Orson Welles: Hello Americans (77 page)

There were various screenings of the film ‘as a basis for discussion’, with Wilson fighting the film’s corner not only against Republic executives but, to his fury, against Charles Feldman, who had brokered
the original deal with Republic and whose name was on the film as producer. Wilson had been hoping to show at the screenings how ridiculous the proposed cuts were, but, he wrote to Welles, ‘I have had the considerable disillusionment of hearing Charlie request some of the god-damnedest things it’s possible to imagine.
³¹
I’ve had the odd experience of being supported by Newman against the suggestions
of your good friend and partner, Mr Feldman.’ Wilson tells Welles that he had better resign himself to the fact that ‘there is going to be editing on the picture’. He has persuaded Republic to send a list of their cuts. They include – Feldman’s suggestion, this – Lady Macbeth’s first soliloquy and the first murderers’ scene. Feldman was also obsessed with certain details of costume, especially
what was more or less affectionately known as Welles’s Statue of Liberty costume, with points shooting out of his chunky crown:

To give you a better picture of Charlie. He had so many of his friends talk to him about
Macbeth
that he now doesn’t know what to think. He has memorised the
Life
article and cannot help but quote it to make a point. In other words, he’s now beginning to believe the
Life
article … his suggestions … are directly opposed to your pitch in your letter that the cure is not to file down the roughness. His sensitivity to costumes, sound,
witches
, voice etc. are all of a kind: intended to soften and make smooth the production.

Wilson was convinced that Feldman never passed on to Republic any of Welles’s proposals. Herbert Yates himself was consistently sympathetic
and encouraging, but insisted (not unreasonably) that any changes should be effected as soon as possible. Wilson was convinced that Yates had an essential optimism about the movie ‘based on his personal belief in it. He has also, I feel, a sincere feeling of loyalty to you and the project which,’ he added pointedly, ‘has now become precarious.’ Yates was Wavering on how to sell it, feeling that
the artistic high ground had been taken by Olivier. ‘He’s a bit wistful about “the greatest gangster the world has ever known” type of approach.’ The ‘Exploitation boys’ were frustrated by not having got an endorsement (‘they can’t get anyone to “come out” for it’); there was no review good enough to quote, except foreign ones. Receipts were down everywhere; legally speaking, Republic could – should
they be so minded – seize the picture from Literary Classics. A psychological impasse had been reached whereby the sales department felt that it was impossible to sell the picture in its present form. A decision was taken not to put it on general release till autumn of the following year.

It is interesting to note that the Scottish accents, which before long became an overriding obsession, are
not mentioned here as a central problem. But soon the question was all-engrossing; under huge pressure, re-recording of certain lines, nominally supervised by Dick Wilson, was attempted. Welles offered this objection and that, while Wilson valiantly mediated with the studio, trying to interpret Welles’s instructions on snatched transatlantic calls or via the erratic mail. Welles’s own contributions,
recorded in London, were not always properly synchronised. Eventually, and apparently impulsively, he decided that it must be all or nothing, and briefly came back to Hollywood to put the final touches to the re-recording of virtually all the dialogue, and the elimination of most traces of the accent. In the attractive vein of mellow reminiscence he so often adopted with Peter Bogdanovich, he
told him, ‘Feldman had been so nice about everything that, when he asked for the Scottishness to be muffled, I muffled it. That meant post-synching, of course, and made splendid nonsense of my whole proud experiment in miming to playback.’ It was a rather different story at the time, a constant battle of wills, with Welles deploying his favourite tactic of hide-and-seek.

Then, in the autumn of
1949, Welles suddenly took control of making an entirely new version of
Macbeth
, redubbing and recutting the whole picture. He did it in Rome, himself, and entirely to his own scheme, removing twenty-one minutes (nearly a quarter of the film) from the running time. He took absolute responsibility for this version, publicly claiming it as his own work. ‘They asked me to take out two reels,’ he
told Bogdanovich, ‘and I did – but
I
cut the two reels, they didn’t. I thought they shouldn’t have been cut out, but I’m the one that cut it. Not some idiot back at home.’ This was the version that was finally released in 1950, rather more than three years after that legendarily swift twenty-three-day shoot, and this was the version that formed the basis of all subsequent critical discourse on
the film.

