Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

The film Me and Orson Welles portrays Orson very well. Welles was charming and he was a damn good actor, but he wanted things his own way. Usually he knew what was right, what was creative.

--Arthur Anderson, an actor in Orson Welles Mercury Theater

There were moments during Me and Orson Welles when I felt like I was there again. Christian McKay was extraordinary as Orson.

--William Herz, an actor in Orson Welles Mercury Theater

It’s ironic that Christian McKay was the actor with the least amount of film experience, and here he is lording over everyone else with such authority. Christian’s performance, when you think of what’s required and the degree of difficulty, is an utter wonder.

--Richard Linklater

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Over the last month I've done a bit of polling of some of the actors I've talked to in the past who are also voting members of the Academy. One of the questions I asked them was what they thought of Christian McKay's performance in Me and Orson Welles and if they were to vote for him, would it be as "Best Supporting Actor" or as "Best Actor."

The results were unanimous in placing Mr. McKay in the "Best Supporting Actor" category. This is rather important, because due to an unfortunate error the DVD screeners of Me and Orson Welles that were sent to Academy members listed Mr. McKay for consideration as "Best Actor" rather than as “Best Supporting Actor.”

Therefore, if enough voters follow that advice, as Academy member Robert Harper says he will, Mr. McKay's votes will be split and he may end up not being nominated in either category!

However, if all the actors in the Academy who favor Mr. McKay were to vote for him as "Best Supporting Actor" there is little doubt he would be one of the final five nominees.

Actor Robert Harper revealed his thoughts in reply to a piece on Christian McKay's chances in The Los Angeles Times Awards Insider, where Tom O'Neil talks about Mr. McKay possibly winning the final gold, if only he can get nominated!

Let's hope that is the case. In the meantime the five voting actors I consulted, included Christopher Lee, Martin Landau, Peter Fonda, Viggo Mortensen and Malcolm McDowell. They didn't say they would be voting for Mr. McKay but they all seemed to be considering it (and as "Best Supporting Actor"). Ironically, as a newcomer to movies, Mr. McKay cannot vote for himself, since he is not yet a member of the Academy.

Therefore, to bring some attention to this issue, I've decided to award Christian McKay "The Wellesnet Award" for Best Supporting Actor for his superlative work in bringing Orson Welles to life on the screen.

Here is a list of awards and nominations Me and Orson Welles has already received:

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1. Me and Orson Welles -- Richard Linklater

Christian McKay's performance as Orson Welles highlights this fictionalized, but still highly accurate account of the staging of Welles's 1937 production of Julius Caesar. An absolute must see for anyone with the slightest interest in Welles or acting and the theatre.

2. Inglourious Basterds -- Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino's stylish re-imagining of WWII France had enough ideas for two movies, as this scene cut from his script shows:

EXT—NAZI TOWN CAR (MOVING)—DAY
Col. Hans Landa sits in the backseat of the convertible that’s speeding away from the French farmhouse.

Landa speaks to his driver in GERMAN, SUBTITLES IN ENGLISH:

COL. LANDA
Herrman, I sense a question on your lips? Out with it!

DRIVER
Why did you allow an enemy of the state to escape?

COL. LANDA
Oh, I don’t think the state is in too much danger, do you?

DRIVER
I suppose not.

COL. LANDA
I’m glad you see it my way. Besides,
not putting a bullet in the back of a fifteen year-old girl and allowing her to escape are not necessarily the same thing. She’s a young girl, no food, no shelter, no shoes, who’s just witnessed the massacre of her entire family. She may not survive the night. And after word spreads about what happened today, it’s highly unlikely she will find any willing farmers
to extend her aid. If I had to guess her fate, I’d say she’ll probably be turned in by some neighbor. Or she’ll be spotted by some German soldier. Or we’ll find her body in the woods, dead from starvation or exposure. Or, perhaps... she’ll survive. She will elude capture. She will escape to America. She will move to New York City, where she will be elected President of the United States.

The S.S. colonel chuckles at his little funny.

3. The Lovely Bones -- Peter Jackson

Like King Lear and Jackson's own masterful trilogy on Middle-Earth, this is a film about death. In Jackson's hands, it transcends that to become even more: a poetic meditation about what could possibly happen after death, along with an emotional roller coaster ride that provides the kind of stylistic cinematic devices that would no doubt have delighted Orson Welles. Extreme close-ups, wide-angle shots and an extremely creative use of cross-cutting, sound and music, the latter provided by Brian Eno, in what is easily the years best film score.

