The Magic World of Orson Welles (29 page)

This depth of composition is emphasized when at one point Macduff walks back toward a small, fork-shaped tree in the distance, stops with his back to us, and cries, “Hell!” Then he turns and crosses to the camera, walking into a close-up while we track with him to the right. The effect of these histrionics is sometimes awkward, and yet something of Welles's talent shows through. The ordinary filmmaker, given a couple of weeks to transfer a stage production to the screen, would have given the actors simpler movements, cutting back and forth between them with “invisible” editing. Welles, however, puts the camera
into
the stage setting, letting the effect of theater remain but turning it into an artful little ballet. His camera is active, more like one of the players than like a proscenium, the wide-angle lens giving a sweep to even the slightest movements of the players.

Figure 5.11: The Celtic cross and a forked tree: symbolism in
Macbeth
.

Everywhere the movie is characterized by a deliberate, stagy artificiality, as in the scene where Macbeth climbs a hillock and rages at the top of his voice while nature storms around him; the studio lights are turned up and down to represent lightning, a tinny backstage rumble simulates thunder, and on the “sky” behind Welles we can actually see the shadows cast by the phony trees in the foreground. Welles is quite willing to let these awkward effects stand, however, because he is striving for something much like Raymond Durgnat's description of expressionist cinema in
Films and Feelings
. Durgnat says that expressionism is characterized by “heaviness, symbolism and a sense of
haunting
.” It represents a “turning away from naturalism” that is reflected in “the German preference for huge studio sets and elaborate technical effects rather than location photography.” In addition, he says:

The relationships of the characters are all reduced to broad, primal attitudes and urges. The acting concentrates, not on the ebb and flow of people's behavior, but on broad, forceful postures and gestures. Thus the film is reduced to a series of
basic
movements each of which is then emphasized and “accordioned out”—giving the characteristic “heaviness” of German silent films.

By this description,
Macbeth
is arguably the purest example of expressionism in American cinema. It begins with a few highly effective outdoor shots and then grows progressively less naturalistic as it goes along. It makes use of all the expressionist urges that were characteristic of Welles's style from the beginning of his career—the deep-focus photography, the distortions of the fish-eye lens, the deep shadows, the snaky movements of the camera—but to these it adds an obviously staged, constructed, symbolic environment, to say nothing of an acting style and a conception of the play that is so “simplified” in outline that it actually conflicts with Shakespeare's language. (This language is further defaced by post-synchronized sound, a flaw one encounters repeatedly in Welles's low-budget European films. Here a number of scenes were shot in the same fashion as a Hollywood musical number, with players mouthing their own prerecorded speeches so that a “perfect” reading of Shakespeare could be obtained throughout the complex long takes. When the studio later
objected to the Scottish accents Welles had given his actors, much of the film was redubbed, creating unfortunate confusion. In 1980 UCLA and the Folger Library restored the film to its original length and soundtrack. This restoration is superior in every way to the studio's version; in recovering the porter scene, it also recovers an impressive ten-minute take.)

The results are often striking: the bank of clouds that symbolizes “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”; the shadow of Macbeth's finger crawling along a stone wall to point at Banquo's ghost; the highly artificial, Nuremberg-style lighting of Dunsinane at night; the misty, heathenish courtyard with a gray cyclorama spread behind it. But in spite of the effectiveness of parts of the film, Welles's methods are often silly, resistant to the photographic realism of the camera, provoking more laughter than Eisenstein's distortions in
Ivan the Terrible
. Furthermore, one leaves the movie with a feeling of doubt. Can Welles, who appears in public as a sophisticated man of the world, really believe in this sort of elemental, black/white melodrama, this Manichean duel between witches and the church? Has he not accepted the limitations of expressionist drama along with its virtues?

The answer to the second question is an obvious yes, but the first is much more difficult to resolve. Welles was too complex a man to hold a naïve belief in “Christian law and order,” but on the other hand his interpretation of
Macbeth
is quite consistent with a theme we have seen in his other films. He repeatedly dealt with the same issue he presents here: a conflict between the will to power and the need for orderly constraints.
Macbeth
is different from the other Welles films only in the psychological simplicity of its conception and the abstraction of its mise-en-scène. As Joseph McBride has observed, it lacks the “necessary naturalistic counterpoint,” the “documentary verity” that gives many of Welles's other films their social dimension. And yet the “counterpoint” McBride has mentioned is indicative of a latent tension in Welles's work. In most of his films, the division (I would even say conflict) between tragedy and documentary truth is reflected in the style. At one level we have the newsreel in
Citizen Kane
or the drugstore in
The Stranger
—sequences that reveal Welles's concrete awareness of American life and his basically progressive social criticism. At another and perhaps more basic level, we have the obviously constructed, symbolic settings like Xanadu or Dunsinane; the remarkable low-key lighting; the highly orchestrated, bravura movements of the camera in the long takes; the dizzy angles of perspective. At this level we are dealing almost exclusively with the tragic elements in Welles's stories (hence the purely expressionist style of
Macbeth
), and we have entered a realm
that has something in common with the demonic, authoritarian bombast of the tyrant hero.

