but unlike poor love-maddened José, Michael O’Hara lives; to that extent it is an optimistic tale. The opening of the
narration, over a mysterious shot of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, might well have some autobiographical resonance for Welles (and more than one review eagerly seized on it as such): ‘When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little that can stop me. Once I’d seen her, I was not in my right mind for some time.’ We are thus immediately introduced to Welles’s Irish brogue, a thing much
mocked, though in fact it is a more-than-halfway decent west of Ireland accent such as he may well have heard fifteen years before, in Galway, at the start of the mad adventure that was his career. It is perhaps rather relentlessly deployed, however, the same cadence repeated over and over again, and ultimately becomes something of a straitjacket, stiffening his phrasing and inhibiting his natural
expressiveness; its authentic softness lends a certain sleepiness to Michael’s utterances, too. No sooner have we heard our hero than we see him, in Central Park, in the dark, catching sight of a beautiful young blonde in a carriage, and setting out to pick her up. The first glimpse of Hayworth transmogrified into a short-haired platinum blonde must have been a real shock, and perhaps a thrill,
for the film’s initial audiences; it again turns us into voyeurs, goggling at Elsa rather than simply looking at her.

Welles himself – for the first time on film
sans
beard, false nose or other facial make-up – might have been quite a surprise, too. It is a remarkable face, astonishingly protean, seeming to change with every changing angle: now puffy, now angular; huge eyes and small retroussé
nose surmounting heavy and seemingly boneless jowls; often, in repose, seeming sullen, only to blaze with animation in action. Dick Wilson noted in his memo, ‘Rudolph [Maté] took a whole day to learn how to photograph you,’
¹¹
and one can see that it might have been a challenge. The best solution was to contrive shadows along the jawline and light deep into the eyes, inevitably a somewhat stylised
effect. As often, Welles had chosen to play one essential trait of the character, in this case chivalry, and though it is not without charm, it is an unassimilated assumption, put on like the jaunty cap he sports, an indication of a type. It is a good sketch of something, but it is scarcely a performance, let alone a characterisation. The transformation (such as it is) is entirely superficial;
there is never a point at which the character seems to have autonomous life, and never a moment at which – in David Hare’s admirable formulation – his gestures cease to be about one thing and become about everything. The particular is so imprecisely expressed that it can never become general. In an interview Welles gave during the shoot, he expressed his impatience with acting:

I have a small
public now whose interest in me is sufficient at the box office to make my appearance on the screen a necessary adjunct to my writing and directing.
¹²
But no critic has ever liked my acting. I can show you, frame for frame, that my eyebrows move less than Ray Milland’s in
The Lost Weekend
. If I permitted myself a tenth of his expressions in that excellent performance, I would be howled out of
the theatre. I have only to walk into camera range and the critics are convinced that I am a hambone. I am an actor of the old school. That is the only way I can explain it.

The explanation won’t wash: there are plenty of actors of ‘the old school’ – Pierre Brasseur, Michel Simon, Nikolai Cherkassov, Laurence Olivier, George C. Scott – who made searing and profoundly moving impressions on the
screen. The truth is that on screen Welles was an extraordinary presence, but rarely an engaged actor. It is hardly to be wondered at that his mind was elsewhere when he was standing in front of the camera during
The Lady from
Shanghai
: he was working sleeplessly round the clock on a film that was in danger of spinning out of control, with a leading lady who was exhausted and ailing, while rewriting
on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. But the fact has to be faced that on this exceptionally ambitious film of his, playing a role that was so very close to his heart, Welles gives a limp, rather absent performance, and it damages the film.

