Orson Welles: Hello Americans (74 page)

Welles remained in Rome with Lou Lindsay
after shooting on
Cagliostro
was over in the spring of 1948; as they worked on
Macbeth
, they discussed
Cyrano
(of which Korda had now finally washed his hands) and Welles’s production of
Othello
for the Edinburgh Festival, which he planned to film.
Cagliostro
’s producer, Edward Small, was keen for him to do it in Hollywood, with the same speed with which he shot
Macbeth
, and in Technicolor. Small’s
principal anxiety was that Welles wanted to play Othello as a black man: Joseph Breen of the Hays Office had advised him that they would refuse to pass any such picture. How deeply that must have confirmed Welles’s resolve to remain out of his native country. Wilson, meanwhile, was in financial trouble. He had not been paid himself, and it was increasingly difficult to fund the office. Yet his
affection for Welles never falters. ‘Dearest Chuck,’ he calls him in Macbeth’s own words, and signs off ‘With much, much, much love’.
⁹

By early March, Lou Lindsay was back with the picture, more or less finished. Wilson, had been ‘low and generally confused’; he was much cheered by what he saw.
¹⁰
‘I love what you did. It has a simplicity and a beauty unexcelled in the motion picture cinema.’
But it was still unfinished. Now not only Republic but Charles Feldman (Welles’s chum and partner in Literary Classics) was beginning to
urge
that the film be completed, with or without Welles. Soon afterwards, with various changes proposed by Welles, the film was run or Feldman and Robert Newman. ‘When I talked to Feldman,’ wrote Wilson, ‘he said that he had always liked the picture, and that
he liked it even better on seeing it last night.’
¹¹
At this stage, there was no score; it had not yet been recorded. Ibert refused to work until he was paid. Republic, ever eager to get things moving, proposed that work on the sound should be abandoned because music would cover it – a shocking proposition on a Welles movie; Dick Wilson successfully resisted it. In the fullness of time, serious
contractual quibbles having finally been resolved, Ibert duly wrote the score and, because of the limitations of international travel in 1948 and Ibert’s refusal to travel by air, it was recorded not in Hollywood but in Rome, under the skilful baton of the Russian-American conductor Efrem Kurtz. Having received a copy of the recording, Welles advised on how best it should be used, asking for some
ancillary bagpipes, which Ibert had neglected to include in his instrumentation. The composer was professional, intelligent and imaginative, and his score is everything that any similarly endowed musician might have hoped to produce in the time. But it bears no comparison with the texturally detailed and profoundly subtle work of Bernard Herrmann. It is, in fact, incidental music of very high quality,
playing while the film runs, but not an integral part of it. How could it have been otherwise? Losing Herrmann was a disaster for
Macbeth
, but no one seems to have felt it at the time. No composer, at any point in Welles’s career, ever worked with him the way Herrmann did. And the films are accordingly diminished.

Dick Wilson held Republic’s music department at bay while the question of where
and by whom the score would be recorded was being thrashed out. It is impossible not to feel pity for the man as he wrestles with problems not of his making, endlessly prodding Welles (who was still swanning around in Rome) to provide photographic stills, this or that loop for the dialogue track, and a dozen decisions about crucial matters; Italy’s forthcoming elections were rendering the country
increasingly unstable. Not only was Wilson attempting to get
Macbeth
into releasable form, he was trying to keep Welles’s American operation afloat, as well as set up
Othello
, which was to play a two-week season in Edinburgh a mere three months hence and then go straight into shooting – but when? Where? How? The Salzburg Festival was eager to have
Othello
, too, a testament to Welles’s growing
European reputation. ‘Please send some generalisations at least about the script version, cast, etc, etc
of
Othello
,’ Wilson wrote.
¹²
‘The most general and the roughest sort of lira budget would also be very helpful, and I’m sure you know how valuable it would be to have the script as soon as possible. I once sent you word of some of the equipment needed for the sound system (here is another copy).
I’m still anxious to find out whether they can be procured in Italy. As you know, this can save a tremendous shipping expense and trouble. Love.’ Throughout the exchange, he maintains his good humour and his affection for Welles. ‘Dear Old Hank Cinq:
¹³
it was quite a boost to hear your voice and to find that you really hadn’t dissolved into air or got lost behind the “Iron Curtain” or any of the
other imaginary alternatives.’ But Welles simply would not make the decisions. ‘For Christ’s sake let me know!’