4. Avatar -- James Cameron

A spectacular effects adventure built around a story of genocide on a distant planet. If nothing else, Avatar is certainly one of the best 3-D movies that has ever graced the silver screen. But just imagine what Orson Welles would have done with a budget of over 200 million dollars!

5. Coraline -- Henry Selick

A truly astonishing stop-motion extravaganza with beautifully detailed miniature sets and even more fabulous design work! Be sure to see it in 3-D!

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Since Me and Orson Welles was written by Robert Kaplow, a New Jersey English teacher, and concerns a fictional student who discovers the world of the lively arts in 1937 New York, it's only fitting that the movie will become a subject in classroom discussions.

To this end, Film Education in the UK has put together a marvelous study guide for Me and Orson Welles that explores in great detail the historical background of the film and the myriad of different ideas it contains.

As their website explains:

It features study materials and film clips designed to stimulate debate, discussion and reflection on Orson Welles, Shakespeare, performance, theatrical production and filmmaking.

The study guide addresses core elements of learning in English, Media, Film and Theatre Studies. The materials are most suitable for students aged 14-18.

You can download the study guide HERE.

In America The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) has also put out a statement for teachers about Me and Orson Welles:

As a film that tells the story of the process of opening a show, Me and Orson Welles will be of particular interest to English and theatre students as well as educators who are well-acquainted with this exhausting, but profoundly gratifying process. Because Mr. Linklater and the film's producers intend for this movie to be an exploration of theatre history, Shakespearean drama and the theatrical work of Orson Welles, as well as all that is learned in the process of producing a show, a study guide has been developed and will be made available to educators free of charge. The study guide will provide educators and their students with a way to use Me and Orson Welles as a tool to study these important aspects of the film, as well as a springboard to study the history and context in which the film's story is told.

The producers plan for the study guide to be available in time for the film's New York City and Los Angeles release on November 25.

(Unfortunately, I haven't found the link to their study guide yet, but will add it when I do.)

In the meantime, EdTA's online site has an article by Jeffrey Sweet which contains some great photos of Orson Welles. It is entitled: Orson Welles: Finding New Ways to tell the Story.

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As Me and Orson Welles expands this week to theatres across America, one of the primary audiences who may be especially interested in seeing the film and talking about it will be teachers and their students.

Therefore, here is a short excerpt from Orson Welles chapter taken from Everybody's Shakespeare, the book he wrote in 1934 with Roger Hill, which became a big success with teachers and students in schools across the country, especially after Harper & Brothers issued the books as companion volumes to the first full-length audio recordings of William Shakespeare’s plays, as performed by Welles and his Mercury Theatre actors. The three plays released were Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, followed a few years later by Macbeth, all of which were “edited for reading and arranged for staging” by Roger Hill and Orson Welles.

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ON STAGING SHAKESPEARE AND ON SHAKESPEARE'S STAGE

By Orson Welles - Director of the Mercury Theater
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Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man's season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it's wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn't properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer's ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elizabeth.

Shakespeare speaks everybody's language, but with an Elizabethan accent. When he came squawking and red faced into it, England could carry a tune and was learning to talk. It was a kid of a country, waking up noisily and too suddenly into adolescence and bounding blithely into the sunny, early morning of modern times.

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Chris Welles Feder's wonderful new book about her life and times with Orson Welles, In My Father's Shadow has just been released by Agonquin Books. Chris Welles began her book tour in San Francisco with a showing of The Lady From Shanghai at the Rafael Theatre on November 2, and earlier that day Alex Fraser and I met with Chris in the lobby of the Orchard Garden Hotel in San Francisco, at the corner of Grant and Bush Streets, only a few blocks from where her father had shot key scenes from The Lady From Shanghai (at Grant and Pine street) in 1946. Part one of our talk appears below and will soon be followed by part two.

You can see pictures of Chris with her father and Rita Hayworth taken by Life Magazine photographer Peter Stackpole HERE.

You can also read Alex Fraser's review of In My Father's Shadow at Epinions Here.

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LAWRENCE FRENCH: What prompted you to start writing In My Father’s Shadow?

