Orson Welles, Vol I (93 page)

The integration of the optical elements was another crucial and painstaking task, but Wise was most struck by Welles’s approach to sound. ‘He overwhelmed me with his radio background and his masterful use of sound, stretching the boundaries of how I thought sound could be used.’
²⁵
Citizen Kane
represents a real leap
forward in the use of sound in motion pictures. It really was a ‘radio picture’, the first RKO film that could be so described since Sarnoff had invented his slogan. The function of sound in a movie is surprising, contributing enormously but generally subliminally. Ambient sound and sound effects can transform a sequence with the simplest of means: a clock ticking, a distant dog barking, the wind,
the laughter of children. Any or all of these radically alter the sense of time or place in what is perceived by the eye; most of them are only subconsciously registered. For Welles with his acute awareness of selection and manipulation of sounds, this was only a beginning. His greatest innovation on radio had been the creation of a melos in which he dared to mingle voices (often overlapping) with
effects and music; equally striking was his strong sense of the value of silence – not something of which a lot was heard in movies of the thirties. Applying all of this experience to his new medium, he used sound to lead the eye.

Hitherto, in film, what you heard was what you saw. In
Citizen Kane
, for the first time, you heard something – a line, a sound – and
then saw where it was coming
from. The audience’s mind is thus kept in a state of continuous curiosity and alertness. There is, further, no pretence that you are not watching a film (pace Toland). What’s the next shot? Where is the next scene? the audience wants to know. It is one step further away from the beau idéal of film-makers of the thirties, the illusion of reality. The implications for the editors were considerable,
as, of course, for the sound engineers. Welles’s slavish attention to the precise quality of the sound effects, often requiring them to be made and remade, was exactly the same as that with which he had tormented his radio engineers. James G. Stewart, dubbing mixer on
Kane
, later an Oscar winner, and an old radio hand, told Carringer that much of what he knows aesthetically about sound came from
Welles. Again, he felt little personal warmth for the man: ‘I’d work all day. He’d make an appointment for 8 o’clock to run rushes,’
²⁶
Stewart told Richard Meryman. ‘He’d show up at midnight. No apologies. Just “let’s get going now.” And we’d work to 3 or 4 a.m. He’d have a jug of whiskey, but no offering it to anybody else in the room. Just for Orson. I don’t remember asking him a favor. And
I don’t think it would have occurred to anyone else.’ None the less, he described his work with Welles (he later worked on
The Magnificent Ambersons
) as one of the most significant experiences of his working life.

The film’s musical score was crucial for the editors, too. Bernard Herrmann, Welles’s musical director on most of his radio shows, composed a substantial amount of the music before
editing began so that scenes could be cut to its rhythms. ‘I was given twelve weeks to do my job. I worked on the film reel by reel, as it was being shot and cut. In this way I had a sense of the picture being built and of my own music being part of that building.’
²⁷
The breakfast sequence for which Herrmann wrote a cunning Theme and Variations in which the Waldteufel-like waltz becomes increasingly
fragmented and sourer as the marriage falls apart is a famous instance; another the arrival of Kane at the newspaper office for the first time done to 1890’s dance forms. Calling it the
Chronicle Scherzo
, Herrmann says ‘this whole section in itself contains a kind of a ballet suite in miniature.’ Though Welles was no musician himself – ‘his ear was not for music,’ said Virgil Thomson – he was
uniquely aware of the value of music. His entire approach to film (and to the theatre, for that matter) could be described as musical. He knew from the outset that the composer’s contribution to
Citizen Kane
would be enormous. Long before shooting began, Welles sent Herrmann a telegram which must have made his mouth water: ‘in second scene
we cut to kane in audience during which time full act
or scene is supposed to have been sung since curtain comes down following susies aria which opens act never mind logic please stop camera and composer must make this seem logical by ingenuity … here is chance for you to do something witty and amusing dash and now is the time for you to do it stop I love you dearly stop orson’.
²⁸

