Orson Welles: Hello Americans (75 page)

The edition of
Life
magazine in which its hatchet job appears was on sale in Boston at the time of the film’s premiere, which,
much against Dick Wilson’s advice, had been arranged by Republic in conjunction with ANTA. Emerson University sponsored it, and in order to obliterate largely inaccurate reports of a fiasco in Venice, it was billed as a ‘world premiere’, which meant that the review from
Il Tempo
and others equally glowing could not be quoted. The film’s reputation as a stinker was growing; anyway, Boston’s critics,
as Wilson pointed out, ‘had exhausted themselves with writing superlatives about
Hamlet
’, which had been running there for ten sold-out weeks.
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The audience that
Macbeth
got was largely a young one, ‘because they admire you for your courage and liberal attitudes’; the financially lucrative carriage trade was slow to build. Most woundingly, ANTA (whose idea it had been in the first place to translate
a stage production of a classical play into a movie) had dissociated itself from the picture; board members who had seen it filed bleakly negative reports.

Under the pressure of all this negative reaction to a film over which he had, in Welles’s absence, personally laboured for months and months, fighting his wayward boss’s corner in a studio where he was a barely tolerated outsider, Wilson allowed
himself a rare outburst against Welles, a real
cri de coeur
. ‘Of course I think the whole thing cries out for a fight – a fight on the order of the one you waged for
Around the World
.
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I think it’s tragic that you’re not here personally to lead it because I’m absolutely and sincerely convinced that if you were around for the next three or four openings to lecture, meet the critics, women’s clubs
and all that, you could put this over the top and turn it into a controversy such as
the
industry has seldom seen.’ As far as he knew, there was no reason why Welles couldn’t be there; he wasn’t filming at the time of writing. As far as Wilson knew, Welles was doing nothing at all. He cannot bring himself to criticise Welles’s behaviour during post-production, but he does dare to raise the question
of Welles’s ‘industry and general public relations’, which, he says, ‘are in a period and state of crisis’. He reveals that Newman of Republic has told him that he doesn’t think Welles will get a penny of bank financing for any picture he ever tries to produce again; Edward Small (
Cagliostro
’s producer, and their potential partner on
Othello
) has been quite explicit about Welles’s position in
the industry, in Hollywood ‘and all over the country with exhibitors’.

Pushing on fearlessly – ‘I know that this usually bores or infuriates you’ – Wilson brings up the question of ‘the unhealthy press we have right now’. Leonard Lyons of the
Post
manages the occasional warm (albeit pointless) anecdote, but the rest of the columnists ‘take nothing but digs at you’. He begs Welles ‘to get again
directly before the people and directly to the people’. He would have ‘tremendous popular sympathy and understanding’ if he went on the road on
Macbeth
’s behalf. ‘The deterioration that has gone on since you left the air on the
Commentary
series can hardly be overestimated.’ He implores Welles at least to pen a fighting piece for the
New York Times
, and to write round to his chums on the various
newspapers. Hedda Hopper, surely, could be co-opted, ‘if you would extend yourself personally to cope with the situation’. Welles behaves as if it is nothing to do with him. ‘Please write me a letter so that I know what the hell is going on with you and I really want, need and hope to get the material I’ve asked for in this letter. I promise to put it to good use because I intend to follow this
as closely as Republic allows me – anyway, you know I’ll be in there punching. Much much love and affection.’ The whole letter is a mark of the force of Welles’s personality and the often exasperated loyalty that he inspired. But Dick Wilson had no power within Republic or within the industry in general. Welles himself, at the head of a massive charm offensive, might just have been able to swing
things in his favour; in his absence, events would inevitably take their own course. Republic – above all Robert Newman, the chairman – had started to form an opinion that
Macbeth
needed radical reworking.

This is perhaps the moment to look at the film as it stood in 1948, the film acclaimed in Venice, the one derided in Boston. This film disappeared from view shortly afterwards, presumed lost
or
destroyed. Then, in 1985, the film as originally issued – which was anyway thirty-five minutes shorter than the first rough-cut – was discovered in nearly pristine form, and reissued; for the first time it was possible for a general audience to see the film in which, as Welles himself said at the Venice Festival, ‘for the first time in my life I got what I aimed for’.
²⁶