The opening sequence in Central Park suffers from this, despite some witty camera work during the first flirtatious dialogue between Michael and Elsa, whom
he dubs his Rosaleen; when she sets out on her own, he finds her handbag and its concealed gun, then hears her being pursued by muggers in the park. Welles’s fist-fight with her assailants is just a little half-hearted; Central Park itself makes a slightly stagy impact, too. Once Elsa and Michael go to the car park, reality kicks in. Michael refuses her offer of a job and, as she drives off, various
low-lifers emerge to ask about the classy blonde dame; at which point the unforgettably sweaty and drunken features of Glenn Anders as George Grisby loom up like a death’s head and then slide speechlessly away. In the loose repertory company that acts Welles’s films, here is often a glamorous tar (Rita Hayworth, Jo Cotten, Anthony Perkins), a number of first-rate character actors (Ray Collins,
George Coulouris) and an actor of profound inner life. Anders is one of the last-named; Agnes Moorehead was another, Michael Redgrave (in
Mr Arkadin
) a third. Anders’s Grisby is a recklessly brave but perfectly centred performance, exuding a sense of fathomless corruption and self-disgust that is deeply disturbing, and it electrifies every scene in which he appears.

After Grisby has slithered
out of the frame, the scene changes to the following day, at the Hiring Hall, where Bannister comes to look for Michael. Everett Sloane brilliantly and audaciously characterises what Sherwood King calls the crippled lawyer’s ‘comic, jerky walk’, swaying backwards and forwards on his two cane sticks like some curious bird, an impression enhanced by the beakiness of his nose – a nose the actor so hated,
having operation after operation to have it reduced, until finally (according to Welles) he knew there was no further he could go and he killed himself. Although the nose does indeed limit the amount of physical transformation possible, Sloane’s Bannister – sharp, demanding, anguished – is a far cry from the actor’s kindly, pixie-like Mr Bernstein in
Citizen Kane
. Welles contrives a good atmosphere
for the Hiring Hall, with a monkey for exotic effect, and the scene in
which
Bannister gets drunk, or appears to get drunk, is a classic piece of Wellesian overlapping and repeated phrases, the faces crammed tight into the frame as they huddle round the table and a barely audible Frank Sinatra croons on the juke-box.

When O’Hara brings the drunken Bannister back to the yacht, he meets Elsa for
the second time and is forgivably smitten by her all over again. Hayworth wears the shortest of skirts, a captain’s blue jacket and a nautical cap at the most provocative angle. Everyone, including the black maid, begs him to come to work for the Bannisters; he succumbs, and over the following deftly shot sequence of yacht life, the sense of sexual tension between Michael and Elsa grows, in its
strange way: Hayworth provocative but withdrawn, Welles looking mournful, his great panda’s eyes filled with doomed yearning. Finally they are in each other’s arms, only to be interrupted by Grisby who has rowed up on a boat, leering and cackling and rather queeny. Elsa goes off to swim, and Grisby follows her with his telescope, as eventually so do we, witnessing her dive to the accompaniment of
poor Heinz Roemheld’s misplaced orchestral orgasm.

The song sequence, dropped in to please Harry Cohn, suggests that perhaps the old monster knew a bit about film after all. As shot by Welles, it has extraordinary tension, and is clear proof (if any were needed) of his exceptional sensitivity to music. Michael is in the cabin with other crew members as Elsa starts to sing; one of the guys picks
up the tune on his guitar and Michael is drawn upwards, the music leading him forward like a snake charm, up, up onto the deck where Elsa, exquisitely passive in her swimsuit, purrs her anti-love song, holding three rapt men in thrall: Michael moonstruck, Bannister watching like a hawk, Grisby entertaining who knows what dark designs. The next scene, the following day, takes us away from this tense
triangle of admirers into a sunlit world, with Michael joined at the wheel by Elsa, in her cheeky captain’s uniform: a radio commercial creeps up. It is advertising Glosso Lusto, a shampoo that restores natural sheen – an ironic comment, perhaps, on Elsa’s impossible perfection. Against the sparkling freshness of the sky and sea, she and Michael flirt ever more intensely, and Elsa delivers herself
of two highly characteristic Wellesian proverbs (Chinese, emphasising her unfathomable background in fact from him: Yutang’s
The Wisdom of China
): ‘It is difficult for love to last long. Therefore one who loves passionately is cured of love, in the end.’ The second, even more typical and if anything more fatalistic, says: ‘Human nature is eternal.
Therefore
one who follows his nature keeps his
original nature, in the end.’ Michael is understandably baffled and frustrated by these cryptic injunctions to action, but is increasingly ensnared by Elsa.

