Seth Alexander Thévoz: Orson Welles and Pan-Europeanism, 1947-1970
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Seth Alexander Thévoz: Orson Welles and pan-Europeanism, 1947-1970 Recently, Sight and Sound’s decennial critics’ poll displaced Citizen Kane from its perch; for the first time since the poll’s launch in 1962, Orson Welles’ dazzling debut did not take the top spot. This was a pity; but not for the reason that Wellesians worldwide lamented as their King was deposed. The tragedy is that Welles’ remarkable body of directorial work is still seen through the prism of what Welles himself dismissed as ‘that movie’. It has become fashionable in recent years to downplay how revolutionary Citizen Kane(1941) was. But this misses the point: in Welles’ own eyes, Kane wasn’t even the director’s best film. [1] There is a growing realisation among critics that far from being burnt out at the age of 25 as popular lore maintains, Welles remained a remarkable creative force. Welles’ image is still tarred by a series of lazy criticisms dating from the 1970s (‘Welles had a fear of completion on his films/He ended his days acting in the Transformers movie’). [2] The counter- argument has long been made by Welles devotees, but has only recently found a wider audience: [3] The director consistently reinvented himself as one of the earliest avant-garde independent directors, turning out masterpieces (or ‘flawed masterpieces’ as he self-deprecating acknowledged) like Othello (1952), The Trial (1962), Chimes at Midnight (1965), The Immortal Story (1968) and F for Fake (1974). Such films were quirky, seldom seen in the cinemas – and are still dazzlingly original, decades later. Such work was also distinctively European. With this year’s BFI poll, the title of director of the ‘Greatest’ film made has passed from an American-turned- European director (Welles) to a European-turned-American director (Hitchcock); and in both cases, the accolade went to a signature film made in their Hollywood years. Hitchcock’s early British cinema has widely been considered inferior to his later, bigger-budget American efforts, even though his slow-paced 1956 Hollywood remake of his own The Man Who Knew Too Much is often considered worse than the much breezier 1934 English original, and recent critics like Charles Barr have questioned this neglect of the early English Hitchock. [4] Welles’ European career has suffered from similar critical neglect. Indeed, of his later films, only the Hollywood- produced noir thriller Touch of Evil (1958, thankfully restored to something approaching a director’s cut in 1998) has enjoyed anything approaching the widespread acclaim of Citizen Kane. This is a great shame. Welles was as much a European director as an American one. Having been deeply impressed by Europe during extensive travel in his childhood, he ran away to Ireland and Spain as a teenager, where he worked as an actor, pulp fiction writer and bullfighter. He often proclaimed a deep love of Europe, which he saw – as so many Americans do – not as a series of nations, but as one united continent (although he would also view Spain as being so complex as constituting a continent in its own right). When his Hollywood career hit the doldrums in 1947, it was to Europe that he turned. Initially, this was a purely mercenary decision: he had contacts in the Italian film industry, and hoped to make a fortune from a few commercially successful acting jobs, and after a couple of years to return to America in triumph. Yet matters never worked to plan. Apart from an abortive Hollywood return in 1956-8, Welles remained in Europe until 1970. He had homes in France, Italy and Spain, and also worked in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, West Germany and Yugoslavia. Pragmatism played a large part in Welles’ European exile. Welles was considered ‘damaged goods’ in Hollywood, which was already in a state of decline after the war, with studio heads seldom willing to take commercial risks on an enfant terrible. Indeed, Welles’ famous 1939 RKO contract, which gave him unprecedented levels of artistic freedom on Citizen Kane, had partly been the product of RKO’s desperation over the looming prospect of decline. [5] By contrast, many European countries had growing post-war film industries, propped up by generous state subsidies in France, Italy and Spain. When Welles eventually moved back to America in 1970, it was a similarly pragmatic decision – he believed ‘that’s where the action is’, and with American investors pulling money out of European studios in the late 1960s, the European work opportunities would dry up. (In the event, the move proved catastrophic. Not one of the American funding opportunities led to a completed film being released, and Welles’ only 1970s directorial releases continued to be in Europe.) Welles’ politics have long been ignored (although