Herrmann made brilliant use of his ‘chance’, creating something
that is indeed witty and amusing, but something else, too. A parody but also a homage, the aria he wrote for Susan Alexander Kane is almost superior to its models, the French romantic operas with which Welles was so familiar from his nights at Ravinia:
Hérodiade, Thaïs
and the rest. Using a massive orchestra, he adds a Straussian dimension to the palette of Massenet, horns whooping, trumpets braying,
flutes skirling, over which the soprano hurls herself, surfing over the cascades of glissandi, finally leaping up to a lurid top D. That, at any rate, is what Herrmann wrote, and what has subsequently been performed by Eileen Farrell in the concert hall and the young Kiri Te Kanawa on disc. For the film, Herrmann found the sixteen-year-old Jean Forward, her voice true but tiny, and set her
adrift in a sea of instrumental activity; like Susan Alexander Kane, she sinks. The
Salambo
aria is one of the few occasions in the film where Herrmann deploys a regular (if augmented) symphonic band; as in his radio work, he took the opportunity of being able to employ as many musicians as he wanted to create ‘unorthodox instrumental combinations … sound effects blended with music, music used
in place of soundtrack’.

Radio had been his training ground as much as Welles’s: he found that in films ‘cues of a few seconds were often overlooked: on radio every scene must be bridged by some sort of sound device … I felt that in this film, where the photographic contrasts were often so sharp and sudden, a brief cue – even two or three chords – might heighten the effect immeasurably.’
²⁹
Many of the most striking effects in the film are perfectly complemented by just such brief musical accompaniments: Kane’s light being switched out as he dies, for example, where Herrmann’s sudden brass sforzando gives the moment a chilling finality. This is a fundamentally different approach to writing film music from the prevailing ethos, represented by Steinei and Korngold, both of whom, Viennese
in background, were intent on creating operas without words, symphonic tapestries under, over and around the film itself. In
Citizen Kane
, Herrmann does use leitmotivs (their essential method) though it was not something he was generally to employ in his film music.
It helps to integrate the film still further: the
Rheingold
-like four-note descending Power theme, heard right at the beginning on
low brass and strings with bassoon overtones, undergoes extraordinary transformations, becoming now a ragtime, now a hornpipe, finally a massive maestoso statement for full orchestra. That final statement is for the last sequence of the film; the music was pre-recorded and played on the set, Toland moving his camera to it.

Herrmann had unprecedented involvement in every stage of the work on
the film. He was closely involved in the dubbing: in a radical departure from normal practice, all his music for the film was actually recorded at the level at which it was to be used in picture, not artificially made louder or softer. It was often re-recorded six or seven times before the proper dynamic level was achieved. Welles supported him at every turn in his quest for perfection. In the Souvenir
Booklet for
Citizen Kane
, it is excitedly reported that ‘Welles even supervised the score.’ While it is unlikely that he ever prised the baton out of Herrmann’s hand, or altered the instrumentation, it is true that he expected, as a theatre director, to be more involved at every level than a regular Hollywood director would, and that included the music. He had, naturally and properly, an opinion
about everything, which is one definition of being a director. He and Herrmann had a notoriously fractious relationship, Herrmann sensitive and explosive, Welles insensitive and explosive, but their respect for each other’s work was deeply grounded. James Stewart, the sound recordist, tells a story of Herrmann inveighing bitterly against Welles’s methods and manners for close on half an hour, finally
stalking out of the room and slamming the door behind him. Immediately afterwards, he returned saying: ‘I want to make it absolutely clear that everything that I have just said refers to Orson the man, not Orson the Artist.’
³⁰

The music was the last element of the film to be completed; it wasn’t finally added until January of 1941. Welles, in rising high spirits, had been planning his cinematic
future: the top of his list for development was a
Life of Christ
to be set in New Mexico, at the turn of the last century ‘as a kind of primitive Western’. He carefully explained to the dozens of heads of churches whom he approached for advice and endorsement that he meant no impiety: he was simply following the precedent of painters through the ages who had painted biblical scenes ‘in their own
epoch’. He gained a surprising amount of support for the project; the following year he, Toland and Ferguson scouted locations. He was also eager to find a film in which he could direct Dolores del Rio, with whom
he was still closely and passionately involved. A project that he had first discussed in 1939 was reconsidered (
Mexican Melodrama
, loosely based on Arthur Calder-Marshall’s
The Way to
Santiago
); more immediately engaging was a screenplay that del Rio had been sent by the Mexican director Chano Uruta, an adaptation of the already twice-filmed classic of Mexican realist literature, Frederico Gambao’s
Santa
. Welles became fascinated by its story of the corruption and destruction of a young girl, and wrote a treatment of his own, in consultation with Toland. It shows the beginnings
of a highly personal style, an advance in this regard on
Citizen Kane
. Welles restructured the novel, starting with Santa’s funeral, to which the film returns at the end; it is, in effect, an enormous flashback, introduced by the dead woman as narrator. ‘Don’t think me a saint because Santa was my name. I was a number – a thing to be rented. When I laughed, I was scolded. When I cried, no one
believed in my tears. I died miserably and left nothing. I will tell you my story, and although I was guilty, you will pardon me I am sure – as sure as I am that God has pardoned me.’
³¹
Silence. Darkness. ‘As the picture opens, we fade in to the door of the brothel.’ Santa, new to the brothel, watches her first client fall asleep, having failed to make love. In another flashback, her past floats
into her consciousness.

