Orson Welles: Hello Americans (28 page)

The flight back really happened. This picture
is all true. Bonito was pardoned; carnival was just as you’ve seen it; the four men from the North really sailed all those long miles to Rio in five logs of wood with only the stars to guide them, so they could talk to the President of their country. Naturally our cameras weren’t always on the spot. Some of he action we had to reconstruct. Here – for instance – before we’d finished our work,
Jacaré, the leader of the
jangadeiros
, had died in the sea. But this is still the end of our picture. Because this is the best place we know to stop. Also, it’s true. Jacaré did go back to Ceará, of course, he’s still there – alive in the love of his fellows; still with us, like the Dragon of the Sea who told the slave traders he’d carry no more slaves. For Jacaré lives now in American history.
This picture is his: a humble, solid declaration. To Jacaré, then! To his sixty days on the open sea, and the eight hours it took a plane to fly him back through the air, over fields and mountains and jungles to his family on Ipacema Beach; to the hours less it’s going to take to fly there tomorrow; to all brave flights and voyages; to his dream of the future.

This treatment was handed over to
William Gordon for his comments: they were not kind. ‘Possibly this outline can be brought in at a nominal, acceptable cost.
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However, in light of our previous experiences with the producer, the cost could reach exorbitant, even fantastic proportions, especially since it is so loosely drawn and none too well particularised.’ Suspicion of Welles runs through the report, which is worth examining
as the
only
existing detailed contemporary account of the footage, however predisposed against it the attitude may be. ‘This newest version of
It’s All True
makes nice reading, but I don’t think it’s a practical motion picture. To me, this outline appears to be full of fast, smooth, evasive double talk – another example of Welles’s charming, persuasive, impractical self. No matter how you slice
it, all in the world you have here is a bullfight in Mexico and a carnival in Rio. There is no sustaining story, no romance, no nothing, except what undoubtedly are well-photographed travelogue scenes.’ Gordon had little faith in the impact of Welles’s personality on the public: ‘Audiences (composed of what audiences are composed of) will be indifferent to seeing him enjoying the beauties of the
countries he visits.’
Bonito
is dismissed: ‘I doubt whether in a picture advertised as tending to better inter-American relations, it is fair to Mexico to set up the promise to audiences to show them Mexico at its best – including the culture and the fineness of the people – and then restrict this demonstration to a bullfight, no matter how noble the bull or how many little boys are crying over
the beast’s imminent departure from this life.’ He adds that ‘North American audiences do not like bullfights and will pay you not to show them.’ The Rio sections are impressive as shots of ‘the great pageant that is Rio’, but nothing more. There is no story. Gordon intimates that it’s Welles’s home movie, ‘which will not mean much to the guys who whistle in the gallery … it still looks like a hodgepodge
… we will not keep a typical movie audience in its seats if all we’ve brought them is a nicely photographed scene of dancing in the streets, interspersed with that high and mighty attitude of Welles’.

It becomes clearer and clearer how insufferable these RKO executives – not all of them money-obsessed philistines – find Welles: they
really
don’t like him. Professing himself worried by comparisons
with
Saludos Amigos
, Disney’s wildly successful contribution to hemispheric unity, in which Donald Duck teams up with a parrot called Joe Carioca (and which, surprisingly, Welles himself proposed putting on a double bill with
It’s All True
), Gordon scorns Welles’s ‘constant and continuous showing off … the use of Portuguese and Spanish reaches ridiculous heights when he acts as a Brazilian interpreter
for the Chilean girl. Any Spanish-speaking person can follow Portuguese intelligently – certainly better than one who learned the language in six easy lessons.’ He gravely doubts whether Welles will get Carlos Chávez and Heitor Villa-Lobos to write the score, as he seemed to believe; repeating
the
conventional wisdom that the
jangadeiros
– described in the report as ‘Indians’ – will be quite unsellable
in the South, he also observes that it is impossible to understand from the film why they travelled down-country to present their petition, which is a reasonable comment in the light of the extant
Four Men on a Raft
material.