CHRIS WELLES FEDER: There are many books that have been written on my father, biographies and critical studies and so on, but none of them have captured the Orson Welles that I knew. Also many of the people who wrote about my father either never met him, or they didn’t meet him until the last 15 years of his life. So I felt I had a story to tell from the unique perspective of being his daughter. I think I’m probably one of the few people still alive who knew him when he was in his vigorous youth and he was at the top of his game. So I really wanted to recapture the young Orson Welles before he was beaten down by disappointments, betrayals and not getting the money he needed to make his movies. I wanted that vision to be out there as part of the record. In addition, besides showing a much fuller picture of my father, as I knew him, there were other people in his life who were important but have been given scant attention in the vast Wellesian bibliography, beginning with my mother, Virginia Nicolson Welles. She is always described as a Chicago socialite, which in fact, she wasn’t. But almost nothing is known about my mother, who after all was the first Mrs. Orson Welles.

Then there were other people who were very important in his life that I knew personally. Roger and Hortense Hill, who were like his parents, because he was orphaned when he was quite young. They were probably the closest thing that he had to a family and I wanted the world to know who they were. Also, Oja Kodar who spent the last 20 years of his life with him and was probably the woman that he loved more than any other. I didn’t feel she had been given her due in the other books, so those were just some of the reasons why I wanted to write the book.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: What kind of work process did you follow in writing the book?

CHRIS WELLES FEDER: It took me about six years to write the book. I had two or three false starts where I wrote an enormous amount of material, but I realized I was going in the wrong direction and I had to throw it all out. So it took me awhile to find the right direction for the book. The most difficult thing was deciding what I should leave out. Finally, what became my organizing principle was to use only those parts of my life that were directly involved with my father. I could have gone on for pages and pages about living in South Korea or in other places, but what helped me to hone the book, was to keep it just focused on my father, our times together and our relationship. That became my organizing principle.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: How much direction did you get from your editor at Algonquin Books, Chuck Adams?

CHRIS WELLES FEDER: Chuck was a very sensitive editor. He respected everything that I had written and hardly made any changes to the manuscript, but he did make some very good cuts. Although what I really liked was he would write questions in the margins that would really get me thinking, such as “what did your mother think about that?” That alerted me to the fact that maybe I needed to cover something a little bit more in-depth. I was truly blessed to have him as an editor. He told me he feels very proud of this book. My whole experience with Algonquin has been just wonderful.

LAWRENCE FRENCH: You told me early on when you were looking for a publisher several editors wanted you to write more of a Mommie Dearest kind of a memoir.

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Jake Hinkson who frequently writes about Orson Welles at his blog, The Night Editor, has sent along this informative interview he conducted with Marguerite Rippy for Wellesnet readers to enjoy.

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ORSON WELLES AND THE UNFINISHED RKO PROJECTS

By Marguerite Rippy

Interviewed by Jake Hinkson

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Inttoduction by Jake Hinkson

Southern Illinois University Press has just released Orson Welles and The Unfinished RKO Projects: A Postmodern Perspective by scholar Marguerite Rippy. In it, the author provides an in-depth look at the many projects Welles worked on but never brought to fruition during his tenure at RKO. There aren’t many filmmakers whose uncompleted films could sustain such a thorough investigation, but Rippy deftly demonstrates that Welles’s work during this period was intriguing both in terms of subject matter and proposed execution.

Rippy begins with an examination of Welles’s often overlooked innovations in theater and radio and seeks to explain their impact on his novice forays in film. Drawing on archival materials from the Welles Manuscripts housed at the Lilly Library in Bloomington and the Richard Wilson collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, she investigates the origins of Welles’s attempts to film a subjective camera version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, his plan to film a version of the gospels set in the Old West, and his proposed adaptation of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers with W.C. Fields. She also provides an interesting look at the way in which Welles’s burgeoning interests in documentary film and South American culture created the perfect storm of It’s All True. What The Unfinished RKO Projects makes strikingly clear is that Welles used his time at RKO as a kind of laboratory training period. Throughout his career Welles was a constant experimenter. With her new book, Rippy has given us a valuable look at his first experiments.

I recently had a chance to discuss Orson Welles and The Unfinished RKO Projects with its author, Marguerite Rippy.

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JH: What was the impetus for this book? Why Welles, and specifically, why Welles during his relatively brief tenure at RKO?

MR: Originally, I was working on a project regarding Welles and his 1938 radio adaptations of Charles Dickens—I was interested in Welles’s experiments with mass media adaptation and his techniques of interacting with a broadcast audience. While working in the archives of Indiana University’s Lilly Library on that project, I was overwhelmed by the amount of previously unstudied archival material on Welles during this formative phase of his career. Welles’s first interactions with Hollywood reveal his struggle to translate his performance theories from radio and theater onto the screen, and this struggle is key to understanding his later cinematic styles and themes. I think people tend to privilege Welles’s work in cinema over his stage and radio work, even at this early stage when he was clearly working with all three media simultaneously. It’s fascinating to watch his ideas regarding mass media and performance evolve during this period in his career.

