In 1992 the U.S. Postal Service asked consumers which Elvis Presley commemorative stamp they wanted to see issued: early Elvis (sleek hepcat) or later Elvis (stuffed sausage), take your pick. It was a personality contest pitting an icon against itself. Side by side, the Elvis stamps represented more than different phases of the same celebrity career; they implied a rival split—a broken promise. The later, showbiz Elvis seemed like a gross distortion of his earlier, rollicking self, perhaps even a betrayal. It’s a classic American story, written in the flesh. Long before Elvis went viva Las Vegas, Orson Welles—actor, director, and oral god—knew what it was like to be hounded by his former youth and constantly reminded how he had fallen short. Like Presley, Welles suffered the public mortification of becoming a before-and-after spectacle: a handsome messiah turned blob. He too became a punching bag for every comic’s fat jokes, only Welles had no Graceland in which to hunker. Where Presley sandbagged himself with junk food in front of the TV, Welles comported himself with ceremonial pomp, holding court at Ma Maison with his yappy dog, Kiki. A true king does not hide.
Born in 1915, George Orson Welles made his stage debut at the age of 3, directed his first play at the age of 10, joined an Irish theater company at the age of 16, mounted dazzling productions of Shakespeare in his early 20s, and, at the age of 25, directed and starred in Citizen Kane, perhaps the greatest American film of the sound era. Not bad for a baby face. Six feet tall at the age of 14, he never shirked being larger than life. Kenneth Tynan (another boy wonder) perceived how such showmanship lapped over into salesmanship. Reviewing Welles’s thrilling staging of Moby Dick in 1955, the English critic wrote of Welles’s performance as Ahab, “He has a voice of bottled thunder, so deeply encasked that one thinks of those liquor advertisements which boast that not a drop is sold till it’s seven years old.” Such prescience! Decades later, jumping from youth to elder-statesman status with no apparent interval of middle age, Orson Welles would become household-famous and widely parodied as the 1980s spokesman for Paul Masson wine, intoning the tag line “We will sell no wine before its time” as if it were a biblical injunction.
Between product endorsements, Welles made papal visits to the talk-show sets of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, and Dick Cavett—where he did magic tricks, fondled a cigar, and expounded about topical issues as if he were the Winston Churchill of Beverly Hills—and classed up the dais of the Dean Martin roasts, roaring with medieval laughter at the scripted ad-libs. A director who had been bracketed with Jean Renoir and Federico Fellini, he sank to narrating the trailer for Revenge of the Nerds. In his waning years Welles felt compelled to peddle his blue-ribbon voice because he was unable to get his own cockamamy films financed. The comic-impressionist Rich Little, a puzzled cast member of Welles’s on-again, off-again epic, The Other Side of the Wind, told me in an interview years ago that when an expensive camera got smashed on the set during a car stunt, Welles said with a philosophical sigh, “I’ll have to do another commercial to pay for that.” Along with The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s unfinished or unreleased films include Don Quixote, The Merchant of Venice, the documentary It’s All True, and The Dreamers. When he died of heart failure in 1985, friends and supporters lamented that his commercial fame had eclipsed his artistic legacy. The only Orson Welles many baby-boomers ever knew was the large round object they saw on TV.
Amends are finally being made. Last year saw the reissue of Welles’s antsy film noir Touch of Evil (1958), in a new print which, among its other honoring of Welles’s original intentions, removed the distracting credits from the opening sequence —a three-minute-twenty-second tracking shot executed in one continuous take, a virtuoso feat requiring the combined skills of an orchestra conductor and a traffic cop. Done before the invention of the Steadicam, the looping penmanship of Welles’s camera in Touch of Evil has become the most frequently forged signature flourish in American film, imitated and embellished by Martin Scorsese (GoodFellas), Robert Altman (The Player), Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights), and Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes). This year will be an even bigger Welles festival with the release of Tim Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock, an all-star docudrama about one of Welles’s most controversial theater productions, and RKO 281, an HBO original film, which haunts the soundstages during the making of Citizen Kane.
