Orson Welles: Hello Americans (70 page)

He is to be made as attractive as the art of Hollywood can do it, and since he looks very well in a modern suit there is no reason why he should look so god-awful in
costume. Nothing at the front must be opened. There is something about the way Mr O’Herlihy stands and comports himself that makes it essential that his entire front, from the chin down to the knees, present a flat aspect so that he can’t bulge or sag. There is a way of coining apart which we’ve got to guard against. After one step he starts to crack at the seams.

This tone of affectionate exasperation,
of despairing encouragement, is entirely characteristic of Welles’s tone with his actors; there is more than a little of the actor-managerial style about it. Brainerd Duffield as First Murderer wore lifts in Utah: ‘he is to be denied this privilege’. Welles becomes positively Wildean in his comments on Duffield’s wig: ‘his being the cheapest wig that was given out is by far the best since
it was a true theatrical wig made of inferior hair, and inferior hair is the only hair which makes up into a good wig … neither his [nor Bill Alland’s] wigs are to be tampered with or dressed by any man between now and the last day of the picture. They are to be kept in an old box and no attention is to
be
paid to them in the line of dressing. Otherwise they will be ruined.’ The Friar’s costume
‘is not wild and woolly enough’ – he should resemble ‘an early Evangelical Christian preacher rather than like a member of the brotherhood of hopovers, which this resembles’. There are doubts about his wig, too. In Utah the Friar had worn a bright-red helmet ‘suitable for a high school operetta version of “The Mikado”’. It may be, Welles says, that ‘Research will show us some interesting early bishops’,
though on the whole he prefers the idea of a bare-footed itinerant preacher. He was not dissatisfied with Ross’s costume. ‘I do, however, have this notion. If it is true that there were reindeer in Scotland as there are now, then I would like to see Ross with antlers attached to a helmet. It might be very stylish. Ross is one of those who should have, in my view, braids. And if he is played
by a very large man, very long heavy braids. One of our characters ought to have one of those long knee-reaching Brunnhilde jobs.’ Welles has a conception of a division of the characters into what he calls ‘Tartan or Scots’ and ‘Viking’, though the guiding principle by which they would be one or the other is unclear. In Salt Lake City, he says, ‘we were at our best when we were naked or fur-bearing,
so I suggest Ross should be the big Viking-looking guy, with antler trusses and furs, with naked knees’. Neither this role nor those of Lennox, the Doctor, the Porter, Seyton or Fleance were cast at this point; no doubt the tightness of the budget made it hard to get actors of high quality.

In contrast to the Research-determined costumes for the men, Welles feels that Lady Macbeth’s first dress
should have ‘a rather modern evening dress look to it’. This aspect of the costume was much commented on in the reviews: it is hard to grasp his rationale for it. Later in the same memorandum he tells Wilson that they should try to ‘work against a sort of young lady dressed to give a recital of songs’, an obviously commendable aim, but to do so by introducing a distinctly anachronistic note – while
all those around are wearing costumes of almost slavish period accuracy – seems odd. It is clear, however, that this is exactly what Welles intended. He was unhappy about Nolan’s Salt Lake City coiffure, and sought ‘a new method of doing her hair’; there is no reference to Research in this matter, either. He was concerned that the Gentlewomen’s dresses looked like Grand Opera, too dressy, ‘a
little more civilised than we want’. His comments on the Siwards, junior and senior, again betray his obsession with historical accuracy. ‘They were fine up in Salt Lake City, except that the period was too late, I’m afraid …
I
would be happy if Research would justify our keeping the costume the way it is.’ He is very concerned about the correct distribution of the Celtic crosses; and positively
pedantic about heraldry. ‘It is my hope that Research will justify our taking the license and giving to Duncan the Celtic Cross. So it is first introduced with Duncan and Malcolm and later re-introduced with a vengeance at the end of the play’ He is equally precise about social detail. Seyton, though ‘a virtual slave’, must not be wildly dressed: ‘we need to sense that he is a Castle servant, an
indoor servant … a steward’ and is ‘in charge of others, poorer than himself.’ He will be surrounded by ‘a little pack of people who will be carefully chosen. They will be messengers and hangers-on around Seyton, who will have a special personality and character.’ This singling out of an otherwise unremarkable character to create a centre of interest around which to form a structure of subordinate
relationships was always a hallmark of Welles’s theatre productions, a technique he shared with the great Irish director Tyrone Guthrie, a director with whom he had much in common – an avoidance of psychology, a gift for engendering dynamic stage action, an eye for startling detail. All of these elements are, of course, strongly present in his films.