Gordon was not necessarily wrong about the probability of Welles spending a great deal more on this version of
It’s All True
than he suggested he would. Whenever Welles
started work on something, he saw a better, a richer, a bolder – and almost certainly a more expensive – way of doing it. The treatment itself is a curious mix of straightforward Popular Front politics (surprisingly enthusiastic about the deeply undemocratic Vargas, with whom, it was rumoured, Welles had liked to have contrast-and-compare conversations about their respective sexual achievements),
rather corny and coy boy-meets-girl guff, and the core material at the Urca Casino, in the
favelas
and on the ocean. It is an uncomfortable mix as described, but any film is only as good as its realisation, as Welles knew better than most. What is surprising is that the finest material –
Four Men on a Raft
– only appears in fragmentary form in the treatment; Welles clearly believed that it was
the entertainment value of the film that was its best claim to public attention, and maybe he was right. But it is the footage shot on Ipacema Beach, in Recife and in Bahia that justifies the whole of the rest of the film.

This would not be the last attempt to salvage the material, nor was it the last elaborate recasting of the structure. Welles’s career was full of magnificent obsessions, starting
with
Five Kings
(to which he returned twice, the second time in triumph), continuing with
Macbeth
(four versions) and culminating in
Don Quixote
, a twenty-five-year fixation without ultimate issue. He never ceased to regret the potential of
It’s All True
, with the complex love one bears for something that has come close to destroying one. He wrote to Ferdinand Pinto early in 1943, when he was
still busily trying to reclaim the material, ‘I have a degree of faith in it which amounts to fanaticism, and you can believe that if
It’s All True
goes down into limbo I’ll go with it.’
³⁸
The film did go into limbo, from which it only partially emerged in the early nineteen-nineties. Welles occupied a more productive place, but it is true to say that had he never received the invitation from
the Office of Inter-American Affairs to make a film in Brazil, his life would have been radically different. It is doubtful whether
Journey into Fear
at its best would ever have been anything other than an entertaining
jeu d’ésprit
, but
The
Magnificent
Ambersons
– though it would never have been in tune with the times – would at least have been a complete work, unified in its vision, the work
of one artist.

We shall never know, since in December of 1942, Charles Koerner, utterly disregarding George Schaefer’s parting injunction to spare the film for posterity as Welles shot it, ‘now agrees’, as an anonymous internal memorandum put it, ‘that we may now junk all positive and negative trims and out-takes which you have been holding on
The Magnificent Ambersons’
.
³⁹
The nameless functionary
chooses his verb with particular relish.
Ambersons
was an emblem of exactly the thing that Koerner knew had to be rooted out of RKO: art for art’s sake. The mood both in the country and in the movie business was dead against everything that had led to Welles’s arrival in Hollywood: specifically the New Deal, with its extension of the subject matter of both theatre and film, its belief in the centrality
of the arts to human life and the appropriateness of subsidy for its activities, its sense of collaborative activity in every sphere and its wide social embrace. Roosevelt had been slowly withdrawing from his social revolutionary programme; by the time war was declared, he had shifted his priorities, and Welles was among those who denounced him for it.

Charles Koerner enunciated his new-broom
policy to Peter Rathvon with crystal clarity: ‘I believe that probably the greatest attribute we can bring to the Organisation is one of good common sense, and frankly that seems to be at something of a premium in Hollywood.
⁴⁰
It is going to take us a solid six to eight months to get rid of the choking commitments we have at this time.’ His arrival at the studio as hailed by the trade press. ‘This
new set-up looks like the best RKO ever had,’ exulted the
Hollywood Reporter
.
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Charles W. Koerner had operated a small movie house in Montana in 1914, and had been in the theatre-management business ever since. ‘There’s no “genius” stuff about Mr Koerner,’ said a spokesman for RKO, pointedly referring not only to Welles but to Gabriel Pascal and Jed Harris, who had also been summarily
junked
by the studio, in their case without shooting so much as a frame; Pare Lorentz managed to shoot most of his epic
Name, Age and Occupation
, which, though never released, survives. ‘Our production forces will be levelling off at only one major target, the exhibitor, and through the exhibitor, the public.’ Koerner declared war on what he sneeringly described as ‘interesting film events’, like Gloria
Swanson’s come-back and various recently acquired theatre properties. He put his faith in specially developed stories answering the need of the moment: in
this
case, war and service features ‘with direct appeal to servicemen on leave and war workers with fat pay envelopes’. In other words, it was down with the movies as art.

