Interesting piece in the Northwest Herald yesterday about the fate of the old Todd School and a move to tear it down.

Caryl Lemanski, the daugter of a former Todd teacher and a coach there, is hoping "something we can do aside from just knocking the building down." She grew up at the school.

The article mentions the Orson Welles connection and that the school was run by Roger Hill until it closed in 1954.

Full story at http://www.nwherald.com/articles/2008/08/26/news/local/doc48b3cde906fda604752671.txt

I'd hoped to visit the todd school someday, for that reason and many others it would be a monumental shame if it were to be knocked down. I read the article, and unless I missed it, it doesn't mention why it is in danger of being torn down does it?

Stefan Droessler of the Munich Film Museum has a truly "heart warming" home movie of Welles paying a visit to Skipper Hill and his wife, Hortense, at their retirement estate in the Southwest. The two men, Welles and Hill, appear a match for each other, and they reminisce as Hortense plays hostess, and straightens them out occasionally.

This charming material has been brought up here before, and I would hope that it would find its way soon onto an extra for some future DVD.

Glenn

Say it ain't so - Please don't tear down my namesake, the Todd school!

Thanks Ray, for providing that news link.

What's even more bizarre, is I actually grew up in Wallingford, Conn. home town of the semi-famous Choate School for Boys, mainly because John F. Kennedy went to school there. And now I find out there was a Wallingford Hall at the Todd School for Boys! Plus, Welles set his "Harper School for Boys" in the fictional town of Harper, Conn. Did Welles connect Todd to Wallingford, Conn? Probably not, but it seems pretty certain he was thinking of the Todd School when he made THE STRANGER.

Check out this picture of a very young Welles with his classmates at Todd, from the archives of the Woodstock Library:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/woodstockp ... 628281813/

It doesn't and you think an editor there would have caught that. I looked up an earlier piece from the newspaper and it stated:

Woodstock Christian Life Services, a faith-based organization that operates the Woodstock Early Learning Center and provides housing for senior citizens, proposed tearing down Grace Hall as part of a plan to build new duplexes and remodel existing buildings.

Woodstock Christian Life has owned the property since 1956. It currently uses the space for administration offices, according to the article. The Woodstock Plan Commission apparently does have reservations about the proposal. The earlier article quotes two members as saying:

“I’d be just devastated to see that thing gone,” Commissioner Jack Porter said. Commissioner Doreen Paluch pointed out that the Woodstock Comprehensive Plan emphasized restoring and reusing historic structures.

I had always thought the Todd School was destroyed in a fire sometime in the 1960's. I guess I must be confusing it with something else.

Apparently, Grace Hall is the only Todd School building left standing; the rest of the school's buildings were demolished years ago.

Peter: It may not be too much of a speculation to suggest that THE STRANGER may have been the Post-War offspring of Smiler with a Knife or The Road to Santiago.

Kudos to Toddy Baesen and his little Ha-Ra Club gang for leading us to that surmise.

Glenn

Like many of you' I've sent emails to the Council of Woodstock asking if this site could be preserved. But it would be great if somebody could reissue EVERYBODY'S SHAKESPEARE. Is it really expensive on e-Bay now?

Peter:

You are quite correct in noting that Welles was not credited on the script of THE STRANGER. But this of course, goes to the whole point of the Auteur theory.

Welles may not have written a word of the script for THE STRANGER, but as director, was he thinking about the Todd School? I think so. After all he certainly could control the visual elements movie viewers would see on screen. So when Edward G. Robinson goes into the Harper school gym, we see a sign that say "Harper vs. Todd." We also see references to Todd on a blackboard. Obviously, unless John Huston, Victor Trivias or Anthony Vieller also attended Todd School, nobody but Welles could have added these "touches."

Now, given what has recently been posted about Welles at Todd in the 1938 NEW YORKER piece, there is little doubt Welles hated going to Todd's gym. But he seems to have loved everything else about his years at Todd after he actually got there.

So what I was trying to point out, was that Welles added his own touches to a script that had, as it's setting a small town boys school in Conn. In my view, Welles added some touches based on what he had experienced while he was at The Todd School, and that can have included both his good and his bad experiences. As a director, Welles main concern was probably about making the Harper school appear authentic on screen for an audience.