The next sequence thrusts us out of the enclosed world of the yacht with its games-playing passengers and into a teeming, swarming world of celebratory life. Bannister has impulsively decided to have a picnic at Acapulco Bay, and his party
is borne along by the waves of energy created by the Mexican populace, canoeing, dancing, singing, and later floating by with flaming torches. It is a sequence of outstanding bravura, the sudden irruption of a whole culture, absorbed in its own rituals, moving to its own exhilarating rhythm. A few bearers and porters struggle through the jungle and guide the party up to their clearing, while all
around them, below them, above them, the great celebration goes on into the night. Welles’s feeling for South American life and music pre-dated his trip to Brazil with
It’s All True
, and continued beyond it; but a great part of the spirit of what he saw and filmed in Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza informs this section of
The Lady from Shanghai
, framing and highlighting the emotional dance of death
of a small and over-privileged group of another, decidedly less healthy culture. ‘When you give a picnic, it’s a picnic. Time for another?’ squeals Grisby, his tiny eyes glistening with malice and greed, oblivious to the joyful splendour all around him. For him, it’s just background to the fascinating drama being played out in what he takes to be the foreground, and in which he is of course a principal
figure. But the film contradicts him, and the shooting style evolved by Welles and Lawton – in which the sweating, savage, smirking figures of Grisby and Bannister, the anguished figure of O’Hara, and Elsa’s cool, unperspiring beauty are held within a frame that also includes the constantly moving, rhythmically chanting, torch-bearing Mexicans – results in an epic canvas that seems to owe
something to Welles’s deep encounter with the paintings of Rivera and Siqueiros. And then no sooner is the power of this established than the dreary taste of Viola Lawrence and Harry Cohn dully thrusts itself into our faces, and the scene resolves itself into a series of conventional set-ups, including, most damagingly, Welles in a particularly puddingy medium close-shot, backed by some blurred and
generalised process footage, for his chilling story about the sharks and their feeding frenzy. As if in homage to his great doomed dream,
It’s All True
, he has O’Hara tell us that the story took place in Fortaleza, ‘on the hump of Brazil’, where Welles shot
Four Men on a Raft
. ‘They
eat
themselves,’ O’Hara tells the Bannisters and Grisby. ‘There wasn’t one of them crazy sharks that survived.’

The following day they travel further up the Acapulco coast, and in the dazzling sunshine – ‘which can’t hide the hunger and the guilt: it’s a bright, guilty world,’ as Michael says – Grisby makes his proposition. Higher and higher they climb, for Michael’s temptation on the mount, as Grisby speaks of the impending end of the world. The camera rises vertiginously over them as Anders, white-faced
and almost deranged, barks out his challenge: ‘I want you to kill me.’ Over the shoulder of the appalled Michael we see, a thousand feet below, the sea and the rocks. The same sea twinkles benevolently beyond the balcony of the hotel where, that night, Bannister is sitting tensely with Elsa, who abruptly gets up and leaves him and the dancing couples and runs down the side of the hill – another shot
demanded by Cohn, but in fact rather beautiful – to join Michael in the street. They walk along, speaking of life and death and Grisby. She, looking especially perfect in white, talks of the pain of her life; they become more and more intimate, until they are interrupted by Broome, who insolently wonders whether Bannister knows where they are, a line of thought cut short by Michael’s fist. The
punch sends Elsa flying down the street from which they’ve just come; the camera races ahead on the dolly and the soundtrack suddenly erupts into vigorous Mexican music – ‘Hey-ho, hey-ho!’ – exactly as Welles intended it to. Bret Wood quotes the appropriate direction from the screenplay, and it is revealing to see how closely detailed his requirements are, and, when they are left untampered with,
how effective: