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The Renaissance man
“I always have to be larger than life,” Orson Welles once said. “It’s a fault in my nature.” For me, those two contradictory sentences — a boast followed by an apology — sum him up and explain what made him such a fascinating and perplexing subject for a book.
Welles, acclaimed as a genius while still a teenager, wanted to be a great man. Not content with an artistic career, he toyed with the idea of running for political office and gave up only because he thought that a divorced man could never be elected president. But though he spent his life impersonating warlords, tyrants and imperialistic tycoons, he was never sure if he possessed greatness or merely grandiosity, a by-product of his looming bulk and his booming voice. Eventually, as that confession about the fault in his nature conceded, he came to see his own overreaching as a moral flaw.
In his early twenties he played Faust, the sacrilegious superman in Marlowe’s tragedy, but he ended his life as Falstaff in his film of Shakespeare’s histories, Chimes at Midnight. Nursing his poodle Kiki, the elderly Welles ate for free at a Los Angeles restaurant which fed him because he attracted out-of-town customers, who came to gape.
Welles spent his life impersonating warlords, tyrants and imperialistic tycoons. He was never sure if he possessed greatness or merely grandiosity, a by-product of his looming bulk and his booming voice. He was simultaneously noble and feeble, titanic and pathetic, a sacred monster and a profane clown
Was Welles a tragic hero, martyred by the bureaucratic hacks who mutilated his films? He preferred to see himself as a comic figure and joked that he began at the top and then conscientiously worked his way down. This ironic defence covered his misery as he begged funds from dodgy backers for films he seldom managed to complete. Like Othello or Lear, he was simultaneously noble and feeble, titanic and pathetic, a sacred monster and a profane clown.
Hitchcock is somehow smaller than his work: great as they are, the films derive from his vengeful perversity, which takes pleasure in transforming reality into a nightmare. Welles is not only larger than life but larger than his work and his excessiveness is not a fault in his nature because it testifies to his recklessly generous creativity. Like a tree scattering seeds, he had more ideas than he could ever realize.
The dramatist Thornton Wilder urged him to have ‘capsule conversations,’ but Welles went on talking. One boozy night while filming Othello, he treated his Iago, Michael MacLiammoir, to a discursive romp through cultural history, during which he exploded the notion of the Renaissance. Next day, the details eluded the hung-over MacLiammoir. Welles, suspicious as ever of his own myth, was a Renaissance man who disapproved of the Renaissance.
The UK’s National Film Theatre in London has recently begun to screen a season of his films — among them Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, which chronicle America’s loss of innocence; The Lady from Shanghai, that curdled chivalric romance and The Stranger, unjustly belittled by Welles though it contains one of his most lacerating self-portraits; Touch of Evil, without which Hitchcock (who never acknowledged his debt) could not have made Psycho; The Trial, which updates Kafka’s paranoid fable for a society where the secret police have been replaced by a computer and The Immortal Story, a regretful parable about art and its manipulative designs on life.
Denied money, self-sabotaged by his chaotic working methods, Welles completed only a dozen films. One cannot help fantasizing about the films he didn’t make, which — since his creativity is contagious — we can screen in our imaginations. His tantalizing pitches amount to a kind of conceptual art. Years before his film of Macbeth, made in an inky coal mine left over from a western, he dreamt up an adaptation of the tragedy that would be, he said, a cross between Wuthering Heights and The Bride of Frankenstein: Shakespeare filmed by flashes of lightning.
He proposed setting the New Testament in the deserts of Utah and New Mexico, to find out if Christ would redeem America. While married to Rita Hayworth, he suggested Carmen and Salome as vehicles for her. His Carmen was to be brutish and un-melodic, as if Prospero Merimee’s novel had been rewritten by James M. Cain; in Salome, Welles was to play both the lecherous Herod and also Oscar Wilde. After their divorce, Hayworth went on to play both characters, but without Welles’s idiosyncratic directions the films were tame, sanitized things.
At the end of his life, still grieving over the abrupt, cozily sentimental ending the studio grafted on to The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles thought of returning to the film and attaching an epilogue in which the original actors would reappear, 30 years older. Now, confirming the narrative of decline and decay, the erosive effects of time would be written on the faces of the cast. It was a Proustian inspiration, but it could not be done: some members of the company were already dead, so art once more was outwitted by mortality.