JH: The subtitle of your book is “A Postmodern Perspective.” Do you consider Welles a modernist or a postmodernist?

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Catherine L. Benamou, the curator of the Univ. of Michigan Welles collection recently wrote to tell Wellesnet that the Richard Wilson--Orson Welles papers are now open for viewing and research by Welles scholars and all other interested parties.

You can access the online site to see an overview of the 62 boxes of material on Orson Welles career HERE.

Catherine is also back working on the preservation of It's All True, to add to the 6 or so reels of unseen material from the film that have already been restored.

It appears that special emphasis will be given to restoring footage from both the My Friend Bonito episode and the gorgeous Technicolor footage from the Carnaval episode.

To celebrate, I've posted some images from the Univ of Michigan collection on It's All True at the Wellesnet Facebook page HERE.

In the meantime, The Orson Welles–Oja Kodar collection of papers the Univ. of Michigan acquired is still being processed, but is also open for research, as long as specific requests are directed to the Special Collections archives manager, Kathleen Dow.

The Wilson--Welles collection spans Orson Welles entire creative life, starting with his early stage productions at the Todd School, until the memorial tribute Richard Wilson arranged after Orson Welles death in 1985.

Here are just two samples from the first to the last files in the Wilson--Welles collection:

Winter of Discontent (1930)

Script, undated. Photocopy of an annotated text, in folder marked by Richard Wilson as "Todd School, Five Kings"

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Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

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Orson Welles Memorial Tribute

Held November 2, 1985 at the Directors Guild Theater in Hollywood.

Includes correspondence, messages to be read at the tribute, planning notes, and obituaries (2 folders).

32 years ago, in 1978 when I was the the chairman of The Cinema Guild at a New England College, we received a grant from the Johnson-Mellon foundation for $10,000 to bring important artistic speakers to our campus for a day of interaction with students.

Early in our talks with the University "committee" for the event, my thoughts were focused like a laser beam on one person: ORSON WELLES!

A year earlier, Welles' latest picture, F FOR FAKE had astonished me when I went to see it the weekend it opened in Manhattan at the D.W. Griffith Theater.

Unfortunately, the heads of the Cinema Dept. never were able to prevail on the "money" men in bringing Orson Welles to campus as a speaker. Instead, the sponsors of the lecture series seemed intent for some unknown reason on getting Otto Preminger.

Well, thankfully, that was a choice we could at the least, live with. If they wanted to bring Richard Fleischer or Robert Wise on campus, I'm sure I would have, to quote Waldo Lydecker, "Run amuck."

However, we did get our say in which critic would be accompanying Mr. Preminger on campus. We certainly didn't want someone like Pauline Kael! Instead, we asked for, and thankfully we got, Andrew Sarris.

So in February of 1978, I met Mr. Sarris for the first time. I still remember talking to him while Otto Preminger was trying to get Sarris's attention. I was asking Sarris about why Touch of Evil and Vertigo were not mentioned on his ten best films list of 1958. Sarris was very contrite about the lapse, and admitted it was a critical failure on his part, due mostly to his inexperience at the time.

The day Preminger and Sarris came to speak, I ended up speaking much more to Mr. Preminger than to Mr. Sarris. Luckily, my good friend, James Hurley was far more interested in talking with Sarris, and he also wrote a wonderful piece on Andrew Sarris for our program book.

So here is an excerpt from the introduction James Hurley wrote about the critical writings of Andrew Sarris:

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It's too bad Andrew Sarris is such an important movie critic, because it tends to obscure the fact that he is such a good critic. Sarris's revolutionary auteur theory has created such controversy that its American founder is too often seen as a mere polemicist, a potent critical force rather than a brilliant critical intelligence. But though the slavishly faithful auteurists he has spawned pay him frequent and impassioned homage, Sarris is much more closely related to the great American tradition of iconoclastic film criticism: Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Manny Farber, Robert Warshow, men who have, as critic and film-maker Paul Schrader has said, "come out of the wilderness... spouting some sort of doctrine which they have half-cocked in their own heads."

