Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource

Looking back at the trouble Orson Welles had in gaining commercial success for nearly all of his films, I was struck by how just one key review, preview, or threat from a powerful mogul (such as W. R. Hearst), could effectively destroy the commercial chances of a Welles movie.

We know that on Citizen Kane, it was the efforts of the Hearst empire that single-handedly wrecked Citizen Kane's box-office potential. With The Magnificent Ambersons, it was supposedly the "disastrous" preview in Pomona --- except there were actually a good portion of audience members who felt the film was quite brilliant. For Chimes at Midnight, it was the single pan the movie got in The New York Times. And with Macbeth, it was this article that appeared in Life Magazine, the same week the film opened in Boston and a few other American cites.

What's rather unfortunate about this, is that the Life article was the voice of just a single person, and as we know today, their judgment about the Scots accents was wildly off-base. But at the time, the article caused great concerns, although ironically, not so much within the ranks of the Republic executives, as with Welles's own friend and producing partner, Charles K. Feldman.

This is all brought out in the memos Richard Wilson was continually writing to Welles. Wilson specifically notes that Feldman had "memorized" the Life article in these excerpts from a letter he wrote on May 7, 1949:

To: ORSON WELLES
From: RICHARD WILSON

I have had the considerable disillusionment of hearing Charlie (Feldman) request some of the god-damnedest things it's possible to imagine. I've had the odd experience of being supported by (Republic pictures Chairman, Robert) Newman against the suggestions of your good friend and partner, Mr. Feldman.

...To give you a better picture of Charlie, he had so many of his friends talk to him about Macbeth that he now doesn't know what to think. He has memorized the Life article and cannot help but quote it to make a point. In other words, he's now beginning to believe the Life article.

...his suggestions are directly opposed to (the) pitch in your letter that the cure is not to file down the roughness. His sensitivity to costumes, sound, witches, voice etc. are all of a kind: intended to soften and make smooth the production.

...(Herbert J. Yates) has also, I feel, a sincere feeling of loyalty to you and the project which has now become precarious. He's a bit wistful about "the greatest gangster the world has ever known" type of approach (to market the film) ...and the exploitation boys were frustrated by not having got an endorsement. ...they can't get anyone to come out for it.

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MURDER!

Orson Welles doth foully slaughter Shakespeare in a dialect version of his "Tragedy of Macbeth"

LIFE magazine - October 11, 1948

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Simon Callow had mentioned some time ago that he originally hoped to finish the third volume of his massive biography on Orson Welles by his 60th birthday. So I thought that today, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, I'd take the opportunity to wish him a very happy birthday on behalf of everyone at Wellesnet, and also wish him well as he continues his monumental task of research and writing on volume three.

Of course, Mr. Callow has not yet finished his work on the last volume, but with the wealth of new information that has come to light about Welles, in just the last year, that is all for the best. I for one think it would be very foolish to rush such an important book into print, before it is actually ready, based on artificial deadlines. Of course, when dealing with Orson Welles's life and career (from 1948 until his death and beyond), there are a great many things Mr. Callow may still be exploring.

However, the final volume is now scheduled to be titled:

Orson Welles volume 3: One Man Band.

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Laurence Goldstein, the editor of The Michigan Quarterly Review, just also happens to be a great admirer of Orson Welles work, and he has certainly done a great service to Welles scholarship by inviting Catherine Benamou to put together a substantial collection of letters by Orson Welles about the editing and sound work that was required for Macbeth.

The memos are all part of the special collection library of Orson Welles material that Ms. Benamou curates at the University of Michigan. But this 55-page dossier is merely the tip of the iceberg in the special Welles collections, so I strongly recommend everyone supporting the MQR by buying a copy of this terrific issue! Obviously, if this first installment sells well, it will only help ensure that more, and possibly ever larger selections of Welles material will be published in future issues, perhaps even on a yearly basis.

To order a copy for only $7.00 visit The MQR website.

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Now, to make a few observations about the letters themselves:

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In honor of Sir John Falstaff....

---Christopher Lee

***

Queen Elizabeth II of England has bestowed Knighthood honors on one of my very favorite actors, SIR CHRISTOPHER LEE, who is well known to Wellesnet readers for appearing in Orson Welles's never finished television movie Moby Dick-Rehearsed.

Lee was also was featured in Anthony Shaffer's The Wicker Man and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. Of course, three years after appearing in Welles's Moby Dick, Lee became world famous as "Count Dracula," which ironically, Welles had played so well on the radio way back in 1938.

What I find especially interesting is how English actors have always embraced horror films. Throughout the seventies, English actors were never "afraid" to be in a horror picture. In fact all of the great acting Knights appeared in horror and fantasy films.

Most significantly, they include:

Sir Ralph Richardson

Started out way back in 1933 with The Ghoul opposite Boris Karloff, made Things to Come with Raymond Massey in 1936, Tales From the Crypt in 1971 with Peter Cushing, and played a Wizard in Dragonslayer. Greystoke, one of his final films brought him an Oscar nomination in 1984, but no Oscar.

Sir Laurence Olivier

Played Van Helsing in Dracula, taking over a role made far more famous by Peter Cushing in the 1958 version of Dracula. Ironically, Olivier used Peter Cushing in his film version of Hamlet, as Osiric, in 1948 and as Clarence in Richard III on stage at the Old Vic. Olivier also played Zeus in Ray Harryhausen's Clash of the Titans, a role he was ideal for, although by then he was getting on in years.

Sir John Gielgud

Gielgud acted with Christopher Lee in The Far Pavillions. However, long before that he was the Chief of Police in Frankenstein: The True Story and also appeared in a 1984 English TV movie of Frankenstein with David Warner as The Monster. He was also friends with Coral Browne, the wife of Vincent Price, and was set to act in the role Price eventually played in The Whales of August.

Sir Alec Guinness

Ironically, this great actor is best remembered in America for Star Wars, more than for his masterful Oscar-winning performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai.

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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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