Table Of Content

Orson Welles Orson Welles Six Films Analyzed, Scene by Scene R R ANDY ASMUSSEN McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA Rasmussen, Randy Loren, ¡953– Orson Welles : six films analyzed, scene by scene / Randy Rasmussen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7864-2603-4 softcover : 50# alkaline paper ¡. Welles, Orson, ¡9¡5–¡985—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.W45R37 2006 791.4302'33092—dc22 2006012348 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2006 Randy Rasmussen. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover photograph: Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in the ¡94¡ film Citizen Kane(RKO/Photofest) Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Contents Acknowledgments vi Preface vii Introduction: Fun House Mirrors 1 1. Citizen Kane: Man through a Prism 5 2. The Magnificent Ambersons: A House Divided 61 3. The Lady from Shanghai: Lethal Habits 104 4. Touch of Evil: No Man’s Land 136 5. The Trial: Waking into Nightmare 179 6. Chimes at Midnight: Rough Winds 217 Selected Bibliography 265 Index 267 v Acknowledgments My thanks to Tony Houdek, Brian Baier, Richard Suggs, and Karen Cloud for technical assistance in my never-ending battles with HAL 9000. And to Michael Anderegg for sharing his expertise and resources on Orson Welles. vi Preface The ways in which to write about Orson Welles and his films are as varied as the tal- ents of the man himself. In addition to the usual biographies, interviews, and critical stud- ies, there are the more specifically focused approaches. Michael Anderegg wrote about Welles’s multimedia adaptations of the plays of William Shakespeare in Orson Welles, Shake- speare, and Popular Culture. Robert Carringer’s The Magnificent Ambersons: A Reconstruc- tion attempts to fill the gaping holes in a great film ripped apart by studio bosses who took it away from Welles. Despite the System: Orson Welles Versus the Hollywood Studios, by Clin- ton Heylin, chronicles that battle and many others the writer, director and actor fought to make his kind of movies. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life purports to draw analogies between the stories he told on screen and the myths he created and encour- aged o› screen about his own life. My approach to the subject of Welles’s movies is strictly viewer based—a view from the cheap seats, similar to Jed Leland’s perspective of Susan Alexander Kane’s opera debut in Citizen Kane. As in my previous book about the movies of Stanley Kubrick, I try to delineate the dramatic rhythms of specific movies as they unfold on screen and from the soundtrack. While doing so I draw frequent analogies to other movies, and sometimes quote from the impressions of other commentators, but always within the scene-by-scene progression dictated by the film under discussion. Welles was a very self-conscious storyteller who often invited his audience to ques- tion the methods and veracity of what they see and hear. He was that rare magician who both pulled the wool over our eyes, for our delight, and unravelled the wool before our eyes, encouraging us to ponder the nature of the magic itself. Many of the characters in Welles’s movies are also magicians of a sort, creating impressions intended to manipulate otherchar- acters, or even themselves, into moving in one direction or another. But unlike Welles, few of them voluntarily expose their tricks to the scrutiny of their victims. By involving us so intimately in the foundations as well as the surfaces of what we see and hear in his stories, Welles struck an exhilarating, sometimes precarious balance between subjective and objective points of view. At the very least, his approach to making movies should inspire those of us who presume to analyze his work to acknowledge that we too, however modestly, are engaged in manipulating perceptions, and that our personal incli- vii viii Preface nations and capacities and motivations inevitably shape our e›orts. As in Welles’s adapta- tion of The Trial, it is important to keep in mind the projector as well as the image being projected. Like those of Kubrick, the movies of Orson Welles unfold in symphonic fashion, with each new scene building and reflecting back in some manner, ironically or otherwise, on its predecessors. By approaching them in a detailed, linear, scene-by-scene manner, I can hopefully trace their dramatic development. As to why I chose to write about the work of Orson Welles, the answer is simple. Fascination and pleasure. Writing at length and in detail about movies to which I am not fundamentally attracted would be merely a chore, unless of course the movies were incidental to the promotion of something else. My research too was simple: hour upon hour of watching Welles’s films on videotape and DVD, wearing out the rewind buttons