This is not to say that Sarris's great influence should be downplayed; indeed, it cannot be over-stressed. The best of the younger critics working today have been formed greatly in his mold: Molly Haskell, Richard Corliss, Joseph McBride, Stuart Byron, Roger Greenspun and John Belton, to name but a few. Peter Bogdanovich, critic before film-maker, cites Sarris as one of his "main influences." The auteur theory has not only become the predominant critical and academic outlook, it has acted, for better or worse, as breeding ground for such recent trends in film scholarship as structuralism, semiology, genre criticism and Cahierist Marxism. It has also unfortunately created a school of jabbering parrots, "Sarrisites", who have, in Sams's own words, "embraced the auteur theory as a shortcut to film scholarship." Sarris, however, cannot be blamed for the sins of his bastard offspring.

---James Hurley, 1978

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This is a rather long introduction to Andrew Sarris's very cogent and, I think, quite amazing rebuttal to Pauline Kael's badly researched article in The New Yorker, "Raising Kane." Kael's article, was naturally, well written, but many of the facts seem to have somehow eluded her.

So it was very nice to see how well Andrew Sarris's rebuttal to Kael's article holds up. I was also astonished to find out that Sarris revealed, for the first time I am aware of, that Herman J. Mankiewicz based "Rosebud" on his childhood bicycle!

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CITIZEN KAEL VS. CITIZEN KANE

By ANDREW SARRIS
The Village Voice - April 29, 1971
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“Citizen Kane, American Baroque" is the pretentious title of a solemn, pedantic, humorless revaluation of “Citizen Kane" written on the occasion of its revival in 1956. The piece first appeared in the ninth issue of Film Culture (1956) and did not cause too much stir one way or another. The reviewer (or rather re-reviewer) was a 28-year old New York freelancer (more free than lance) with a severely limited education in film history. He had just started reviewing movies in the mid-'50s, first under the name of Andrew George Sarris and then merely Andrew Sarris, and by 1956 he had decided that the three greatest films of all times were "Odd Man Out," "Citizen Kane," and "Sullivan's Travels." Then from 1961 through 1969, he held that the three greatest films of all time were "Lola Montez," "Ugetsu," and "The Rules of the Game," and now in 1970 he has replaced "Lola Montez" at the top with "Madame de" He still likes "Citizen Kane," "Odd Man Out," and "Sullivan's Travels," but not as much these days as "The Magnificent Ambersons," "The Third Man" and 'The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," "Hail the Conquering Hero" and "The Palm Beach Story," not to mention "Sunrise," "Liebelei," "La Ronde," "Day of Wrath," "Ordet," "Flowers of St. Francis," "French CanCan." "The Golden Coach," "Psycho," "Vertigo," "The Searchers," "Diary of a Country Priest," "Au Hasard Balthazar," "Brink of Life," "Oharu," "Seven Chances," "Sherlock, Jr.," "Steamboat Bill Jr.," and "Shop Around the Corner."

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Back in March of 1967, when Falstaff was first released in New York, it was a time of great social upheaval in America. Protests against the war in Viet Nam were about to reach critical mass. LSD made the cover of Life Magazine. Hippies and flower children were preparing for the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco. The new freedom of the screen was just around the corner. So seeing Jack Falstaff as a "swinger," as Welles so aptly called him on the Dean Martin TV show in 1968 was quite correct.

Unfortunately, the staid old reviewer from The New York Times, Mr. Bosley Crowther was so out of touch with the films of the era, he would shortly find himself out of a job!

Presumably, articles like this one by Andrew Sarris, defending Falstaff against Mr. Crowther's bad critical judgment, had considerable influence in getting Crowther fired from The Times in 1968. Of course, what speaks volumes, is that today, I doubt if many film-goers under the age of 40 even know who Bosley Crowther was. Andrew Sarris, on the other hand is still around and writing reviews for The New York Observer!

Below is Andrew Sarris' Village Voice article defending Welles's film, Falstaff, followed by Bosley Crowther's original review of the film in The New York Times.

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Orson Welles's FALSTAFF: Humpty-Dumpty from Wisconsin

By Andrew Sarris -- The Village Voice, March, 30, 1967

Orson Welles's Falstaff deserves the support of every serious moviegoer. Bosley Crowther has panned the film in no uncertain terms, but Mr. Crowther panned Citizen Kane in its time. I don't wish to single out Mr. Crowther as a critic, only as an awesome power on the New York film scene. He is certainly not alone in panning Falstaff. Happily Falstaff has found powerful defenders in Joseph Morgenstern of Newsweek, Judith Crist of the World-Journal Tribune, and Archer Winsten of the N.Y. Post. Even so, Mr. Crowther is entitled to his opinion, and he is scarcely the least enlightened of American film critics. Henry Hart of Films in Review has earned that dubious distinction with ease. The problem with Crowther is power. Not only can he still make or break most "art" films in New York; he can dictate to distributors what films they may or may not import. Lately he has been credited even with determining what will or will not be produced.