The most significant innovation in the new version was the introduction of a spoken and written epigraph to the film, in fairly naked emulation of the opening of Olivier’s
Hamlet
(which quotes a speech from the play, ending with the bathetic and somewhat misleading formula: ‘Hamlet is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.’ Olivier – as active an actor as ever lived – plays
the least indecisive Hamlet imaginable. Welles’s epigraph is at least a guide to the physical design of his film and an explanation of the presence of the Holy Father). The other cuts tighten the action to the point of incoherence, while undeniably adding to the nightmarish atmosphere; the redubbing retains some of the Scottish burr, but within a basically standard ‘English’ pronunciation. This
version of the film has more or less disappeared from circulation: it stands in relation to the earlier cut as the editions of some Bruckner symphonies do to each other: there are gains in each version, and losses. The press that it received was interestingly less prejudiced than the 1948 reviews: the comparison with
Hamlet
had faded, and some sense of what had actually been achieved – of the
film Welles had been trying to make – was beginning to seep through. Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
said, ‘… it has a great deal in its favour by way of feudal spectacle and nightmare mood … Mr Welles deploys himself and his actors so that they move and strike the attitudes of tortured grotesques and half-mad zealots in a Black mass or an ancient ritual.’
³²
He discerns in Welles’s Macbeth
– ‘much given to pondering’ – a ‘monstrous quality. Except that he offers the suggestion that this fatally ambitious man took rather heavily to drinking in the later phases of his bloody career, he accomplishes no illumination of the classical character., Jeanette Nolan was ‘a pop-eyed
and
haggard dame …’; there was – and here it is hard to disagree – ‘no real sexual tension between them’. Crowther
finds that the whole purpose of the production seemed to be ‘to create the vicious moods, the ruthlessness and the superstitions of the warriors in Scotland in Macbeth’s day’;
c’est magnifique
, seems to be the verdict,
mais ce n’est pas
Macbeth, a not unreasonable judgement. For Welles, an annoying feature of the reviews was the occasional assumption that he had borrowed from Olivier ‘the device
of speaking the soliloquies while his lips do not move’ (
Broadcast
magazine), though the films had been shot at exactly the same time, with the Atlantic Ocean between them. ‘This is not so effective as it has been in Sir Laurence’s Shakespearean films,’
Broadcast
bitchily noted, ‘mainly because the predominance of Mr Welles’s countenance obtrudes.’

It is a notable feature of these 1950 reviews
that it has clearly been generally agreed among the critical fraternity that Welles was a figure about whom anything could be said, any casual rudeness indulged; he had been elected to the position of critical sitting duck, always good for a pot-shot. ‘They don’t review my films any more, they review me,’ lamented Welles a little later.
³³
The critics were baffled by Welles, and remained so for
the rest of his life, all too aware of the flaws in his work, but conscious of a certain magnificence about the failures that somehow made them more interesting than the films they had acclaimed. The reviews of
The Lady from Shanghai
, which Harry Cohn had finally released in 1948, had precisely followed this pattern: under the heading
A WELLES DIVIDED
, the
Herald Tribune
called it:

an imaginative
and highly stylised film which is at the same time one of the most inept celluloid dramas of this or any other season.
³⁴
His glaring effects and camera magic cannot be dismissed lightly by any lover of the cinema; unfortunately they have a selfish existence of their own, smothering the story and making it appear even more false and posy than it is. Like a fine car in which the maker has forgotten
to put a steering apparatus,
The Lady from Shanghai
is a pretty silly piece of infernally good work … there is no coherence worth mentioning and as a result no picture. In disdaining to make an imitative or conventional film, Welles sometimes exaggerates his values out of all bounds, and sometimes hits on a tremendously effective idea … certainly Hollywood needs as much imagination as it can get
into picture-making and the creative touches in
The Lady from Shanghai
,
though
impossibly uncontrolled, indicate that Welles is still the man who can supply the much needed stimulant.