As is clear from the costume memorandum, a
considerable number of parts had to be recast in a very short space of time; it is curious to find this important task being left so late. Lady Macduff was the largest of them, and for a while, too, Welles seriously considered replacing Jeanette Nolan, presumably for box-office reasons, since he otherwise expressed complete satisfaction with her performance. They offered the part to ‘everyone’, Welles
said, among them Tallulah Bankhead and Vivien Leigh. (He only stopped short, he said, at Dame Judith Anderson, the Australian actress who had committed the unpardonable sin of playing the part not only opposite Olivier in London, but more pertinently in New York with Welles’s
bête noire
, the mild-mannered Maurice Evans. Evans’s performance in the title role, like all of his Shakespearean performances,
had, to Welles’s rage, been acclaimed as definitive and a histrionic triumph. Welles’s barbaric conception of the part owes something to his violent antipathy towards the Evans school of acting.)

As for the rest of the parts, he followed his usual eclectic policy of casting. Some actors came from within his personal circle: the not insignificant role of Seyton he gave at a late stage to his chauffeur
and general dogsbody, George ‘Shorty’ Chirello, a dwarf, whom he had already used on stage in
The Mercury Wonder Show
; as Macduff’s
son,
again a substantial speaking role, he cast his daughter from his first marriage, Christopher, while – to keep it all nicely incestuous – the Third Witch was to be the screenwriter Charles Lederer, Welles’s first wife’s second husband (who, as previously noted,
also happened to be Marion Davies’s nephew and thus a regular guest at William Randolph Hearst’s table). There were Mercury veterans: Gus Schilling (
Five Kings, Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai
) was the Porter, his role sadly truncated; Lady Macbeth’s doctor was Morgan Farley (from
Heartbreak House
and
Danton’s Death
nearly ten years earlier). John McIntire withdrew from the role of the Friar,
and the English leading man Alan Napier, distinguished of voice and demeanour – and with whom Welles had worked in the broadcast
Master of Ballantrae
– took over the part, now renamed the Holy Father. The pretty but inexperienced Peggy Webber was to play Lady Macduff and double as a witch, alongside a couple of Goldwyn Girls, Brainerd Duffield and, as we have seen, Charlie Lederer. The extras
were mostly supplied by Republic, a refreshing change for them, no doubt, from playing cowboys; Welles took great care over selecting the most gnarled and wild-looking faces.

Apart from these preparations, the principal activity of the three-week gap between stage run and shooting was pre-recording the dialogue. Welles justified this obsession of his, already attempted on
The Magnificent Ambersons
and then to universal relief abandoned, in various ways at various times: it was designed, he sometimes said, to eliminate the tiresome recording boom, which can have a cramping effect on camera movement (especially since he proposed using three cameras simultaneously, the cameramen to be disguised with costumed dummies on their backs, thus swelling the ranks of extras); he would also be able
to do long takes without worrying about sound. At other times he said that the technique liberated the actors: they could concentrate on acting without worrying about diction. On yet another occasion he suggested that it meant that he and the cameramen could shout out instructions over the action, since the soundtrack already existed. During the preparatory period, he coached the actors untiringly,
making take after take. ‘Orson explained to me,’ Jeanette Nolan told François Thomas, ‘that partly because I was a novice in film … it would help if we recorded the whole film beforehand. Like that, when we came to act in front of the camera, we wouldn’t get muddled up in the dialogue. And he didn’t want the public to be put off by the facial expressions we’d pull if we felt too much emotion.’
It suited her very well:

not only because of my radio background but also because of Orson’s magnificence as a director. He could focus on a single passage for five hours. The speech, ‘Come, spirits, unsex me here’, we recorded and recorded again and again, finding first one way then another, and then he, like the stimulating director he was, would have yet more ideas. All of us who had worked
in radio took special pleasure in our different ways of going about things; with pre-recording you could do the same. We spent days and days having fun recording what we’d already done in the theatre, breaking down each line.

