Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts

245 Pages·2018·8.181 MB·English

by  James Gilmore

ORSON WELLES
IN FOCUS

ORSON WELLES
IN FOCUS
Texts and Contexts
EDITED BY
James N. Gilmore and
Sidney Gottlieb

FOREWORD BY
James Naremore
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
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© 2018 by Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gilmore, James, 1989- editor. | Gottlieb, Sidney editor.
Title: Orson Welles in focus : texts and contexts / edited by James N. Gilmore
and Sidney Gottlieb ; foreword by James Naremore.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039080 (print) | LCCN 2017043173 (ebook) | ISBN
9780253032966 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253032942 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780253032959 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Welles, Orson, 1915-1985—Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC PN1998.3.W45 (ebook) | LCC PN1998.3.W45 O77 2018 (print)
| DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039080
1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19 18
CONTENTS
Foreword / James Naremore vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Totality of Orson Welles /
Sidney Gottlieb and James N. Gilmore 1
1 Th e Death of the Auteur: Orson Welles, Asadata Dafora,
and the 1936 Macbeth / Marguerite Rippy 11
2 R evisiting “War of the Worlds”: First-Person Narration in
Golden Age Radio Drama / Shawn VanCour 34
3 O ld-Time Movies: Welles and Silent Pictures /
Matthew Solomon 52
4 O rson Welles’s Itineraries in It’s All True: From “Lived
Topography” to Pan-American Transculturation /
Catherine L. Benamou 80
5 O rson Welles as Journalist: The New York Post Columns /
Sidney Gottlieb 111
6 P rogressivism and the Struggles against Racism and
Antisemitism: Welles’s Correspondences in 1946 /
James N. Gilmore 131
7 M ultimedia Magic in Around the World: Orson Welles’s
Film-and-Theater Hybrid / Vincent Longo 150
8 “ The Worst Possible Partners for Movie Production”:
Orson Welles, Louis Dolivet, and the Filmorsa
Years (1953–56) / François Thomas 176
9 P resenting Orson Welles: An Exhibition Challenge /
Craig S. Simpson 201
Index 223
FOREWORD
JAMES NAREMORE
Except for Alfred Hitchcock, more has been written about Orson Welles
than about any other US filmmaker. This is perhaps not surprising, be-
cause the two men were at least arguably the most significant Holly-
wood directors of the 1940s, the peak decade of the classic studio era,
and they have interesting things in common: the burning “R” at the
end of Rebecca and the burning “Rosebud” at the end of Citizen Kane;
the madmen at the family dinner tables in Shadow of a Doubt and The
Stranger; the crazed clerks who rent motel rooms to Janet Leigh in Touch
of Evil and Psycho. They also make fascinating contrasts with one an-
other: Welles the exhibitionist versus Hitchcock the voyeur, Welles the
baroque stylist versus Hitchcock the lucid exponent of suspense, Welles
the critic of plutocracy versus Hitchcock the artist of anxiety, Welles the
Midwesterner who became “un-bankable” in Hollywood versus Hitch-
cock the British expatriate who was one of Hollywood’s most successful
figures. The comparisons resurfaced in 2012, when the international Sight
and Sound poll of filmmakers and critics announced that Citizen Kane,
which for sixty years had been considered the best film ever made, had
fallen to second place, just below Vertigo.
But Welles was a man of more varied talents than Hitchcock, and
because his career had so many aspects, the literature on him continues
to grow, to the point where it may soon outdistance any of his possible
competitors. He was not only an innovative director of theater, radio,
film, and television but also an actor, magician, painter, cartoonist, mu-
sician, costume designer, writer, journalist, educator, political activist,
orator, and raconteur. He was chiefly responsible for “War of the Worlds,”
vii
viii Foreword
the most socially significant radio broadcast of all time, and he created
some of the most legendary radio dramas and theatrical productions of
US, British, and European history.
One of the twentieth-century’s leading exponents of Shakespeare,
Welles gave us three remarkable Shakespeare films, each in a different
style, and a fourth (a color version of The Merchant of Venice) that has yet
to be restored and distributed. Because of his unusual education at the