Why all of this backing and filling now? It’s partly a belated tribute to the tremendous wingspan of Welles’s influence. The opening to Touch of Evil is only the tip of the inheritance. His 1938 radio direction of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, in which a Martian invasion was dramatized as an emergency broadcast, was the forerunner for the fake vérité of The Blair Witch Project. Citizen Kane bequeathed a bottomless Christmas bag of re-usable images and reference points to pop culture, from “Rosebud” to the snow globe to Kane himself as the dead soul of Daddy Warbucks. (With its doctored newsreel footage and schnooky antihero, Woody Allen’s Zelig is Citizen Kane seen through the wrong end of the telescope.) The fun-house-mirror shoot-out in The Lady from Shanghai has become a diamond set piece in the highlight reel of film noir. (Allen restaged it in Manhattan Murder Mystery.) The Shakespeare boom of the last 10 years—stretching from Kenneth Branagh’s foursquare adaptations ofHenry V and Hamlet to the crazy quilt of Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard to the Fascist swank of Ian McKellen’s Richard III—owes plenty to Welles’s stage and film adaptations of Macbeth, Othello, Julius Caesar, and Falstaff’s saga (Chimes at Midnight). It was Welles more than anyone who demonstrated that Shakespeare wasn’t a marble bust to be handled with kid gloves but a hardy perennial whose words could be sown to the wind. Shooting all over Europe under haphazard conditions, Welles patched together works in which the stunning pictorial passages (the mud-caked battle in Chimes at Midnight) compensated for the poor dubbing, stitchy editing, and oddball casting. At his best he seemed able to animate everything and everyone around him with his own physicality. He summoned the elements.
When you read about Welles’s stage productions, such as his “voodoo” Macbeth, his modern-dress Julius Caesar, or the Moby Dick that Tynan praised, they don’t sound corny or dated, as so many theatrical landmarks do. They still capture the mind’s eye. Welles shook preconceptions like dust from a rug, and you can see what made his productions crackle. Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock, opening next month, gives itself the dual task of re-creating the cultural-political ferment of the 30s and communicating the virgin excitement of a Wellesian event. I’ve never been a fan of Robbins as a director—Bob Roberts, his satire about a folkie presidential candidate, whittled the smugness of Nashville down to a single guitar strum, and the acting in Dead Man Walking struck me as too Academy Award– conscious—but Cradle Will Rock is a fabulous promenade. Where most Depression-era dramas look hangdog, the colors here really pop. A mini-epic which mingles famous and fictional characters in the spirit of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, it makes the past look newly painted—young again.
Some history: The original production of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, a musical which wedded hard-driving American rhythms to the socialist allegory of Bertolt Brecht, ran into federal interference and Red-scare intimidation shortly before its premiere in June 1937. When the theater was padlocked by the Works Progress Administration, Welles seized the moment like a born general. Since the actors’ and musicians’ unions forbade the cast to perform, Welles hit upon the ingenious solution of having the cast buy tickets like patrons and perform from their seats when they heard their cues. After a mad scurry for a suitable venue, Welles and company lucked into the Venice, a theater on 59th Street which had seen better days. As Simon Callow relates in his 1995 biography of Welles (Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu), “The actors then trooped down the several blocks to the old theatre in company with their excited audience (who had been regaled outside the sealed theatre with pamphlets saying your friends have been dismissed! you may be next!).” After Welles and his collaborator John Houseman made speeches, the spotlight fell on Blitzstein at the piano. As he played the score, the cast of The Cradle Will Rock popped out of the audience to sing their parts, some of them standing in the aisles and dancing to the music. The actors and the audience seemed to join forces. When it was all over, the audience unleashed a wild enthusiasm that Blitzstein himself characterized as “roaring pandemonium.” Welles had staged another coup.