Fun it might have been, but perhaps not entirely helpful. ‘True, the result was a little disconcerting: hearing the playback was a shock, your brain went back in time. You
heard a line you’d recorded in a particular way, which seemed the opposite of what one hoped one had done. Having done it that way, one wanted all the rest to be the same. But it was Orson’s prerogative as director, and he could have gone on playing with the sound forever.’ It is an altogether bizarre procedure; whatever the potential gains, the losses – above all of any kind of spontaneity – would
be huge. Apart from anything else, a recording made in a recording studio would have an entirely different feel from the piece performed on the set, with physical actions. Film acting is an unnatural experience under the most propitious of circumstances: the requirements of camera and light are such that actors are called upon to perform every manner of acrobatics (mental and physical) to accommodate
them, but generally speaking there is at least a certain freedom of verbal expression – the rhythm, the tempo, the overall shape of a phrase can vary, as the actor in take after take is able to make deeper and better contact with his or her fellow-actors and with the script. If all that has been decided in advance, the performance is wholly pre-determined. It is ironic that Welles, who so
loved actors and acting, should have devised such an inhibiting procedure. It meant, of course, that his authority over the performance was absolute: by rehearsing and re-rehearsing the actors’ vocal performances until they were perfectly to his satisfaction, and then recording them, he could ensure complete conformity to his intentions. Not even Hitchcock at his most domineering ever imposed such
rigid control over his actors.

Shooting began on 23 June. As he would do again on later films, Welles deliberately chose an apparently impossible schedule for his first day’s filming to make a clear and readily understood statement
of
his mastery. At the beginning, the atmosphere on the set was not good, the crew surly and uncooperative. ‘They were really hateful,’ Nolan told François Thomas:

They wouldn’t cooperate in any way, they resented him so much that they seemed to have only one purpose in life, to show him he had no right to be there. When we started, we got nothing but sarcasm, resistance and negativity. The first day of the shoot, we began at 9 in the morning. It was a long take, several minutes, the murder of Duncan. There were dozens of camera positions. Everyone insisted
that Orson had no chance whatever of doing it. And at five past midnight, when he’d got exactly what he always knew he’d get, everyone was eating out of his hand – they gave him a round of applause. And the next day, they were very grateful to be under the same roof as him. For me, that was the high point of the film.

The cinematographer, one of Republic’s house team, was John L. Russell, but
he too, like Fred Ritter, was more of an executant than a collaborator, and needed to be galvanised. To accomplish everything that was needed in the three and a half weeks of the shoot, enormous energy was required, and Welles supplied it in overplus. Shooting took place on two sets; while one was being prepared, they would shoot on the other. With the cameramen using hand-held camera operators darting
among the warriors in the battle sequences, wearing masks on the backs of their heads to blend with the throng, the soundtrack blaring away, and Welles and the crew roaring over it – even when Welles was in a scene, but not actually in shot – the atmosphere bordered on the hysterical. As they moved from one set to another, Welles cheerily shouted to Alan Napier, ‘
RUN
, don’t walk! Remember, this
is a B-movie.
¹⁴
Time is money!’ Roddy McDowall, frankly unenthusiastic about Welles in general, found acting with him unnerving: ‘One eye was on you, the other was sort of mad … as if he had two completely separate eyes.’
¹⁵
Once Welles gave the young actor an observation about some unsatisfactory aspect of his performance: McDowall, partly by way of explanation, muttered: ‘I’m so hot.’ Welles,
thinking he’d said: ‘So what?’ raged at him so long and so extravagantly that McDowall, young as he was, understood that Welles was operating at a level of adrenalin that rendered him almost out of control. During one take, a high, keening noise was heard – one of the cameramen, an epileptic, was in the throes of a seizure. Welles, still
in
the scene though not on camera, shouted above the unnerving
wail: ‘Let the fucker have his fit. Keep shooting.’ To McDowall, ‘there was a streak of contempt running right through that man … he was too talented to behave that way continually’. Nolan, on the contrary, adored every moment of it, with one exception: the famous soundtrack. ‘God, I’ve never experienced fear like the first time I heard that huge sound, wiping everything else out, that thunderous,
unrecognisable voice – mine, no doubt about it – filling the whole of the vast sound stage at Republic. And I was supposed to act with that voice booming in my ear! I could only see one way out, to run away into the night and forget it all. Later, they turned the volume down and we adjusted to the technique.’ But even a willing accomplice like Nolan finally drew the line. ‘Actually, we did
the sleepwalking scene without playback. I asked Orson to let me do it exactly the way I had in the theatre and he did.’