Clearly Welles was a liberal, and yet one could argue that the “expressionist” side of his artistic character is the sine qua non of his style. The contradiction, however, is only apparent. It exists because Welles was ambivalent (emotionally, not morally) about power, will, and the so-called dark gods. His expressionist style and his penchant for tragedy enabled him to depict characters and emotions he was fascinated with but that on the consciously moral and political level he found repugnant. In this sense as in others, the filmed version of
Macbeth
has as much in common with Conrad as with Shakespeare: the hero is caught up by what Kurtz calls “the horror”—the primitive, antirational world of power that André Malraux has described as “everything in man that longs for the annihilation of man.” Perhaps Welles himself once felt similar emotions; having come to Hollywood as one of the most powerful young men in the world, and just at the time when Hitler was terrorizing Europe, he must have had firsthand knowledge of “the horror.” Therefore the following Nietzschean speech, which he wrote for the unrealized
Heart of Darkness
, might equally have been spoken by Charles Foster Kane or even Macbeth:

KURTZ: I'm a great man, Marlow—really great. . . . The meek—you and the rest of the millions—the poor in spirit, I hate you—but I know you for my betters—without knowing why you are except that yours is the Kingdom of Heaven, except that you shall inherit the earth. Don't mistake me, I haven't gone moral on my death bed. I'm above morality. No. I've climbed higher than other men and seen farther. I'm the first absolute dictator. The first complete success. I've known what others try to get. . . . I won the game, but the winner loses too. He's all alone and he goes mad.

In the filmed version of
Macbeth
, as in the earlier script for
Heart of Darkness
, Welles is trying to show that the line between barbarous ambition and a civilized order is very thin and that constraints are needed to hold the will to power in check. At the same time, he is fascinated by tyrants like Macbeth and Kurtz, and he gives their downfall a tragic aura. Thus
Macbeth
ends on the very note that is described in the speech above: the “great man,” totally alone and mad in his dark castle, is besieged by the millions.

At one level, therefore, Welles did believe in “Christian law and order.” And
Macbeth
, whatever its faults and virtues as art, gives us an insight into the cautious, pessimistic morality that was the underside of Welles's liberalism.

After
Macbeth
Welles did not make another film in America for ten years, and the work he finally produced is so crammed with sermons, so charged with visual acrobatics, so peopled with celebrity friends dressed as if for a Halloween party, that it might have degenerated into nothing more than an entertaining curiosity. Instead
Touch of Evil
became the most impressive of his films after
Citizen Kane
, the one in which all of his strengths—the showman, the political satirist, the obsessed romantic, the moral philosopher, the surrealist—are somehow merged.

Touch of Evil
needs to be lifted out of chronological order (Welles made two movies in Europe after
Macbeth
) because it belongs with the American work and follows naturally the issues discussed in the previous chapter. Once again Welles is dealing with a thriller that is charged with social satire; once again his style is so outrageously exaggerated that it affronts critics and movie bosses alike. The
Variety
reviewer, for example, labeled
Touch of Evil
a “confusing, somewhat ‘artsy' film” with “so-so prospects”—no doubt throwing Universal executives, who had already lost half a million dollars in the first quarter of 1958, into a panic. During the early months of that year, trade papers were filled with rumors of sweeping changes within the studio hierarchy, including reports that the film division would fold altogether in order to save their second arm, Decca Records. Corporation president Milton Rackmil announced in April that henceforth Universal would make “the type of picture we think will make money for us.” Because of this anxious conservatism,
Touch of Evil
was never given the publicity or theatrical bookings it deserved and took many years to develop a cult following.

But then it is remarkable that the film should have been made at Universal in the first place. The studio specialized in Tony Curtis/Piper Laurie romances and the “Tammy” series, trying to survive the popularity of television by producing some of the most inane movies of the decade. Certain directors, notably Douglas Sirk, were able to transform Universal soap operas into triumphs of stylistic innuendo over literary content, and the low-budget horror films of Jack Arnold were well scripted and full of sexual intensity despite the relative banality of their direction.
Touch of Evil
, however, was a far more unorthodox movie than any of these, and one of the pleasures of watching it comes from the knowledge of how much it rebels not only against the general tone of its studio but also against the whole fifties concept of artistic respectability. It deals with racism, police corruption, and sexual confusion in an atmosphere so gorgeously sleazy that the very air is filled with blowing garbage. It dresses Janet Leigh in a tight sweater and surrounds her with a gallery of threatening “cameo” players, setting off gifted character actors like Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Dennis Weaver, Gus Schilling, and Ray Collins against “stars” in minor roles: Joseph Cotten as an aged police surgeon; Mercedes McCambridge as a butch member of a hot-rod gang; Zsa Zsa Gabor as a madam. Most important of all, Marlene Dietrich plays an old-fashioned Mexican prostitute who mutters her lines in a Germanic baritone. (According to Welles, Keenan Wynn was to be cast as “a member of the
Lumpenproletariat
.” I've never been able to spot him, but a less well known actor, John Dierkes, appears in a couple of brief shots.) As a result of all this,
Touch of Evil
becomes a brilliant fusion of pulp art with continental sophistication; it has all the energetic cruddiness of a Samuel Fuller B picture and all the self-consciousness of the French New Wave.

Exactly how such a bizarre project came about is still a matter of conjecture.
Newsweek
reported that Welles had been offered the film as a sop for a character role he had played previously at Universal. Charlton Heston has said he suggested Welles as director after reading the film's unpromising script, and there is no reason to doubt Heston's goodwill and influence. Producer Albert Zugsmith, who was also responsible for some of the Douglas Sirk films, tells still another story. According to Zugsmith, Welles had come to Universal in the late fifties in need of money to pay tax debts, and Zugsmith cast him in the role of the heavy in
Man in the Shadow
(Jack Arnold, 1957). After this film, Zugsmith says, he and Welles became pals over a bottle of vodka, and Welles offered to direct the “worst” script the producer had to offer—the Paul Monash adaptation of Whit Masterson's novel
Badge of Evil
.