As with the premieres of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro, the importance of The Cradle Will Rock has been magnified over time into a seismic moment—a symphonic wake-up call. So entwined is the lore of The Cradle Will Rock with Welles’s own legend that Welles was set to direct a film on the subject in the 1980s and relive old glory. Shortly before filming began, the financing dried up, and once again Welles was left dangling. (What makes this setback a keener disappointment in retrospect is the fact that Welles himself was to have been played by … Rupert Everett. The young Rupert Everett as the young Orson Welles is a terrible thing to be robbed of.) Robbins’s Cradle Will Rock is an act of fidelity, finishing what Welles was never able to start. (Though for some mysterious reason the title was shortened.) The opening sequence, which reveals Emily Watson (playing an older version of the Little Match Girl and exuding freshness in a role that could have been a dip in corn syrup) sleeping behind a movie screen and trails her out into the impoverished streets in one long fluid passage, is a tour de force that fuses Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil, as if the film were channeling Welles. Its cumulative force overwhelms its blemishes (backstage scenes frantic with rhubarb bustle, John Cusack’s weak stem as a young Nelson Rockefeller, overeditorializing shots of a Diego Rivera mural being destroyed). As Blitzstein, the always underrated Hank Azaria has dark, insomniac eyes as he hunches on a park bench, the stern example of Bertolt Brecht pecking at him; Cherry Jones makes competence and cheerful fair-mindedness seem like states of grace as Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project; Cary Elwes seems ready for a Whit Stillman comedy as John Houseman; and, hooray, Bill Murray, as a vaudeville ventriloquist who rats about Communist infiltration before finding redemption, has never alternated more brilliantly between shine and corrosion. The final shot of the film, involving the funeral procession of Murray’s ventriloquist’s dummy, is a devastating stroke.
Ironically, the famous face that gets most lost in the shuffle belongs to the character of Orson Welles himself. Angus MacFadyen plays Welles with buoyancy and aplomb, but he doesn’t stand out enough in the Altmanesque tableaux. Welles’s relationship with his colleague and later nemesis John Houseman, who, like Welles, ripened into a florid actor (The Paper Chase) and sage TV pitchman (“They make money the old-fashioned way,” he pronounced on behalf of Smith Barney, “—they earn it”), is reduced to a flurry of bitchy spats, and Welles seems more of a fancy cog in the machinery than a prime mover. Perhaps this downsizing of Welles to normal scale reflects Robbins’s own left-wing perspective—a belief that Welles was as much a product of his times as any other notable, that it isn’t men who make history but history that makes men. Whatever the explanation, it leaves a slight blur on the screen where a major pulse point should be, and devalues the power of personality. A magnate such as Nelson Rockefeller may have straddled the globe, but it is Orson Welles whose nocturnes continue to resonate. As a director and broadcaster, he seemed to occupy a skull-cavern, equally at home with literary melodrama and pulp suspense. (His was the most famous voice of the radio serial The Shadow.) Even when Welles was young and all-conquering, his hearty spirits were darkened at the edges by the early deaths of his mother and alcoholic father. His refusal to shy away from the prospects of death and ruin is so singular, it’s practically un-American.
Welles’s first and best film, Citizen Kane (1941) is a memory play and gothic psychodrama enacted largely inside a lavish crypt—a furniture-showroom wing of Coleridge’s Xanadu. The snow globe that rolls out of Kane’s hand on his deathbed might as well be his brain slipping its master’s leash. Few would deny the film’s place at the pinnacle of American cinema, but how much of Citizen Kane was truly Welles’s wizardry? In a revisionist essay called “Raising Kane,” which appeared first as a two-parter in The New Yorker in 1971 and later as the introduction to the shooting script for Citizen Kane (The Citizen Kane Book, 1971), Pauline Kael tilted the spotlight from Welles to screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Dinner at Eight; Pride of the Yankees), whose contribution, she argued, had been short-sheeted by the credit-hogging Welles. Mankiewicz, a sour-pickle wit in the Algonquin Round Table manner (it was he who said of Welles, “There, but for the grace of God, goes God”), did a draft of the newspaper-mogul saga called simply American. Many of the gems ascribed to Welles’s protean genius were Mankiewicz’s ideas. “If one asks how it is that Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote the film that many people think is the greatest film they’ve ever seen, is almost unknown, the answer must surely be not just that he died too soon but that he outsmarted himself. As a result of his wicked sense of humor in drawing upon Welles’s character for Kane’s, his own authorship was obscured. Sensing the unity of Kane and Welles, audiences assume that Kane is Welles’s creation,” Kael wrote. “Herman Mankiewicz died, and his share faded from knowledge, but Welles carries on in a baronial style that always reminds us of Kane.”
