The Magic World of Orson Welles (34 page)

Nearly all the performances in
Touch of Evil
are done in this broad, roughly expressionist form; only Heston and Leigh use the techniques of “normal” movie acting, partly because they are meant to be out of place, like unwilling witnesses who have chanced into a crazy house. (Even they, however, are extravagant presences—Heston cast against type as a Mexican and Leigh made so sexy in her role as a sweet wife that she becomes unreal.) Elsewhere the film offers a heyday for character actors, who have been allowed to defy the notion that they should not emote but simply “be.” As we have seen in earlier chapters, Welles is almost alone among American moviemakers in his love for a theatrical intensity, a “hot” style of acting that has more in common with Griffith or Eisenstein than with the tradition of talking pictures. Consequently he relishes the opportunity to people his film with an assortment of international types in offbeat costumes, players who scurry about making broad gestures and yelling their lines. He has a keen sense of how these various bodies react against one another within the frame of an individual shot, and he tries for an exaggerated, highly choreographed effect that produces a surreal comedy.

The best example of the technique is the pivotal episode in Sanchez's apartment, which is photographed in three elaborate shots, the action broken only when Vargas exits to cross the street and telephone Susie. Throughout, the actors are in continual motion, the camera drifting in and out of three rooms. Sanchez's apartment sometimes threatens to become as crowded as the shipboard room in
A Night at the Opera
, yet the camera movement remains fairly
unobtrusive, the compositions changing in size with the fluidity of invisible editing. The wide-angle lens enables Welles to take in a broad playing area even while it distorts space and gives the feeling of giant heads swimming in and out of close-up. Everywhere the lighting is relatively simple, lacking the romantic chiaroscuro of the ordinary studio film; it originates from a few sources, usually from a low angle that casts the shadows of the actors on the ceiling and gives their faces sallow, demonic looks.

Welles and Heston dominate the space in the room, their movements slow and powerful, their voices held to a low key until they confront each other in a tight composition and Vargas shouts, “You framed that boy, Captain!
Framed
him!” Heston is ramrod stiff, his head cocked slightly, his chin jutting out, trying to remain a neutral “observer”; Quinlan, on the other hand, is weary; he moves with great effort (“I'm an old man,” he tells Marcia Linnaker) except when he suddenly deals Sanchez a vicious slap. One of these two kingly presences usually occupies a central spot in the frame, surrounded by tinier figures who rush nervously about, speaking at a higher volume. Sanchez (Victor Millan) is angry and distraught, wringing his hands and virtually jumping in frustration; Menzies is wiry and puppylike, moving urgently at Quinlan's suggestion; Uncle Joe Grandi is a chubby, quick little figure who tries to stay out of the picture, always talking with his hands. Now and then one of the smaller players inserts himself between Quinlan and Vargas, gesticulating wildly, as in the image shown here.

Figure 6.17: Vargas, Sanchez (Victor Millan), Quinlan and others in Sanchez's apartment.

The actors bite at one another's lines, their speeches contrasting in pitch and tone so that they take on a strangely rhythmic, musical counterpoint. For example, the dialogue that accompanies
figure 6.17
goes as follows:

SANCHEZ
(gazing wide-eyed at Quinlan, who avoids his stare)
: Where did you find this?

QUINLAN
(pained and weary, in a low voice)
: Right here in your love nest.

SANCHEZ
(shrill)
: Where?

MENZIES
(offscreen, shouting in a child's derisive sing-song)
: Right where you had it stashed, of course!

SANCHEZ
(more shrill)
: What are you trying to do?

QUINLAN
(low, tired)
: We're trying to strap you to the electric chair.

MENZIES
(at the top of his voice)
: We don't like it when innocent people are blown to jelly in our town!

QUINLAN
(quiet, almost dreamy)
: Yes, an old lady on Main Street last night picked up a shoe . . . The shoe had a foot in it . . .

SANCHEZ
(pleads with Vargas in Spanish, his voice whining)
.

VARGAS
(overlapping Sanchez)
: You'll have to stop him yourself . . .

QUINLAN
(to himself, overlapping Sanchez)
: He can talk Hindu for all I care.