The opening credits
proudly proclaim ‘A Mercury Production’ – not since
The Magnificent Ambersons
had a Welles film been able to claim as much – while Ibert’s rackety, hectic overture, filled with fanfares, plays; it ends with a sly quotation from Herrmann’s Xanadu theme from
Citizen Kane
. The first image of the film is swirling fog. It is striking that this is exactly how Olivier’s film of
Hamlet
begins, as does
Kurosawa’s 1956
Macbeth
film,
Throne of Blood
. As in those two films, fog remains the essential element: everything looms up out of it and dissolves back into it. In Welles’s film, the camera pushes deep in to reveal three hags toiling over a cauldron. In an arresting montage they seem to be brewing a constantly metamorphosing stew, which is now viscous, now fluid, now opaque, now mere mist. The
witches – seemingly possessing many more than three voices, some male, others female, some young, others old – work on a doll made of clay. On cue – ‘something wicked this way comes’ – two warriors in seemingly Tartar garb appear, Macbeth and Banquo on horseback, galloping across the mist-obscured heath. They are immediately engaged by the witches, who make their predictions: as they tell Macbeth
that he will be king hereafter, their voices rise to a chilling shriek. The rest of the army draws up, headed by a strange, rugged, unshaven figure, with plaits – apparently Anglo-Saxon, carrying a banner with a Celtic cross; this is the Holy Father, who, somewhat unexpectedly, doesn’t seem upset by the Weird Sisters. Macbeth steps aside for his first soliloquy, which is spoken – just as in the
contemporaneously filmed
Hamlet
– in voice-over as we study the actor’s face. Welles’s make-up emphasises his huge eyes with great smudges of kohl; his nose is the one he was born with, small and retroussé, unencumbered with the habitual putty; he has a light, stubbly beard shaped into mustachios, which follows the line of the chin.

Since childhood, Welles had been described as looking slightly
oriental, or sometimes even Mongolian, and his physiognomy here seems to have something of the steppes of Central Asia about it. Almost from the moment we see him, this Macbeth appears haunted and dismayed; with one striking exception, we never see the seductive charm that is such a large part of Welles’s appeal as an actor.
His
conception of the role seems to be of a man tranced, somnambulistically
obeying a destiny over which he has no sway. This is very much how he had played Franz Kindler in
The Stranger
. The danger of such an interpretation, which Welles does not entirely avoid, is that it will rob the part of any dramatic progression and will fall into an unchanging rhythm. But, like Olivier in his
Hamlet
(with which
Macbeth
has very much more in common than either its detractors or
admirers would like to admit), Welles wants to take us into his leading character’s head: harking all the way back to his early radio work and his planned film of
The Heart of Darkness
, he seeks to explore the subjective viewpoint. ‘What I am trying to do,’ he told
Cahiers du Cinéma
, ‘is to see the outside, real world through the same eyes as the inside, fabricated one.
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To create a kind of unity.’
His
Macbeth
has an oneiric quality throughout, and – which is perhaps to say the same thing from a different viewpoint – the quality of a particularly harsh and frightening fairy tale. This aspect of the film is manifest in the constant metamorphoses of elements – the Macbeths’ castle, for example, seems to be made of the same clay as the witches’ voodoo doll – but also in a certain pictorial
naivety and occasional oddly anachronistic touches; the condensation of the action, telescoping and eliding events, enhances this sense of temporal and geographical unreality. Macbeth himself, shot from on high or from far below, often appears as an ogre, while Lady Macbeth is played and filmed like a wicked stepmother. (Welles was much exercised by the idea of kingship – he told Kenneth Tynan that
as an actor he fell into the category of ‘he that plays the king’ and lamented to Peter Bogdanovich that ‘we can’t have a great Shakespearean theatre in America anymore because it’s impossible for today’s American actors to comprehend what Shakespeare meant by “king”:
²⁸
they think a king is just a gentleman who finds himself wearing a crown and sitting on a throne’; but, despite his physical stature
and vocal refulgence, he chose to present both the monarchs he impersonated – the other is King Lear – as unstable and lacking in natural authority.)

Welles’s purported approach to
Macbeth
, his attempt to evoke a time poised between the pagan and the Christian – where pagan is equated with evil – is more in the nature of a design concept than of an examination of the play. From his stated intentions,
it seems that what he had in mind was the creation of an early medieval world in the manner of Tarkovsky’s
Andrei Rublev
, but the text scarcely gives him the opportunities to achieve this; nor could he possibly have done so on his schedule and with his budget.
From
a theological or a social-anthropological point of view, there is a certain incoherence to the idea. Perhaps, as André Bazin, with
his habitual elegance, suggested, Welles had created ‘a prehistoric universe – not that of our ancestors, the Gauls or the Celts, but a pre-history of the conscience at the birth of time and sin, when sky and earth, water and fire, good and evil, still aren’t distinctly separate’.
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Whether this is remotely what Shakespeare had in mind is neither here nor there. But some of the uses to which Welles
puts the Holy Father – the key figure in the working out of his idea – are a little perplexing. He displays surprising equanimity when he sees Macbeth and Banquo talking to the Weird Sisters, surely the enemy incarnate. He is next found taking dictation from Macbeth; quietly and efficiently he writes down a very nearly seditious letter to Lady Macbeth. Banquo comes in, and he and Macbeth amiably
jest about the witches’ prophecies – prophecies that, in the case of Macbeth, can only mean the death of King Duncan and his immediate heirs. Yet the Holy Father, who seems at the very least to be Duncan’s chaplain, goes on diligently practising his stenography in the background.