As must inevitably happen in a vacuum of leadership, Republic started to make decisions themselves. Wilson felt entirely unsupported. ‘For your information, Charles K. Feldman is a shit! And not one bit of help in anything … Newman quotes Charles K. Feldman as the strongest proponent
of finishing the picture immediately with or without you. I must say that Feldman to me on this latter point is still interested in your finishing it.’
¹⁴
Uncertain of its own judgement, Republic had asked Welles’s distinguished radio colleague, Norman Corwin, for his advice, which he gave with characteristic incisiveness: ‘There’s no reason why the witches who open the film should sound as if
they come from
Li’l Abner
.’ His suggestions were extensive, affecting not just the now universally acknowledged problem of the accents, but matters of tone and dynamics; he even suggested cutting Lady Macbeth’s death-leap, one of Welles’s most audacious interpolations.
¹⁵
The extent to which others were dabbling in his work behind his back is extraordinary, but hardly surprising – except perhaps
to Welles himself, whose innocence or ignorance of the world’s way is sometimes baffling. It is almost incomprehensible that Welles would have let things come to this pass, had he cared in the least for the integrity of his film. Instead he moved on to his next European film, while Wilson was left to deal with everything, not least the break-up of Welles’s personal entourage: Shorty Chirello was
cutting up rough about certain sums owed to him, and was hanging on to the money raised from the sale of Welles’s car.

Eventually a version of
Macbeth
was ready to be shown to a preview audience: Wilson reports great restlessness at various points. He suggests remedies, but doubts whether he has the shots to implement them. Perhaps revoicing would help? If only they had asked
for
music for the
exile scene … sound might help. Or maybe not. There was more tinkering. Then, in a curious and still-murky episode, in September 1948 the film was entered for and then withdrawn from competition in the Venice Festival, because, it is said, Welles felt that Laurence Olivier’s newly released film of
Hamlet
was bound to win. This was the first hint of the eventually all-engulfing shadow that Olivier’s
movie would cast over
Macbeth
. Though
hors concours, Macbeth
was widely reviewed. The London
Daily Telegraph
’s man Campbell Dixon, who had seen both films, was in Venice to report: ‘[Welles’s] own opinion of his work is no secret.
¹⁶
He considers it infinitely superior to Olivier’s
Hamlet
which for some reason strikes him as “Wagnerian”. An odd adjective, you might think for a production of so
much taste and disciplined beauty but one not wholly inapplicable to Mr Welles’s
Macbeth
.’ Dixon’s comments on the film adumbrate the derisive tone of virtually every review of the film in the English-speaking world thereafter. ‘The problem of creating a Scottish castle in Hollywood was solved by making the Macbeths a tribe of troglodytes inhabiting caves … surely a queer background for characters
pouring out the rich and subtle poetry of the English Renaissance. For past delights one can forgive Mr Welles a good deal, and if faults were only in the setting – but alas the whole conception of the play seems to me mistaken to a degree I should have supposed impossible to a man of so much talent.’ Here, too, the criticisms of the Scottish accents appear for the first time. ‘The three witches
become Glasgow washerwomen clacking round the tub, Lady Macbeth is a wee body sair set in her opinions.’ Dixon was generally contemptuous, too, of the use of the verse. ‘Lady Macbeth says “Gentle! My lord”, rather than “Gentle my lord”. I suggest that if Shakespeare had meant “Wait a minute, honey”, or “Hold your horses, hand-some”, he would have said so.’ And this was to become a common theme
in subsequent responses to the film.

The European press was naturally less interested in the matter of language and accent, and reacted on the whole warmly to it: ‘[It] grabs the audience by the throat,’ reported
Il Tempo
, ‘and does not let go of it until the very end.’
¹⁷
The audience applauded four times during the showing, reported
Il Tempo
, declaring the film Welles’s best since
Citizen Kane
. Jean Cocteau, who had seen and reported on Welles’s 1936
Voodoo Macbeth
with a sort of fascinated repulsion, immediately acclaimed this new version as a
film maudit
, a somewhat complex accolade, though he did not enter the movie for his festival of similarly cursed films held in Biarritz later that
year
. Cocteau later wrote his impressions of Welles’s film. ‘Coiffed with horns and crowns of cardboard,
clad in animal skins like the first motorists, the heroes of the drama move in the corridors of a kind of dream underground, in devastated caves leaking water, in an abandoned coal-mine … at times we ask ourselves in what age this nightmare is taking place, and when we encounter Lady Macbeth for the first time before the camera moves back and places her, we almost see a lady in modern dress
lying on a fur couch next to the telephone.’
¹⁸
This engaging account suggests that the film is somehow Coctelian, which is misleading, to put it mildly. It is, if nothing else – for better or for worse – perfectly Wellesian, a notion that continental (especially French) cinéastes were beginning to embrace. Marcel Carné pronounced it superior to Olivier’s film from a cinematographic point of view;
Bresson loved its ‘fake light and cardboard settings’.
¹⁹