Kael’s essay may have been conceived as an attempt to retrieve Mankiewicz’s reputation from neglect and reaffirm Citizen Kane as a collaborative triumph rather than a one-man circus (she also elaborated on the cinematographer Gregg Toland’s invaluable contribution to the film), but it wasn’t taken that way by Welles’s friends and auteurist followers. They were sizzling mad. Welles loyalists saw “Raising Kane” as a torpedo job intended to tarnish his greatest achievement. Leading the defense was the director Peter Bogdanovich, who wrote a lengthy riposte (with Welles’s guidance) for Esquire called “The Kane Mutiny.” Bogdanovich poked a number of cannonball-size holes in Kael’s piece, quoting from an affidavit offered in 1941 which contained sworn testimony as to how much heavy revision Welles had done on Mankiewicz’s script; mocking her speculation that one of the most meticulously rehearsed and lit sequences in Citizen Kane was caught by accident by the film crew monkeying around on the set (which he later derided as “a wildly naïve fantasy of the filmmaking process”); and, in his most effective rhetorical steam eruption, telling the jury: “To believe that Welles—who notoriously had absolutely no compunction in blue-penciling Shakespeare, Marlowe, Shaw, or any classic he touched, and reshaping them as well, and who rewrote and reworked every single radio script or movie acting role he got, would sanctify the deathless prose of Herman J. Mankiewicz is an impossible character-switch to buy.” Even Mankiewicz’s admirers conceded that he never wrote anything afterward which approached Citizen Kane in richness or scope (whereas Welles’s next directorial effort was that subversive curio of small-town life The Magnificent Ambersons). But the damage was done. “Cleaning up after Miss Kael is going to take a lot of scrubbing,” Welles wrote Bogdanovich. Kael’s essay entered the critical canon, leaving a taint on Welles’s reputation that no amount of elbow grease could remove.
WELLES
And this is the Great Salt Lake. Where Christ stands and says “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he loses his soul . . . ?”
MANK
And John the Baptist replies, “A night with Rita Hayworth.”—From a shooting script for RKO 281, by John Logan.
Premiering on HBO this month, RKO 281, written by John Logan and directed by Benjamin Ross, could be read as an attempt to forge a truce between the warring factions represented by Kael and Bogdanovich, and give everybody connected with making Citizen Kane penance. Inspired by the PBS documentary The Battle over Citizen Kane, written by Richard Ben Cramer and Thomas Lennon, this fictional dramatization found a home at HBO after Hollywood studios nixed the project as a feature film. The script’s portrayal of the studios’ twitchy fear of gossip columnists and pressure groups may have offended Hollywood’s corporate pride. Unlike most of the biopics popping up on cable these days, fancy scrapbooks dominated by the wardrobe-and-props department (where vintage cars and Speed Graphic cameras are buffed into service as some la-di-da star negotiates the potholes of Memory Lane—Halle Berry’s Dorothy Dandridge biography on HBO being the latest hokey example), RKO 281 has an inside feel for the tension levels that travel from the executive suite down to the talent pool. The cast is up to the stress test. It may be the best-cast cable film ever: John Cromwell plays William Randolph Hearst as a dignified but deadly ice pick, David Suchet wears his suit as a beetle shell in the role of MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, Brenda Blethyn parks her broomstick with the maître d’ as Louella Parsons, and Roy Scheider tries to defuse crises with political handshakes as George Schaefer, the put-upon chief of RKO; even Melanie Griffith isn’t bad as Marion Davies once you get past her clown lipstick. As Welles, Liev Schreiber has too much shy reserve to convey the lion cub in full roar, but he’s wonderful in the quieter scenes, wrestling with doubts, slumping under the weight of the world’s expectations.