The dissolve to Lady Macbeth reading the letter brings us a first touch of anachronism – exactly as Welles requested
(apparently, as Cocteau so wittily noted, on the point of making a phone call). She lies on her bearskin bedspread, and her first soliloquy is heard in voice-over, accompanied by Ibert’s wistful, seductively skirling strings, as she voluptuously, tremulously enjoins the spirits to unsex her, gazing out into the encircling mist. It is a striking realisation of the scene. Though Jeanette Nolan is
unimposing physically, she conveys an intense inner life, revealed less as a terrifying ruthlessness, than as a rather complicated sexuality.

It is when she first appears that the vexed question of the Scottish accent forces itself to the forefront. Miss Nolan was a skilled mimic and, technically speaking, the accent, consonant for consonant, vowel for vowel, is more or less accurate (more so
than that of many in the cast – Dan O’Herlihy lapsing frequently into Irish, as sometimes Welles himself does). What she is unable to do is to transcend the accent so that it is a natural, breathing instrument of her thoughts and feelings. The Olivier film, with which
Macbeth
was so unfavourably compared in this regard, is not flawless: the accents – even Olivier’s – have a slightly clipped, cut-glass
character that sets them in their own period. But in
Hamlet
the actors are, of course, absolutely at ease with what they are saying, and able to play effortlessly with each other. Welles’s actors are in a constant
double
struggle, with the accent and with the demands of synchronisation: the result is stiff and inexpressive. It is not entirely surprising that the most favourable responses to the
film have been from non-anglophone countries: if the film were in Latvian or Swahili, it would be much more enjoyable. Welles’s core problem is that he is dealing with a text that – almost by definition – lives in its language. Moreover, in this particular play (more than many others of Shakespeare), the level of poetic inspiration in the writing of the central character is integral to an understanding
of the man. It is one of the commonplaces of dramatic criticism that Macbeth is a great poet – is, to some extent, undone by the power of his imagination, which comes between him and his capacity to act sufficiently ruthlessly in pursuit of his ambition. A great amount of his text is, inevitably, cut; but in addition Welles, as has been observed before, lacks a poetic sensibility, excelling
instead in rhetoric – making a fine sound for the sake of effect, rather than inhabiting the metaphorical landscape of the verse. His sense of music is oratorical rather than personal, and tends to the hypnotic (and sometimes, frankly, soporific) rather than the mercurially responsive.

Interestingly, Welles’s great rival in putting Shakespeare on film, Laurence Olivier, was also lacking in the
sort of instinctive poetic sensibility possessed by a Gielgud or an Irene Worth, but he had made of his voice such an extraordinarily flexible instrument that he was able to orchestrate the language to constantly arresting effect; his sharp response to imagery would lead him to draw attention unexpectedly to subordinate phrases, suddenly illuminating a passage unforgettably (if sometimes irrelevantly).
His goal was immediacy of comprehension; he always sought to root his work in the perceived world. Ideas scarcely engaged him at all. Welles’s approach to verse-speaking, and indeed to acting in classical plays in general, was very different. He was in some ways a throwback. Michael Anderegg in his masterly study
Orson Welles: Shakespeare and Popular Culture
draws attention to a tradition of ‘wildness’
in nineteenth-century Shakespearean performers, associating Welles with this tradition. Certainly, he consciously dissociates himself from the contemporary tradition of Shakespearean acting, sometimes hurling himself at a scene with huge energy and indeed wildness, although this never affects his performance of the text, which hurtles on – where formerly it had rolled on – with perfect fluency,
but without real individuation. He finds a cadence, quick or slow, and he sticks to it, and the result is sometimes impressive, but very often simply
monotonous
. Physically, he handles himself like a silent-movie actor (or an opera singer), putting enormous emphasis on his eyes; as director, he uses his own face – often filling the frame with it – as kind of emotional landscape; the effect is
static: a painting, as it were, of feeling, which is often impressive in the photographic stills deriving from the shoot, but dramatically inert in the film itself. It is impossible to separate the movie from its leading actor, because he has naturally thrust himself to the forefront of the frame, but his performance is not, needless to say, the whole story: the physical realisation of the action
and the overall visual language are quite strikingly separate from it. Welles the
metteur-en-scène
, and indeed Welles the director of other actors, is a very different creature from Welles the actor. The central paradox of his film of
Macbeth
is that he deploys a radical shooting style to film a conventional and generally rather limited performance of the piece.