In the
New York Times
, Bosley Crowther, noting that the film could have been ‘a terrific piece of melodramatic romance’, continued, ‘no sooner has Mr Welles the director deposited this supercharged group in … San
Francisco … than Mr Welles the author leaves him in the lurch … Mr Welles might better have fired himself – as author that is – and hired somebody to give Mr Welles the director a better script.’
³⁵
The
ad hominem
attack then inevitably follows: ‘and he certainly could have done better than use himself in the key role of the guileless merchant sailor … no matter how much you dress him up in rakish
yachting caps and open shirts, Mr Welles simply hasn’t the capacity to cut a romantic swath … indeed his performance in this picture – and his exhibitionistic cover-ups of the story’s general untidiness – give ironic point to his first line “When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little can stop me.’” Welles had been asking for it, of course.

Macbeth
was released in Britain the
following year, and the reviews are significant, because by now Welles had become a considerable European presence – he had acted in two other films, including the one in which he finally became a film star,
The Third Man
, and had made the first of a number of false starts on his next Shakespeare film,
Othello
. Though the British reviewers were as grudging as their transatlantic counterparts,
they grasped something about the film that had eluded the American press. Predictably, the verse-speaking and indeed the acting in general were given short shrift. ‘Though Mr Orson Welles’s film is very far from being
Macbeth
,’ said the
Times
silKily, ‘it is of great interest to students of Shakespeare and the cinema.
³⁶
They will certainly wish to see for themselves why a man of proven imagination
should fail so lamentably with the play of Shakespeare’s that would seem, of all the tragedies, the one most readily adaptable to the screen.’ Not unreasonably, the uncredited reviewer discerns in ‘the unlocalised, unromantic impressionist settings’ a debt to the post-First World War German cinema: ‘halls stretching away from the spectator with the improbable spaciousness of an ice-rink’. Campbell
Dixon of the
Telegraph
, revisiting the film in its trimmed version after his exposure to the earlier version in Venice, was still disappointed in ‘the brilliant Mr Welles’:
³⁷
‘I should like to praise something, but what? The acting?’ No one, he says, is really ‘at home in the great Shakespearean tradition’. But elsewhere the title had turned: ‘The temptation with the
long-awaited
Macbeth
is to
go through it making ribald and incongruous comparisons,’ wrote Richard Mallet in
Punch
.
³⁸
‘Going prepared to be interested, I was interested and stimulated.’ Over-concentration, he felt, was the problem (which it certainly is in the eighty-minute version).
Sight and Sound
suggested that ‘a more powerful effect might have been achieved if the film, properly, had been silent; simply a series of
blood-curdling illustrations to a series of anonymous declamations from the sound track’.
³⁹
Caroline Lejeune, doyenne of British film criticism, wrote: ‘It is uncouth, unscholarly, unmusical, historically unsound, and almost without exception, abominably acted; but even at its worst it has a sort of power; it is often horrid, but never negligible.’
⁴⁰

Virtually all the English critics understood
that Welles was pushing towards a new use of the medium and a new approach to Shakespeare. ‘Welles’s
Macbeth
is nothing if not of the cinema,’ wrote Henry Raynor in
Sight and Sound
, claiming, in a striking and accurate parallel, that it was ‘as complete a translation into another medium as [Robert] Helpmann’s ballet of
Hamlet’
.
⁴¹
Or, he might have said, Verdi’s opera
Macbeth
: disappointing as
a response to the play, but remarkable as a piece in its own right. In a cool consideration of Olivier’s
Hamlet
and Welles’s
Macbeth
as attempts at filming Shakespeare, Raynor acknowledges that both films, neither entirely satisfactory, show, in varying degrees, the immense possibilities of the medium, but continues: ‘We do not know if the visual imagery of the cinema will or can ever develop
the power of suggestion, the unmistakeable force and the subtlety of Shakespeare’s imagery’ He concludes with a striking perception: ‘So far, in
Macbeth
, we have only had Shakespeare’s play adapted and filmed by one whose imagination has not progressed beyond the stage of Christopher Marlowe’ – in other words, Welles is interested in rhetoric, in the epic, in the sensational, none of which goes
to the heart of Shakespeare. (On the other hand, a Marlovian film is scarcely a thing to be sniffed at.)