Simon Callow has recently sought to draw more attention to them). [6] He was a prominent ‘progressive’ and liberal enthusiast for the New Deal, who campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt and flirted with a Senate run in 1946. Joseph McBride has argued that Welles’ European exile was a product of anti-communist blacklisting. Welles is not usually identified as a victim of the blacklist, as he was absent from America throughout its worst period, but as McBride notes, until 1956 he had an extensive FBI file littered with accusations of communism, his 1947 departure coincided with the HUAC hearings, and his return to America would have been improbable until after McCarthy’s disgrace. [7] Europe, with its ‘progressive’ politics closer to Welles’ own, was far more congenial, particularly among the Left Bank intellectuals who championed his work, and the Republican friends Welles had in Spain – in the 1930s, he had sided with the Republican cause, and he later declared that, ‘the Spanish Civil War was the central tragedy of anybody’s life who’s my age.’ [8] These, then, were the reasons why Welles fled to Europe. But why did he stay for so long? Firstly, critical appreciation made his European residency rather congenial. Like Eric von Stroheim and the blacklisted directors Charlie Chaplin, Jules Dassin and Joseph Losey, Welles found that in Europe he enjoyed a level of critical acclaim which he had not experienced in America since his 1930s radio and stage work. In France, the very earliest generation of Cahier du Cinémacritics hailed Welles as a cinematic giant: André Bazin wrote a laudatory critical biography of him, introduced by François Truffaut. [9] French writers like Maurice Bessy championed even his lesser works. [10] Indeed, the praise Welles received in France could be out of all proportion. At a Paris gala screening of his darkly comic adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, the black tie-clad audience famously ‘shushed’ two people at the back who were disrespectfully laughing throughout the film – unaware that they were Welles himself, and his friend Peter Bogdanovich. Furthermore, the role of enigmatic European globetrotter suited Welles; after the success of his turn as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949), he cultivated that image, co-writing, directing and starring in the international hit radio series The Lives of Harry Lime (1952), in which the film’s sordid racketeer was remodelled into a lovable rogue. In Newcastle, Welles was enthusiastically hailed by dockers, who had not come to see his staging of Othello, but told him, ‘To us, you’ll always be ‘Arry Lime.’ It was an image he continued to play up for the next two decades, even as he began to resent it – most notably, his abandoned BBC TV series Around the World With Orson Welles (1955), and his US TV pilot Portrait of Gina (1958) both portrayed the real-life Welles as the same world-weary but charming European traveller. Even ‘hack work’ such as the Italian travelogue Nella Terra di Don Chisciotte (1964) and the disingenuously affectionate Around the World of Mike Todd (1968) revolved around this image. The reality was noticeably less glamorous, as the permanently impecunious Welles often sneaked out of one hotel after another, fleeing creditors. Producer Harry Alan Towers recalled that after he’d paid Welles for the Harry Lime series, which was being recorded in Paris, Welles stopped his taxi at four hotels, some of them grand and some decidedly dingy. It transpired that these were all the hotels where his luggage had been impounded after he had left unpaid bills. [11] In understanding Welles’ working methods in Europe, his Othello (1952) is a key work. After the original producer went bankrupt early in the film’s shoot, Welles improvised the rest of filming over a four-year period, taking often-demeaning acting jobs to privately finance his own project. [12] (Welles pleaded guilty to the story that actors were abandoned on set for weeks at a time while he went off to raise more money: ‘The actors love to tell that story because they were stranded, but what they forget is that they were stranded in the four-star luxury hotels of Europe…at [my] great expense’.) [13] It was a pattern he would repeat over and over, to the detriment of his career, for his own personal projects would remain little-seen, often tied up in legal wrangles, and his only work to get widespread release would be ‘hack work’ including schlock films and sherry adverts, encouraging the perception that Welles’ creative powers were in terminal decline. In reality, Welles’ European period represents some of his most bold and original work as a mature director. What made Othello so daring was the piecemeal nature of the shoot; different halves of scenes were shot in Italy, Spain, Morocco: anywhere Welles could gather his cast together.