The scene is vividly overwrought, like a bad dream. It even generates an obsessive, darkly comic motif involving shoes and feet: Sanchez works in a shoe shop (“the best shoe clerk that store ever had”) and has met Marcia Linnaker in the course of his job (“I've been at her feet ever since”); he is charged with a crime that left an old lady's foot and shoe on Main Street, and the evidence has been planted in an empty shoebox in his bathroom. Jokes like this give the film part of its crazy energy, a delirium that is intensified by the distorting lens, the continual movement of actors and camera, the array of strange facial types, and the fantastic interplay of voices.

It is remarkable that Welles was able to give life to expressionist theatrics so late in the fifties, when a great many movies were being shot on location, and when dramatists like Paddy Chayefsky and William Inge were being praised for their “realism.” In a sense
Touch of Evil
is the last flowering of artful crime melodrama from the forties, a style that survives in our own day only in the form of nostalgic imitations. Debased as the world of the film is,
the actors seem driven by beautiful demons, and the shadowy rooms and buildings retain a certain voluptuous romanticism. (Welles may be the only German expressionist who is also authentically attracted to Latin cultures and who is able to appropriate their “feel” to his style.) In another sense, however, Welles is breaking with the film noir, making Los Robles too decadent by far, extending the artifice of the film to such a degree that it becomes a new style, a foreshadowing of depressed, bombed-out landscapes of movies like
The French Connection
. Perhaps because he has never taken thrillers very seriously, he exaggerates everything to the point of absurdity. He uses “cameo” players to break the surface of the illusion, and he enters the film as “our local police celebrity,” having Joseph Cotten look offscreen to announce his arrival. Even when he is creating his strongest emotional effects—as in the scenes with Tanya—he loads the movie with references to himself and Dietrich. It doesn't matter that both characters wear makeup; in fact Dietrich's black hair and dark skin are meant to resemble one of those fantastic costumes she wore in the Von Sternberg musical numbers, and Welles has photographed her in soft focus amid wreaths of smoke, in the manner of her earlier films. She keeps her German accent, and when she looks at Welles and remarks, “You're a mess, honey,” the players separate from the fiction altogether.

In other ways, too, the bordello scenes are self-referential; for example, Tanya says that her business has become so diversified that “we show movies.” Such moments might be regarded as indulgence (to an extent they are), but the film's surface is so exciting that the director has earned them. Hence the scenes work at two levels, as if Welles were speaking out of his own age and thwarted idealism, acknowledging that the film is an expression of his own psychology and his desire to make fun of Hollywood. He sets the audience in an odd relation to the events, making us aware of the spectacle even while we are immersed in it. When Dietrich walks off into the darkness of the Los Robles oil fields at the end of the movie, turning back to the audience to say “Adios,” we are asked to regard everything as a magic trick, a form of play. It has been only a movie, Dietrich suggests, and she has noted that it doesn't matter what you say about people. But the very casualness of the gesture tends to heighten the wit, the satiric insight, and the imaginative power that have gone before.

Ironically, Welles's departure from Hollywood and his fitful, hectic career on the continent were precipitated by the stage musical titled
Around the World
. At the end of that show's financially beleaguered two-month run, Welles had gone $350,000 in debt and had been forced to commit himself to three movies (
The Lady from Shanghai, The Third Man
, and
Prince of Foxes
). The Internal Revenue Service refused to allow him to deduct his losses, and for the time being no important offers came from US movie producers. Partly to raise extra money, partly out of his growing alienation from America, Welles sought work in Europe, living in France, Spain, and England and filming in locales from Morocco to Yugoslavia. In 1973, looking back over his career in the States, he gave a Spanish interviewer a bitter summary of the facts: “During the twenty years that I worked in or was associated with Hollywood, only eight times did they permit me to utilize the tools of my trade. Only once was my own final cut of a film the one that premiered, and except for the Shakespearian experiment only twice was I allowed to give my opinion in the selection of my subject matter.”

