Orson Welles’s Protracted Second Act

The British journalist Clinton Heylin offered little more than puerile stylistics in his Despite the System (2005); Joseph McBride became far too preoccupied in What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? (2006), with forgettable exchanges between an increasingly insufferable crowd of hangers-on surrounding his subject; and the director’s unsung cinematographer Gary Graver provided charming anecdotes but few revelations about his mentor in a posthumous memoir published in 2008. Far more encouraging was the arrival last year of two eminently readable treatments, Patrick McGilligan’s comprehensive Young Orson and Orson Welles’s Last Movie by Josh Karp—both admirably detailed and straightforward in approach, however limited in their focus.

But a discernible standard was established in 1995 with the publication of Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu by the intrepid British actor and memoirist Simon Callow. What made Callow’s detailing of Welles’s life from birth through the premiere of Citizen Kane (1941) so convincing was his atomizing of his subject’s colorful, self-serving exaggerations, of his home life, his formative years at the Todd School, and his incipient literary and theatrical activity. But if these red herrings proved too much for more gullible biographers, Callow’s critical perspective made these pretenses all the more fascinating for the insight they provided into Welles’s histrionic nature.

As a formidable actor himself, Callow easily saw through the disingenuousness of Welles’s perverse statement to Richard France that the apron stage demands greater voice and gesture than the proscenium arch, noting Welles’s love for obiter dicta; the radical cutting of the play text in Welles’s WPA production of Doctor Faustus (1937) is viewed by Callow as a proto-screenplay that anticipates camera moves and edits; and he notes with approval François Truffaut’s observation that Welles’s approach to acting reveals “the fragility of the great authority,” an ambivalent quality that allowed him simultaneously to personify and critique powerful figures throughout his career.

Aided by critical comparisons between his own research and accounts by Higham and Leaming, Callow revealed Welles’s near-primal recourse to self-drama, particularly his need to engage with a mundane or tragic turn of events through reinvention, which became absolutely necessary following the deterioration of his post-Kane reputation.

This respectful skepticism resulted in further discernment in Callow’s second volume, Hello Americans (2006). Noting that Welles’s penchant for expedient improvisation would characterize not only the out-of-control omnibus It’s All True (1942)—an oddity born of Welles’s co-employment by the State Department’s Office for Inter-American Affairs—but also most of his future work, Callow astutely observed that this intoxicant was “an elusive commodity in a studio” such as RKO, the scene of a power shift that would consign Welles to a limbo of erratic creativity for the rest of his career.

But most important for the future of Welles studies, Callow’s latest historiography, One-Man Band, explores two decades that saw Welles’s voluntary exile from his home country, an ill-fated return to Hollywood, and yet another departure for foreign shores—a period of ostensible commercial failure that witnessed the creation of arguably his most characteristic and challenging films. In this third attempt to “restore the texture of real life to the Welles myth,” Callow demonstrates, once again, that he is likely to emerge as Welles’s definitive chronicler.

Welles’s growth as a director is first glimpsed inauspiciously in 1947 as he impulsively snatches a brief shot of the Zoeppè Circus acrobats near the Scalera studio in Rome, an indication of his “sketchpad” approach to gathering compelling cinematic moments regardless of whether any contexts for them might materialize, building visual texture “shard by shard.” Although Callow perceives a dramatic flaw in Welles’s hallucinatory treatment of the character-driven scenario in Othello (1951), this much-maligned film signals the true beginning of this pointillism—his fascination with subtext through postdubbing and editing from a wealth of experimental shots.

As in his earlier treatments, Callow details Welles’s failures to play to his strengths and to harness his own formidable talent into something approximating professional discipline in his unwise returns to the stage during this period. Moby Dick—Rehearsed (1955), a retrograde paean to the actor-manager, anticipates the regional ensemble playing that would later characterize the British theater of the 1960s but is upstaged by the new works of Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht, and John Osborne. The so-called wheelchair Lear (1953) becomes an almost surreal logistical and artistic failure that virtually bankrupts City Center of New York and puts paid to any theatrical future for Welles.

Yet there is undeniable poignancy in Callow’s descriptions of Welles’s unpardonable rages at hapless colleagues while doing piecework acting amid film projects. Enduring the slow poison of Kane‘s aftermath, Welles is convincingly portrayed here as “a man in hell,” impotent with fury that his artistry as a director is considered unmarketable by the industry. Particularly insightful is Callow’s suggestion that for all his preoccupation with powerful central figures in his films, Welles himself lacked the political savvy and bloody-mindedness of such colleagues as Charlie Chaplin or Laurence Olivier, tending to wound himself rather than the competition by his outbursts: “Olivier was a titan, Welles the Titanic.”

But this disparity would only become more pronounced in the ensuing years, for after the completion and re-editing of the troubled 1955 production Mr. Arkadin—which ultimately will claim no fewer than seven versions—Welles yearns for a return to Hollywood, a trajectory that would be marked by the prophetic self-sabotaging of several television documentary efforts where he would display both his intuitive grasp of camera filters and setups and his utter lack of accountability regarding network budgets or deadlines.