Before Citizen Kane, Welles planned an adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in which, examining and arraigning his own mystique, he was to play both Kurtz the murderous genius and Marlow the representative of civilized values. The studio cancelled the project, but Welles, who often accused himself of being a violent and regressive barbarian like Kurtz, made his Heart of Darkness by subterfuge in later films. It is there in the jungle picnic among the predators in The Lady from Shanghai and in a lost sequence (cut by the studio and discarded) from The Stranger, when a Nazi fugitive goes underground in a fetid, swarming city in equatorial America.
Perhaps the role of Harry Lime allowed Welles at last to expose Kurtz’s inhuman amoralism. It always enraged him when restaurants played the zither theme as he walked in, or when fans admiringly addressed him as the third man: couldn’t they see that the part, which Graham Greene had allowed him to amplify and customize, was his self-denunciation?
As a schoolboy Welles wrote a play about Lucifer. He often wondered whether his gifts came with a curse attached and hinted that he might be a damned soul. Hence his plunge from the church tower in The Stranger, impaled on the sword brandished by a clockwork angel, or his leap from the plane at the end of Mr Arkadin.
Desperate to discover where he had gone wrong and to revise his life in retrospect, he wrote two autobiographical scripts just before his death in 1985. The Big Brass Ring benignly kissed off the political career that he — like Kane, whose bid for power is curtailed by a scandal — never had. A presidential nominee and his ripe, rollicking Falstaffian mentor (Welles’s role, of course) escape from responsibility and decamp to Africa: the heart of darkness is now a childish hiding-place. He could not raise the money to make the film, because none of the currently bankable stars would accept the part of the absconding candidate. In The Cradle Will Rock, he revisited and reinterpreted his first seasons on Broadway. He persuaded Rupert Everett to play the young, alluring Orson and wrote dialogue in which his first wife and his former friends all indulge and exonerate the overgrown child whose games they share in. This film, too, was never made.
His true autobiography should have been the film of Don Quixote on which he worked intermittently whenever he had funds, for 20 years. Welles, like the man of La Mancha in the musical, pursued impossible dreams. He admitted, with a grimace of self-disgust, that the characters he played were Faustian aspirers, but it could be just as well if he had said that they were Quixotic idealists, who fondly fancy the world to be a better place than it is — Kane with his giddy juvenile desire to change society, O’Hara the ingenuous sailor in The Lady from Shanghai or Falstaff who, listening to a remote echo of the chimes at midnight, yearns for a Merry England that Welles described as another ‘lost Eden.’ Don Quixote, inevitably, was never completed, and in the fragments pieced together by the Madrid Cinemateca, Welles himself is sidelined, reduced to a narrator who summarizes Cervantes’s story. His globular physique disqualified him from playing the emaciated knight: he had the lofty mind of Quixote, but it was inappropriately lodged in the gross body of Sancho Panza.
Welles made light of his disappointments by claiming not to care about art. “It’s the act that interests me, not the result,” he said. “I write and I paint, and I throw away everything I do.” Because of his self-destructiveness, the images that haunt the viewer most in Welles’s films are iconoclasms, literally attacks on imagery itself. Kane lets the glass receptacle that contains his childhood shatter on the floor and Quinlan in Touch of Evil cracks the bird’s egg he finds in a nest on a window ledge, smearing an unhatched life — another germinating idea — on his fingers. The feuding characters in The Lady from Shanghai shoot up a hall of mirrors, splintering the pictures on display.
In The Immortal Story the dying Mr Clay drops a Nautilus shell, another aesthetic trophy. But unlike Kane’s fragile dome, it does not break. Things of beauty survive, despite Welles’s refusal to trust in art and its artificial permanence. At Chartres in F for Fake, he contemplates the certainty of extinction, foreseeing a time when the cathedral and all mankind’s other works will sift into dust (and he makes his own contribution to this ashen residue by puffing on a cigar). Still, the dead, anonymous artists who constructed the cathedral tell him to cheer up. “Our songs will all be silenced,” they say. “But what of it? Go on singing!” How can we not go on singing Welles’s praises?—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
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