My Lunches with Orson (22 page)

—
HENRY JAGLOM
, e-mail, June 8, 2012

1984

 

15. “It was my one moment of being a traffic-stopping superstar .”

In which Orson recalls that director Carol Reed wanted him for
The Third Man
. He reflects on Joseph Cotten's career, and wonders what the excitement over Alfred Hitchcock was all about.

*   *   *

O
RSON
W
ELLES
:
You're eating already. Your mouth is full, which is a disgusting sight.

H
ENRY
J
AGLOM
:
And how are you today? You're late. That's why I ordered.

OW:
Angry at a lot of things going on in my household. You know those wild stupidities that happen to everybody who lives longer than they should. I have a thing I have to put on my leg that compresses it, and I put it on at night. Somebody has to get me out of it in twenty minutes or I go nuts. But somebody went to sleep, and there was no getting out, and I had to fight my way out of this machine. It took me about forty minutes to get untangled. I'm a little out of breath from rage. You know, simple, quiet, domestic rage.

HJ:
I saw
The Third Man
last night. I don't think there's another movie of Carol Reed's that's in its class.

OW:
I think
Odd Man Out
is close to it.

HJ:
That's a good movie. But James Mason's performance is weak.

OW:
Well, Carol didn't think he was good enough. He talked me out of using Mason in something I wanted to do. He said, “Mason hasn't got the range. He drove me crazy in
Odd Man Out
. He can't do from here to there. He can only do from here to here.” So I believed him, because he really knew acting. Loved actors.

HJ:
The longer you look at Mason's performance—

OW:
The less and less good it gets.

HJ:
The character of Harry Lime fit you like a glove.

OW:
It's a hell of a picture. Alida Valli. Boy, she's great. She's Austrian, you know, raised in Italy. She started very young.

HJ:
What happened to her?

OW:
She was the biggest star in Europe. She was huge during the fascist period, all through the war. In Rome. Then she was taken up by Selznick. Selznick destroyed her. He brought her to America, tried to make a big star out of her here, thought he'd have another Bergman, and put her in three—

HJ:
After
The Third Man
?

OW:
No,
The Third Man
was in the middle. He loaned her and [Joseph] Cotten to Alex Korda, who produced it. Alex had to have two American stars besides me to sell the picture. So he made this deal with Selznick, giving him all American rights. That's the only good picture she made here. You can't look at the others.

HJ:
What else did he put her in?

OW:
A terrible trial movie, Hitchcock,
The Paradine Case
. And something else terrible. She came back to Europe, and nobody would hire her. They said, “She can't be any good. She failed in Hollywood.” After that, it was just, “A special appearance by Alida Valli.” She should never have come here in the first place.

HJ:
Carol Reed had never directed you before. Were you his idea?

OW:
Yes. Selznick had bitterly fought against having me in it. He was so dumb. He wanted Noël Coward for the part. He was impressed by Noël. And not by me. Noël was a little mysterious, but he saw me around all the time.

HJ:
Well, you did fuck up his charades.

OW:
Alex held out, said it had to be me, and so did Gregg Toland. I took the Orient Express from Venice or from Paris, I don't remember which, and arrived in the morning in Vienna at about eight o'clock. I had my wardrobe. We went right out to the Ferris wheel, and by nine o'clock I had shot a scene. Then we shot for six days, five in Vienna and one in London. There were three complete A-film units shooting at once. Because Carol needed an entire crew to shoot one huge scene, where you saw down four blocks at night, and then, in another part of Vienna, the second crew was working. And a third was down in the sewer. That's how come we got it done so fast.

HJ:
You don't appear until near the end.

OW:
All the characters do is talk about Harry Lime. Until the last reel. Then I come on.

HJ:
But it's not the last reel.

OW:
Yes, it is the last reel.

HJ:
No.

OW:
I have one appearance—a silent appearance—in the reel before. I'm in shadow, and the light suddenly hits me when the window is opened. Jo Cotten sees the cat sitting on my shoe. That was the greatest entrance there ever was. We did it in Vienna, but not in a real location. Carol had a little set built just for that, on which we shot at the end of every day, towards dusk. We would look at the rushes, and then Carol would say, “Not yet,” and we'd do it again, to get it perfect.

HJ:
How much of
The Third Man
was Grahame Greene's, how much was Korda's?

OW:
The real makers of that film were Carol Reed and Korda. Greene was nowhere near it. His authorship is greatly exaggerated. The idea for the plot was Alex's.

HJ:
Really? Everyone assumes, automatically, that the Graham Greene novel came first, and then somebody adapted— It's not from Graham Greene?

OW:
Korda gave him the basic idea. Said, “Go and write a movie script set in a bombed-out, nightmare city after the war, with the black market and all that. He just wrote a rough-draft sketch for the movie, and Carol did the rest of it. There's an example of a producer being a producer. Carol deserves much more credit than people give him. Graham wrote the novel
after
the movie was made. Also, he conceived the character as one of those burnt-out cases, one of the Graham Greene empty men, which was not my vision of him at all.

HJ:
Maybe that's why Selznick thought of Noël Coward for the character that Greene wrote.

OW:
Maybe. But I said, “No, he has to be fascinating. You must understand why he's got this city in his hand.” And Carol took a flyer on that idea and changed the character completely. Greene's Harry Lime was nothing like the way I played it. Every word that I spoke, all my dialogue, I wrote, because Carol wanted me to. Including the “cuckoo clock.”