The first great box-office smash of Koerner’s regime, starring the radio
comedian Fibber McGee and his assistant, the ever-faithful Molly, bore the triumphant title
Look Who’s Laughing
. ‘Showmanship in place of genius’ was Koerner’s much-vaunted watchword, and in terms of fiscal probity, he was entirely successful, wiping out the studio’s debts (though the phrase is a little misleading: it was poor showmanship, rather than wasteful genius, that had lost the most money
– as in the case of the star-packed flops
Sing Your Worries Away
and
Valley of the Sun
). The importance of Koernerism was as much a question of image as of finances: wartime America needed to be amused and enthused; there was no place for subtleties, experiment or, God forbid, questioning. What were suddenly perceived to be eternal American values had not only to be maintained, but seen to be
maintained. ‘Welles was offering Americans an unfamiliar and uncomfortable view of their world,’ as Laura Pells observes, ‘at precisely the time when they hungered for whatever seemed tranquil and routine.’
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He also embodied in conspicuously flamboyant form the notion of wayward individualism, an idea equally profoundly out of sympathy with the times. In a sense, the Second World War was another
part of Welles’s bad luck: unlike his fellow director-producers, Noël Coward, Charlie Chaplin and Preston Sturges, he was temperamentally unable to join the mainstream when it seemed appropriate.

No doubt the existence of the Welles Unit at RKO had been something of an anomaly from the start, and it was only a matter of time before it would have been disbanded. From Welles’s personal point of
view, however, what happened was profoundly regrettable. The association had offered him unparalleled opportunities and a degree of support that would never again come his way. Henceforward, every film that Welles made was a massive struggle against the odds. Even when he worked for a studio, he was employed from the outside and had to fight for what he needed. Circumstances conspired to end his
relationship with RKO in the worst possible way, with maximum damage. Given those circumstances and Welles’s own temperamental vagaries, it remains something of a miracle that at least one completely achieved masterpiece saw the light of day:
Citizen Kane
. For the one and only time in his life, he was able to work within a structure that allowed full play to his prodigious gifts, neither oppressing
nor inhibiting him, and causing no compulsion
to
flight on his part. He had been given unexampled latitude by RKO, provoking profound resentment both inside and outside the film industry. He left it with a reputation for unreliable brilliance, still regarded as a peerlessly promising film-maker, but for the time being, at any rate, too hot to handle.

For his part, Welles felt frustrated by the
limiting demands of commercial production: when he insisted on the artist’s right to experiment, he was not speaking idealistically; he was very precisely stating the only conditions under which he could work. He made his films, as he had made his theatre, on the floor, in the heat of the moment. As he worked, the full possibilities of what he was making revealed themselves, and only then;
It’s
All True
was the ultimate instance of this. Nothing could be more inimical to an industry operating within the confines of the studio system. For some film-makers this system was a perfect set-up, allowing them the stability to pursue their own dreams. A Hollywood film-maker who had exactly the same idea as Welles was Charles Chaplin, who set no limit on the amount of time and money he would spend
on a film. But he owned his own studio, and was – at least at this point in his career; it would not always be so – guaranteed huge ticket sales on the strength of his name alone. Welles was in no such position, and never would be. The balance sheet was still formidable:
Kane
an acknowledged work of inspirational brilliance;
The Magnificent Ambersons
, even in mutilated form, recognised as an astonishing
achievement for such a young film-maker (‘Although
The Magnificent Ambersons
seems to lack pertinence now,’ said the
New York Times
, ‘it has integrity and sincerity of purpose. Mr Welles has grown much in a short while; he may yet assume the full stature that can be his’).
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It’s All True
remained a mystery, and
Journey into Fear
was yet to be seen. Nobody was underestimating Welles, but he was
already thought of as somebody who might not be his own best friend.