Welles’s description of this flashback reveals a strikingly independent concept:
‘SANTA’S PAST:
This is, properly speaking, of course a flashback – but a flashback implies a sustained narrative and the effect of continuity within its own framework which I think should be carefully avoided … the first consideration here is a painstaking avoidance of the pat regulation
Hollywood flashback – a perfect little movie within a movie. Memories are like the uncut rushes of a movie. They make their own patterns, unlike the patterns of drama. The emphasis is never the emphasis of a script writer – so that a loaf of bread, or a cup of cocoa – a lithograph on a wall – a shrine – any inconsequential blade of grass may find itself a star performer in one’s memories of things
past. The unities find no special observances in Memory.’ The rest of the film is told in relatively straightforward, realistic terms, detailing the rise, downfall and death of The Queen of Courtesans. The treatment is filled with notes about the nature of sexual contracts – between lovers as well as prostitutes and their clients. This is an unusual area for Welles. There is also an unexpected
degree of compassion for the oppressed and their oppressors. The screenplay was never shot, though Norman Foster, shortly to collaborate with Welles on
Journey into Fear
, later made a film from the same material,
incorporating elements of Welles’s treatment. The treatment is in its way a remarkable document, suggesting a new departure for Welles, into a genuinely realistic world: the opportunities
for virtuosity are limited despite set-piece scenes in the brothel and at the bullfight. It shows him starting to think cinematically as second nature. Above all, it represents his feelings for del Rio, now at their height. Her calm strength and wide experience of Hollywood had obviously sustained him through his work on
Citizen Kane
; the treatment of
Santa
(completed in November 1940) was his
acknowledgement of that, and embodies his growing sense of mastery.

His expansiveness is evident in a telegram he sent around this time to Houseman (which suggests that both of them retrospectively exaggerate the degree of hostility that existed between them). Houseman had wired Welles’s secretary: ‘please give orson all my dearest love i am terribly busy but i have lots of ideas for us and
either when he comes here for the opening or by letter before that i will communicate them to him also to you puss my love you will be glad to hear that i am doing two radio shows a week and directing phillip barrys new musical extravaganza i love you all john’.
³²
Earlier, on 7 October, he had signed a short affectionate note to Welles: ‘Lots and lots and lots of love.’ Welles’s reply was equally
exuberant: ‘my beamish jack citizen kane all done with only scoring and trick sequences yet to come stop i am enormously anxious for you to see it and excessively interested in your statement quote i have lots of ideas for us unquote was beginning to fear you were permanently including me out and that will never never do stop hope to come east for a christmas week or so and see much of you stop
how about a job on your Campbell playhouse query every means of income as you possibly know has been cut off and i have no prospects whatever stop my very dearest love to you’.
³³
What Houseman did not know was that Arnold Weissberger was already involved in protracted plans to get Houseman off the board of Mercury Productions, as he wrote to Dick Baer at the beginning of November. Perhaps Welles
didn’t know, either. His high spirits continued in a telegram to Roger Hill, proposing publicity for the
Macbeth
discs: ‘give your friends a night at the theatre exclamation no waiting for seats walk do not run to the nearest exit see a show with your shoes off how would you like a little murder in your home query all the glamour and glitter of the theatre in one succulent christmas package’.
³⁴
His Christmas present list for 1940 is interesting: ‘Marc Blitzstein ($6), Jo & Lenore Cotten ($15), Chubby Sherman ($2–5), Francis Carpenter (book), John Houseman ($10).’ Houseman
and he had one more date together with destiny; then it really was all over.