When Universal Studios disallows location filming for Touch of Evil (1958) at the Mexican border, Welles’s love for blighted cities (in David Thomson’s phrase) leads him to the tawdry oil derricks and faux Mediterranean architectural remnants of the nearby community of Venice, California, where he convincingly creates the fictional Los Robles. But this latter-day creative economy would vanish with Welles’s hapless, adversarial relationship with the studio head Edward Muhl, compounded by his brusqueness with star Charlton Heston’s agent on the eve of the film’s release, as he uncannily reenacts the aftermath of The Magnificent Ambersons (1946) by fleeing south of the border to indulge his artistic whims (in this case, his never-finished Don Quixote project) while the baffled studio, smarting from cost and schedule overages, hacks it down to manageable size and consigns it to

B-feature oblivion.

Yet Callow argues that Welles’s “private, quirky, bizarre” approach to his subject would have guaranteed Touch of Evil‘s commercial failure, an assessment borne out by its 2000 DVD restoration in which we witness a visual style so breathtaking that it undermines narrative coherence. As Callow remarks, Welles “summon[s] up a definitive world” in the film, “integrating an expressionist vocabulary of low and skewed angles and distorting lenses,” correctly concluding that “every frame of Touch of Evil celebrates the art of film”—a virtual synthesis of Welles’s directorial method throughout this segment of his career.

Similarly, Callow finds that The Trial (1962) suffers from Welles’s co-opting of Franz Kafka’s novel into an antistatist fable, with its questionable portrayal of an unflappable, careerist Josef K. Yet his subversive reinvention of a Kafkaesque world remains visually overwhelming, a setting where disparate baroque and modern European locations coalesce into a nightmarish neverland of suspended time and place, one that clearly reflected Welles’s tendency to view this author through the prism of the Holocaust and nuclear annihilation.

Finally, Chimes at Midnight (1965)—the ne plus ultra of Welles’s under-resourced yet masterful Shakespeare adaptations—appears as Welles’s definitive expression of lost innocence, with its autobiographical echoes of real and surrogate fathers in the figures surrounding the future Henry V, particularly Welles’s guardian, the manipulative Dr. Maurice Bernstein, who dies on the eve of the production. Here, Callow perfectly articulates Welles’s magician ethos not only in his heartfelt performance as the betrayed Falstaff, or in his multifaceted editing of the Battle of Shrewsbury, but also in his descriptions of the frenzied setups (“Follow me, I’m looking for a shot”), extemporized costuming, “trapezoidal” camera angles, and eleventh-hour captures of natural light in a work that may be viewed with hindsight as Welles’s most accomplished film.

As with Othello, Touch of Evil, and The Trial, the improvised sets and expedient locations of Chimes at Midnight take on a visual integrity through a combination of lens filtering, set dressing, and camera placement that discovers unexpected geometrics in ordinary elements and found settings. With his final completed Shakespeare film, Welles reveals the poetic in virtually every shot, however minimalist its composition, culminating in total, unforeseen stylistic coherence.

Throughout One-Man Band, Simon Callow’s own aesthetic remains as riveting as in his first two volumes, his thespian flamboyance held in check by concrete details and an unerring focus on his subject. Callow properly seizes on Welles’s unmistakable affinity with Walt Whitman in his reading of A Song of Myself for the BBC (“I am large, I contain multitudes”). Welles’s direct address to the camera in another British broadcast is described as a moment of near-perfect frisson, linking the artist with the moving image. And two cryptic allusions to Welles’s fateful encounter during this period with future life partner and executor Oja Kodar—a woman less than half his age whose statuesque beauty was equally matched by her managerial shrewdness and creative affinity with Welles himself—offer an indelible segue to Callow’s anticipated fourth and final volume detailing the consummation of a career that must now be recognized as a true artistic collaboration.

Just as he previously delineated Welles’s newfound identity as an independent filmmaker who would work free of both studio interference and budgets, Callow foreshadows the peripatetic post-Hollywood Welles who, faced yet again with the compromising re-edit of a would-be comeback feature and the public dismissal of an ambitious and profoundly personal effort, chooses to delve even deeper into the modernist fragmentation of narrative that characterized Citizen Kane. Exotic paramour at his side, portable editing machine in hand, the massive, black-caped Welles would gallivant about Europe following this period compiling a grab-bag of shots, sequences, and still lifes that would cohere into the mind-boggling mosaics of F for Fake (1973), Don Quixote (1992), and his intermittently glimpsed The Other Side of the Wind—a purported chef-d’oeuvre that has been interminably delayed through a farcical creative and bureaucratic progress and which is currently, almost comically, the subject of a grassroots campaign of fan-based public fundraising for its completion.

Callow has provided the missing element in much of the biographical canon: Despite Welles’s antic recourse throughout this period to theater, radio, or television, his preeminent identity is that of a truly auteurist director of films—an artist who consistently understood, on an almost visceral level, that the world presented through the lens must have a unique integrity that is discerned and articulated solely by the individual who wields the camera.

Dean A. Hoffman teaches film studies at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.