on several machines. Making notes. Writing. Revising. Returning to a particular scene to make sure I remembered the details or the sequence of events correctly. Reading articles and books to compare my impressions with those of other commentators who, though perhaps more qualified than myself to o›er an opinion, often di›ered passionately from equally qualified colleagues. My choice to write about Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil, The Trial, and Chimes at Midnightrather than Welles’s other films involved several factors. First, the matter of limited space. Macbeth, F for Fake, and The Immortal Story all now exist in more or less the form Welles intended, and are all worthy of inclusion in any study. There just wasn’t enough space to include them without com- promising my approach to the others. Othello is a great film recently restored and released on DVD. But much of the soundtrack was enhanced and altered too, including a newly recorded version of the original music score, and I was in no position to compare this released version with its predecessors. The Stranger su›ered greatly from studio interference, and in some respects was the most compromised by Welles himself as he tried to tai- lor his work to conventional Hollywood expectations. The Magnificent Ambersons and The Lady from Shanghai, and to a much lesser extent Touch of Evil, also su›ered from the unwanted interference of others. But Welles’s potent ambitions for those works shine through so fiercely in spite of that interference that I had to include them. Given the time, money, and opportunity, Orson Welles might have gone on tinkering with and revising his old movies until the end of his life, as he did in fact with the never finished, perhaps never intended to be finished, Don Quixote. Magic acts are always in need of a little fine tuning. Taking my cue from Orson Welles himself, I o›er this incomplete but passionate interpretation of his movies. Ten years ago my scattered notes on these same movies probably read very di›erently than my current observations. Ten years from now, if I’m still around, they’ll have probably changed again, though not, I hope, beyond recog- nition. That’s the nature of the game, as Jed Leland, Mr. Bernstein, and Susan Alexander discover in my favorite movie. Introduction: Fun House Mirrors More years ago than I care to admit, a college buddy and I attended a campus show- ing of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Afterwards we argued about the movie through half the night—those being the days when a good night’s sleep seemed less imper- ative than it does now. We parted company on less than cordial terms. If anyone had asked us to describe the movie, we would no doubt have supplied two very di›erent commentaries. And over time each of those commentaries would likely have undergone revision, because at any given moment each of us brings a unique set of experiences, inclinations, and sensibilities to any perception. Telling and retelling stories is a common practice among characters in the films of Orson Welles: from five individuals and one newsreel telling the story of Charlie Kane in Citizen Kaneto Falsta› and Prince Hal playacting a reunion between Hal and King Henry IV before it even occurs in Chimes at Midnight. Various colleagues of and commentators on Welles have supplied di›ering accounts of how his movies were made. Of who did what, when, and why. And then there are the critics, who in the course of explicating a Welles film describe in their own words the action from a scene or two. To describe an event after the fact, or to imagine it before it occurs, is to interpret it. Details can be added or subtracted. Mood can be altered by changing descriptive terminol- ogy and emphasis. We are all storytellers, whether recollecting events from our own past or telling someone else what we read in a book or saw or heard at a school reunion, at work, at home, or at the scene of a car accident. The persuasiveness and veracity of such accounts varies from person to person. But no single account provides a complete picture. And even if one storyteller could paint a complete picture, who among his audience could absorb, comprehend and retain it all? It is not surprising that a man who could show many di›erent faces to so many acquaintances over the course of a lifetime would be so adept at dramatizing the vagaries of human nature, behavior, thought, and feeling. There is hardly any impression in a Welles movie that doesn’t serve as a mask for something else often contrary to it. Not because his characters are frauds, but because each of them is eminently human, with multiple, con- tradictory, and changing needs, impulses, and perspectives. In Orson Welles: One Man Band Welles contends “there is a villain in each of us, a murderer in each of us, a fascist in each 1