These plaudits were of little use in selling the film to the American market. The home-grown preview reviews were generally tepid, and any tiny peep of praise contained in them seemed inaudibly faint beside the deafening fanfares that greeted Olivier’s
Hamlet
. Republic, expecting to be showered with praise for their bold foray into Shakespearean
drama, were suddenly anxious. They were up against an unstoppable and ever-expanding tidal wave of praise for
Hamlet
. ‘It may come as something of a rude shock to the theatre’s traditionalists to discover that the tragedies of Shakespeare can be eloquently presented on the screen,’ wrote Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
, ‘but now the matter is settled; the filmed
Hamlet
of Laurence Olivier
gives absolute proof that these classics are magnificently suited to the screen.’
²⁰
This was exactly what Welles believed, of course, but his understanding of the word ‘film’ was quite different from Olivier’s. If
Hamlet
was what they wanted, then they were not going to like
Macbeth
. Crowther shrewdly notes that what Olivier does in his film is to bring the audience closer to the stage. ‘A quietly-moving
camera which wanders intently around the vast and gloomy palace of Elsinore … gives the exciting impression of a silent observer of great events, aware that big things are impending and anxious not to miss any of them.’ By contrast, Welles’s camera is always highly active, almost assaulting and battering the viewer. Crowther says the acting in Olivier’s film is ‘beautiful’, the articulation
‘perfect’, the interpretations ‘inspired’, the cutting ‘judicious’, the music ‘intriguing’, the design ‘rich’; the dark and haunted palace is ‘the grim and majestic setting’ for ‘an uncommonly galvanic film’. The sort of aesthetic nobility implied
in
all these adjectives is the exact opposite of what Welles was striving for. If
Hamlet
was to be the yardstick – and it was, almost universally –
then
Macbeth
could only fail.

By a process first analysed by Theodor Adorno, Laurence Olivier had been informally elected the representative of theatrical culture, just as Toscanini had been appointed the greatest conductor in the world, beside whom all others were somehow inauthentic, while Jascha Heifetz had become
the
violinist. Now Olivier
was
acting, anointed and sanctified. To dare to criticise
him was to reveal one’s ignorance. His recent knighthood had added a heraldic shine to his beatification, especially perhaps in America; even to those who would not naturally be drawn to his films, he was a byword for acting, the epitome of High Thespian Art. That this elevation bore little relation to the man or his approach to his work is neither here nor there; now there was a Gold Standard
(somehow confirmed by the blond locks Olivier had acquired for Hamlet) by which all others must be judged.
Life
magazine, an important arbiter in these matters, was not slow to confirm his new status: a four-page spread sang the glories of the new film. But just as light is only light because of the existence of dark, so a Shakespearean failure was needed to endorse Olivier’s reign as monarch
of culture. Here to hand, so very conveniently, was Orson Welles’s
Macbeth
.

According Welles’s film a three-page spread,
Life
came not to praise it but to bury it. ‘The scene opposite is not, as you might think, from a musical comedy skit set in an alcoholics’ ward,’ said the anonymous piece, with fine courage.
²¹
‘It is Orson Welles’s movie version of Act III, Sc i of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
. Mr
Welles has had the idea that 11th century Scotsmen appearing in a 17th century play should express themselves in the accents of Sir Harry Lauder on the vaudeville stage of the 20th. Thus we have … Lady Macbeth sweeping down an endless stone staircase shrieking “Oot, damn’d spot, oot, I say.”’ The reporter condemns the reordering of the play – ‘scenes have been ruthlessly juggled, characters interchange
their lines freely’ – and though he acknowledges that Olivier and his text editor, Alan Dent, did much the same, ‘Olivier did [it] to make a consistent and harmonious movie … Welles on the other hand has gone back to the senseless violence of all the hams who have hacked and gesticulated their way through
Macbeth
for out-of-town audiences.’ He or she seizes on Welles’s use of the witches’ line
‘The charm’s wound up’ to end the film – the line with which he had brought the curtain down on the
Voodoo Macbeth
– berating him for failing to understand its meaning: ‘despite what Mr Welles
may
think, not “over and done with” but “ready to work”’. But that is precisely what Welles intends: that we’re in for more of the same trouble – spuriously, perhaps, in terms of the play, but accurately
in terms of the line. Pitying Welles, ‘who, a few sad years ago, was the Boy Wonder of Hollywood’, the piece ends: ‘confusion hath now made his masterpiece’. And
Life
was not alone. ‘If Welles has failed utterly to live up to the standard set by Laurence Olivier’s
Hamlet
, he has at least failed honestly,’ said
Newsweek
.
²²
‘In both acting and directing, Welles’s limitations are strongly, sometimes
offensively, apparent.’ ‘There is no doubt,’ said
Fortnight
, ‘that Orson Welles is gifted with colossal ingenuity and resourcefulness.
²³
It would take colossal ingenuity to make so great a bore of Shakespeare as he has done in this outrageously poor production of
Macbeth
.’