Todd School for Boys in Illinois, he became not only a famous Bardolator
but also a lifelong pedagogue. In 1934, at age nineteen, he and his tutor
Roger Hill collaborated on Everybody’s Shakespeare, a series of abridged
“acting texts” of Shakespeare plays with suggestions for how high school
students might stage them; and these charming, unpretentious class-
room books still have educational value. In 1939, following the huge suc-
cess of his modern-dress, antifascist Julius Caesar in New York, Welles
supervised the Mercury Text Records, the first full-length recordings
of Shakespeare performances ever produced; with Roger Hill, he wrote
an article about the recordings for the National Council of Teachers of
English, and they were recommended as teaching aids in the first issue of
College English. In 1947, when movies were beginning to be widely used
in classrooms, Welles made ambitious plans for producing and direct-
ing 16mm educational films, but unfortunately, his American career was
nearing an end and nothing came of the project.
At the outset of World War II, Welles produced and, through no fault
of his own, tragically lost one of cinema’s most ambitious educational
experiments—a film about Latin America combining documentary and
fiction, playfully entitled It’s All True, about which we’re given new infor-
mation in this volume. One reason his producers scuttled the film was
political. Throughout the 1930s, Welles was deeply involved in Popular
Front activities, and after the war, he became increasingly outspoken,
publishing his views on American racism and renascent fascism in a
syndicated newspaper column and in other venues—matters discussed
in full by two essayists in this book. He had become the target of an FBI
investigation that was begun at the time of Citizen Kane, almost cer-
tainly prompted by J. Edgar Hoover’s friend William Randolph Hearst,
and had he remained in the United States after 1947, when a congres-
sional witch hunt for “un-American” filmmakers began, he would no
Foreword ix
doubt have fallen victim to the blacklist. Instead he went to Europe for
a decade, where he directed theater and transformed himself into a pio-
neer of the international art film—this last in a period before a strong
distribution network for such things existed. New details about one of
his most complex ventures in Europe, Mr. Arkadin, is found in another
essay collected here.
In late life, Welles also pioneered what came to be known as the
essay film and made original experiments with found footage and voice-
over. No wonder that writings and films about him keep increasing in
number. Interesting data about his prodigious career keeps surfacing,
largely because repositories such as the one at Indiana University’s Lilly
Library have given a home to his vast archive. As another contributor
to this volume points out, Welles presents both a challenge and an ex-
citing opportunity for librarians and archivists. Because of their work,
and because of continuing curiosity about Welles’s career, the scholars
represented in this collection have made new discoveries about such
things as Welles’s interest in the history of silent film, his legendary WPA
production of the “Voodoo” Macbeth, and his elaborate stage extrava-
ganza Around the World, which Bertolt Brecht regarded as a landmark
of American theater.
George Orson Welles died in Los Angeles in 1985 with his typewriter
in his lap, working, as always, on a new project. In 2015, the centennial
year of his birth, important books, journalistic tributes, and an excellent
documentary appeared.1 There were also film retrospectives and public
tributes across the United States and around the world. One of the larg-
est, perhaps the largest, was at Indiana University, where Welles was the
subject of an academic conference, a museum exhibit, and a comprehen-
sive showing of his films.2 Scholars, filmmakers, and visitors from the
United States and seven foreign counties attended and participated in a
discussion of Welles’s last, unfinished film, The Other Side of the Wind,
which at this writing is being edited posthumously for release. Because
of those events, critics and researchers went to work on the essays you
find here, all of them previously unpublished, and all dedicated to the
idea that Welles was a multimedia artist.
Is there anything else to say about Welles? Yes, and the proof is in
these pages. All great artists are sources of reinterpretation and new