Welles's subsequent European movies were financed largely from his own pocket and are a testimony to his resourcefulness and ingenuity. In the main he had to work under worse conditions than celebrated art directors like Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini. Frequently his backers were in financial difficulties themselves or caused problems similar to the old Hollywood moguls. For example, when the original producers of
Othello
went broke, Welles spent four years of intermittent work on the film, stopping now and again to act in
The Black Rose
(Henry Hathaway, 1950) until he could gain
enough money to continue; it is said he even “borrowed” equipment from the Hathaway movie to shoot parts of
Othello
in North Africa. In September 1961 Filmosa S.A., the production company for
Mr. Arkadin
(also known as
Confidential Report
), charged Welles with a breach of contract because they were infuriated with the almost chaotic form of the film's narrative. Welles seemed in trouble until about a year later, when Michael and Alexander Salkind, two energetic entrepreneurs without much money, approached him to play a bit part in
Taras Bulba
. “Are you kidding?' Welles is reported to have said, “I
am
Taras Bulba!” He refused their offer but persuaded them to arrange financing for
The Trial
, a project he had been contemplating for fifteen years. The Salkinds raised $1.3 million and hired a well-known international cast, only to find themselves in financial and legal troubles midway through the picture. Just as the production was about to fall apart, Welles conceived a way to shoot scenes in an empty rail station across from his Paris hotel, avoiding higher production costs and speeding up the work. In addition to writing, directing, and acting in the film, he also worked as second cameraman, editor, and dubber, completing everything within the original budget and a week ahead of schedule.

A good deal has been written about whether Welles's move to Europe was a self-destructive act. The decision, however, was not entirely voluntary. Possibly Welles could have managed his career so as to become a prosperous character actor, occasionally able to find theatrical or film work in America; on the other hand, the 1942–43 campaign against him at RKO had made a lasting impression in Hollywood. He was typed as unreliable, extravagant, and poor box office; his style was outrageous and idiosyncratic; and except for
The Stranger
he had never made a picture that audiences could watch with an easy, passive involvement. He had therefore gone where he could find the best chances of making films, and in the next twenty years he was able to direct two distinguished adaptations of Shakespeare and two other films that are completely in his own style. In between these projects Welles acted in a variety of other people's movies, usually bad ones, but sometimes he was able to influence lesser directors in interesting ways.
Prince of Foxes
(1949), for example, is ostensibly directed by Henry King, but parts of it bear the marks of Welles's style as vividly as the Robert Stevenson
Jane Eyre
he had done in the early forties.

As an actor in these films, Welles was usually a “character” in the worst sense and was frequently miscast by directors who did not understand his essential immobility or the fact that he was best when he played a vulnerable or childish figure of power. He appears to have chosen roles casually, out of
immediate need for cash, but he does fine work as Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann's
A Man for All Seasons
and as Bresnavitch in John Huston's
The Kremlin Letter
; he also makes a nice parody of himself as Le Chiffre in
Casino Royale
and a clever imitation of Alex Korda in
The V.I.P.s
. On the other hand, as General Dreedle, the pure monster of
Catch-22
, he is too much like a movie celebrity playing a cameo. Of all these roles, the one for which he is most famous—Harry Lime, the villain in the Carol Reed/Graham Greene production of
The Third Man
—is also the best. Here Welles not only steals the film but also makes its success possible, largely because of the strategically clever places he appears, the beautifully sinister compositions in which he is photographed, and the use he makes of his own spoiled-baby face. Actually he has little to do but has been given the title role and is the subject of everyone else's conversations; therefore his brief, tantalizing appearances are supercharged, bringing just the right amount of Luciferian dramatics to the bleak, downtrodden backgrounds of postwar Vienna. There is in fact a good deal of the young Charles Foster Kane in his performance. Joseph Cotten plays a man not unlike Jed Leland, and the famous scene between him and Welles atop an empty Ferris wheel has many of the same psychological dynamics as the newsroom encounters in
Citizen Kane
. Welles's “touch” is everywhere apparent in that scene: poised high above an amusement park reminiscent of the one in
The Lady from Shanghai
, he looks down on the people below and calls them “dots,” an echo of Franz Kindler in
The Stranger
. A moment later he makes a bravura exit speech, disarmingly confessing his ruthlessness with a joke that Graham Greene has said Welles invented: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” (A few years later Welles told André Bazin that although he was responsible for putting the gag in the film, he had stolen it from “an old Hungarian play.”)