HJ:
I remember that verbatim. Lime says, “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they have five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!”

OW:
I have to admit that it's unfair, because the cuckoo clock is made in the Schwarzwald, which is not in Switzerland at all! And I knew it when I wrote the line! And did the Swiss send me letters!

HJ:
You have a generation of Swiss hating you because of that.

OW:
But pretending to laugh. You know how the Swiss laugh, when they want to show they have a sense of humor? It's like the Swedes. They go, “Ho ho ho. Ho ho—your joke about the cuckoo clock. You know, the cuckoo clock is not made in Switzerland.” I say, “I know, I know.” It was as misleading a statement as has ever been made for a laugh in a movie. I came to Carol the morning we shot it and said, “How about this?” And he said, “Yes! And so we did it.”

HJ:
Greene has script credit. Did he give you any problems about your writing your lines?

OW:
No. Because he didn't take the movie seriously. It wasn't a “Graham Greene” work. He gave me a line that I was supposed to say from atop the Wiener Riesenrad, the Ferris wheel: “Look at those people down there—they look like ants.” Well, that's about as clichéd as you can get.

HJ:
So how much of
The Third Man
is Korda, and how much is Reed?

OW:
It's full of ideas that everybody thought up on the set. Because Carol was the kind of person who didn't feel threatened by ideas from other people. A wonderful director. I really worshipped him.

HJ:
How was
The Third Man
received?

OW:
In Europe, the picture was a hundred times bigger than it was here. It was the biggest hit since the war. It corresponded to something the Europeans could understand in a way the Americans didn't. The Europeans had been through hell, the war, the cynicism, the black market, all that. Harry Lime represented their past, in a way, the dark side of them. Yet attractive, you know.

You cannot imagine what it was, a kind of mania. When I came into a restaurant, the people went crazy. At the hotel I was staying in, police had to come to quiet the fans. It was my one moment of being a superstar, a traffic-stopping superstar. The best part ever written for an actor. Had I not been trying to finish
Othello
, I could have made a career out of that picture. From all the offers I got. But by the time I finished
Othello
, the fever was over, you see.

Now, after this huge European success, it comes out in America—Selznick's version—saying: “David O. Selznick presents
The Third Man
. Produced by David O. Selznick.” About three of those credits.

HJ:
It was Chaplin all over again.

OW:
I took Alex and David to dinner one night in Paris, right after it opened, and Alex said, “My dear David. I have seen the American titles.” And David started to hem and haw, “Well, you know…” Alex said, “I only hope that I don't die before you do.” David said, “What do you mean?” Alex replied, “I don't want to think of you sneaking into the cemetery and scratching my name off my tombstone.”

When I was up for Best Actor for
The Third Man
, I was nearby, in Italy, a few hours away from Cannes. Alex called me and said, “If you'll come to Cannes, you'll get the prize.” That's the way it works. I said, “Why don't I stay here and get the prize?” And he said, “If you don't come, they'll have to give it to Eddie Robinson, because he's been here the whole two weeks.” I didn't believe him. And then I talked to [Robert] Favre Le Bret, who was president of the festival in those days, who said, “Yes, you come and you've got it. You don't come—” So I said, “Give it to him,” and didn't go. And Eddie Robinson won.

HJ:
Joseph Cotten is rather amazing in
The Third Man
.

OW:
He was very good.

HJ:
I've never particularly liked him, except in
Kane
and
Ambersons
.

OW:
Shadow of a Doubt.
He's awfully good in that.

HJ:
Oh, my God! He's great in that. I completely forgot about it.

OW:
That's the one good Hitchcock picture made in America. Hitchcock himself said it was his best. The English ones are better than the American pictures, the very early ones, like
The
39 Steps
. Oh, my God, what a masterpiece. Those pictures had a little foreign charm, because we didn't know the actors very well. But I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies. I don't recognize the same director!

HJ:
He decided to become popular.

OW:
Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows. About the time he started to use color, he stopped looking through the camera. I saw one of the worst movies I've ever seen the other night. Hitchcock's movie where Jimmy Stewart looks through the window?

HJ:
Rear Window.

OW:
Everything is stupid about it. Complete insensitivity to what a story about voyeurism could be. I'll tell you what is astonishing. To discover that Jimmy Stewart can be a bad actor. But
really
bad. Even Grace Kelly is better than Jimmy, who's overacting. He's kind of looking to the left and giving as bad a performance as he ever gave. But, then, you see, the world was so much at Hitch's feet that the actors just thought, “Do what he says and it's gonna be great.”

HJ:
If you think that one is bad, there's another terrible one with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.

OW:
Vertigo
. That's worse.

HJ:
And then the other one—what was the other one? His much praised comedy,
The Trouble with Harry
.

OW:
By then it was senility.

HJ:
No, it wasn't senility—that movie came earlier.

OW:
I think he was senile a long time before he died. He was in life, you know. He kept falling asleep while you were talking to him. When I would go to Jo's, Hitchcock would be there for dinner. I'd go because Jo was fond of him, not because he was interesting. When he first came to America, I looked him up and took him to lunch at 21.

HJ:
He must have been a different person then.

OW:
No, he wasn't very interesting then, either. I was disappointed.

HJ:
There's a movie I know you would hate that Jo's in with Jennifer Jones.

OW:
Portrait of Jennie
. He and I laughed at it when it was being made!