A movie studio, Welles famously remarked upon arriving at RKO, was “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had.” But the unprecedented free hand he was given also gave him the freedom to fall on his face. Anything less than genius would be viewed as anticlimax. Although Welles’s swollen egotism takes some kidding—“Telegram from the Christ child,” announces Simeon Andrews as John Houseman—it’s clear that Welles is the catalyst and mad captain on the set of Citizen Kane, drilling a hole in the studio floor in order to get the shot he wants, keeping himself hopping on Benzedrine as everyone else flags. Although RKO 281 is a “making of” film (RKO 281 being the working title of Citizen Kane), it actually gains predatory thrust and intrigue after Citizen Kane is wrapped and William Randolph Hearst attempts to kill it by calling on every dirty trick in the press-lord playbook. He fails, and his failure tolls the end of his reign. A toppled despot, his fortune engulfed by debt, his secrets exposed for public ridicule (“Rosebud,” the name of Kane’s sled, being Hearst’s pet term for Marion Davies’s nooky-nook), Hearst drifts through his San Simeon mansion like a withered balloon on a stick. Yet in striking down a king, Welles has unwittingly delivered a self-inflicted wound. In the script, Welles and Hearst meet one last time in a hotel elevator shortly before the opening of Citizen Kane. Welles is full of sass, having plucked this old American eagle. But Hearst gets the final say:
They didn’t. After Welles completed Citizen Kane, he embarked upon The Magnificent Ambersons, based on Booth Tarkington’s novel. The Magnificent Ambersons wasn’t the cymbals-clashing opus Citizen Kane was; it needed more careful tending. When Welles made the mistake of agreeing to go to Brazil on a cross-cultural mission to do a documentary, The Magnificent Ambersons was manhandled in his absence. The extensive cables he sent suggesting edits and fixes were exercises in futility, and new scenes jarringly out of character with the rest of the film were shot by another director in the wake of a disastrous audience preview where plain folks like me and Maw offered such well-considered sentiments as “It stinks” and “People like to laff, not be bored to death.” Reeling from the tattooing he took from such rejection slips, George Schaefer sent a cable to Welles saying the two of them needed to have a “heart to heart talk”: “Orson Welles has got to do something commercial. We have got to get away from ‘arty’ pictures and get back to earth.” Welles later said that this debacle was the turning point in his career, not only because The Magnificent Ambersons flopped, but also because the perception was that he had orphaned it in order to shake his can-can at the carnival in Rio. (It didn’t help that Welles caused a minor scandal in South America by chucking furniture out of a window.) As Welles later wrote to Bogdanovich, “When I’d left, the worst that can be said for me was that I was some kind of artist. When I came back I was some kind of lunatic.”
One of the key recurring words in The Magnificent Ambersons is “comeuppance,” and Welles royally got his. He may have been unconsciously courting it. He went on to marry Rita Hayworth, direct and star in other movies, do ponderous voice-overs as if he were an after-dinner speaker at the Last Supper, play a mothball Merlin in low-budget films by apprentices such as Brian De Palma (Get to Know Your Rabbit) and Henry Jaglom (Someone to Love), and become caretaker of his own legend wherever there was a live mike. But never again was he allowed to play with the studio train set. The steady output that marks Hollywood directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Raoul Walsh was denied him. His glandular energy never left him, but it was scattered and squandered piecemeal.
For all of the launchpad excitement of Cradle Will Rock and RKO 281, both movies end bittersweetly, reflecting this sense of letdown. In RKO 281, it’s the knowledge that Welles’s bright future is destined to dim that casts a shade of melancholy; in Cradle Will Rock, the awareness that the upheaval triggered by Blitzstein’s musical will prove a false dawn. One is a personal tragedy, the other a cultural indictment, as the theater community shuffles off to the neon graveyard that is Broadway. I hesitate to invoke the dread m-word, but Cradle Will Rock and RKO 281 seem to share a sense of regret and frustration as the new millennium approaches that pop entertainment isn’t enough, that our deeper hungers aren’t being met, and that the future looks even more focus-grouped, pre-fab, and sanitized for our protection. Unlike Welles, a hero-artist who personified the Shakespearean dictum that all the world’s a stage, today’s creative fidgets believe that all the world’s a screen, and all the players clickable icons. Advances in technocratic sophistication can’t make up for the loss of magic, ritual, and bodies in space—can’t lead us out of the impasse. Perhaps Orson Welles is being resurrected as an inspirational figure because there’s no one else around to point the way.