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Orson Welles: Genius and Innovator of the American Cinema is a short documentary written and directed by a 14-year old student, David La Rosa, as part of the National History Day Competition. It won third place out of all the finalists from New York State and can be viewed on YouTube HERE.

I found it to be especially enjoyable, since in only ten short minutes it covers many of the lesser known films from Welles's career, such as It's All True and Chimes at Midnight.

By contrast, take this opening line from a 2003 book review by a so-called "professional" writer who shall remain nameless:

"The 1964 Spanish/Swiss film Chimes at Midnight, based on several Shakespearean plays, will never be recalled as one of the cinema's high points. With a budget only $800,000, there were no makeup artists on set to aid director and star Orson Welles, long exiled from the Hollywood mainstream."

Now, in only two lines, this reviewer has made between three to five mis-statements about Chimes at Midnight, simply because he believed the numerous factual mistakes from the error-ridden captions in the photo book he was supposed to be offering critical advice on: Stars on the Set.

David, on the other hand has done quite a commendable job of research. After watching the film, I asked David to write an introduction for his documentary, which I've posted below, along with the process paper he wrote, that tells how he went about researching Orson Welles career for National History Day.

Introduction by David La Rosa
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I've always liked old movies and one day I watched Citizen Kane on Turner Classic Movies. I was astonished by the film and thought it was brilliant. It made me want to see more of Welles' films. I thought that his directorial style reminded me of Hitchcock's. We went to our library and borrowed all of the DVD's we could find. As I watched them, I saw how brilliant they were and decided to learn more about Welles and his work.

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A few months ago I found several old issues of Theatre Arts magazine in the tenderloin district of San Francisco, a few short blocks from where Wellesnet "legend" Glenn Anders lives. The mags were priced at a big 100% mark-up over their original price.

Well, since the original price was only .50 cents, they were actually great bargains, so I quickly grabbed several issues, including the September, 1951 copy that featured an article by Walter Kerr assessing Orson Welles career in both theatre and film, up to that point. Indeed, in 1951 Welles had only been active for 15 years in radio, the stage, and on the screen, and he had already become something of a legend. Or, according to Walter Kerr, a legendary "has-been."

Which is why I thought Kerr's article was way off the mark. (more...)

Heart of Darkness is a story we came to Hollywood to make a movie of---we never did and maybe someday we will---but I think it's particularly well suited to radio. Here it is, one of the best regarded and most typical of the works of Joseph Conrad. The Heart of Darkness could be described as a deliberate masterpiece, or a downright incantation. Almost, we are persuaded, that there is something after all, something essential, waiting for all of us in the dark areas of the world, aboriginally loathsome, immeasurable and certainly nameless...

I think I’m made for Conrad. I think every Conrad story is a movie. There’s never been a Conrad movie, for the simple reason that nobody’s ever done it as written. My (Heart of Darkness) script was terribly loyal to Conrad. I think that the minute anybody does that, they’re going to have a smash on their hands. Any of them; think what Lord Jim could have been, if some attention had been paid to the original book.

--Orson Welles

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Listening to Orson Welles reciting Joseph Conrad's masterful story The Secret Sharer from the audio recording he made for The Orson Welles Library, reminded me of Welles's longtime love of Conrad's work, starting with Heart of Darkness, which formed the basis for his first film project at RKO. Welles also did two different radio productions of the novel, and later wrote scripts from Conrad's novels Lord Jim in 1964 and Victory - An Island Tale, in 1971 (under the title of Surimam).

While none of Welles's screenplays based on Conrad's work were ever produced, it seems more than likely he would have been delighted to make a movie from The Secret Sharer.

In any event, hearing Welles reading the story, it is obvious it would have certainly made a terrific Welles's movie, containing as it does several themes that relate it to Welles's other film work. And strangely enough, the story was made into a picture at (of all studios) RKO, in 1952, starring James Mason as the Captain, and Michael Pate as the first mate of the Sephora. Directed by John Brahm, it features some beautifully atmospheric camera work by Karl Strauss, who was the cinematographer on Welles RKO production of Journey Into Fear. The short 45-minute episode was released under the title Face to Face, along with another short film based on Stephen Crane's The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.

The entire episode can be watched on YouTube HERE.

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