Actually, Peter, THE STRANGER has Welles written all over it. From Welles' obsessive concern about the survival, indeed revival, of fascism in America to picking as the newly married Mrs. Rankin the established actress Loretta Young, whose sister was married to Welles' Mercury Theater collaborator, Norman Foster, THE STRANGER is clearly a Welles' film, despite slashings and re-shoots. The trail from Todd School to Harper School was probably created, as Todd Baesen pointed out to me when we discussed the matter a few weeks ago, from the initial fact that Thornton Wilder, who had befriended young Welles, visited him at Woodstock to help him adapt his Todd School Summer Shakespeare Festival, in 1934. The trail then leads from there to Grovers Corners in Our Town to Welles' Grovers Mills in "The War of the Worlds" to Wilder's re-imagining of Santa Rosa in Hitchcock's SHADOW OF A DOUBT to Harper in THE STRANGER's New England.

I think that your idea about Harper not being "special" enough is a fair one. But you do not take into account that in THE STRANGER, the 30 year-old Welles is looking back on his Pre-War Golden Age at Todd, when he was already dreaming of the re-emergence of Evil in the World, and in frustration, to his Post-War present, when all the horrors of that Evil Dream had come to pass. Todd/Harper has been transformed by World War II and the coming of Rankin/Welles upon the scene.

THE STRANGER was obstensibly based on a story by a Russian refugee, Victor Trivas (who wrote Director Fydor Otsep's MORDER DIMITRI KARAMAZOV/ BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, 1931); adapted by him and Decla Dunning; but resulted from an actual screen play by John Huston, Welles, and Anthony Veiller (who got the credit).

Huston was still in the Army in 1945, and under contract to Warner's, unable to put his name on the film. He was preoccupied himself by the coming of fascism to America, which eventually evolved into the return of the Mob from Cuba in his adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's KEY LARGO.

Welles is said to have been at odd ends, rumored going over the screenplay for his wife's big hit, GILDA, a film also about a Nazi who is smuggling fascists, in that case into Brazil, another one of Welles' interests.

A practical factor was that the film was released by a fledgling independent distributor, International Pictures. [The Company had ties to Great Britain, and Edward G. Robinson had an interest in it. The company produced THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and SCARLET STREET, two of Robinson's more off-beat features.] The principals of the Company wanted to be different and safe, at the same time. Never a very good idea.

Welles said later that the 20-30 minute "ratline sequence" he wrote for THE STRANGER, detailing with how escaped Nazis were being brought into the Americas, was some of the best writing he ever did. He imagined that the picture might have the kind of significance in Post-War America that CITIZEN KANE had before the War. But when Producer Sam Spiegel (S.P. Eagle, at that juncture) cut the sequence out, along with the framing nightmare of Mary Longstreet (Young) at the beginning, Welles lost considerable interest in the picture. He carried through because he wanted to prove himself reliable to the Hollywood Studios.

Macresarf1, in May of 2004, wrote an extensive review of THE STRANGER, which describes the film in more and somewhat different particulars:

http://www.epinions.com/review/mvie_mu1 ... 0772085380

[My old eyes, however, did not spy the Todd vs. Harper sign. All Hail, Baesen.]

Glenn

Other Harper/Todd connections: I believe a couple of notices in the gym in THE STRANGER are signed "Coach Roskie". Roskie was the athletic director at Todd, and his daughter Caryl Lemanski is leading the charge to save Grace Hall.

Grace Hall is beautiful building--I drove out to Woodstock a few years ago to have a look.

Like Glenn Anders, I think THE STRANGER is very much a Welles film. Probably realizing he would have not a lot of control of the film in post production, Welles did a lot of editing "in the camera". There are many long takes (that I suspect were not otherwise covered) that, to some extent, tied the hands of Sam Spiegel in cutting the film. Critics focus on the famous walk in the woods with Konstantin Shayne, but there are many others. "This is Orson Welles" describes how Spiegel fought with Welles to cover the final big confrontation scene in the house with a close up of Young--when Welles refused, Young succesfully backed him up and the close up wasn't taken. Last time I saw the film, I noticed for the first time (mainly due to the beautiful transfer on the Warner DVD) that the medium shot cut into the scene is an optical blow-up of the long shot! Spiegel "won" that fight, I guess. To bad Spiegel couldn't keep his hands off the framing device and the South America sequences.

Peter: There's no reason to pursue this matter further around the mulberry bush, but I think you are being far too literal. Following your logic, Skipper Hill indeed would have had to be named and appear on camera for the analogy of the two schools to be valid. Harper School is no doubt supposed to be a cross between, say, Phillips Andover and Todd, just a nice WASP finishing school, for the purposes of the story, in New England, not Woodstock, Illinois. [But it is interesting to reflect, as we all learned later, there are Woodstock's in both regions.] The important point in Welles' [and Huston's] mind would have been that "It can happen here." In New England, as Rankin/Kindler boasts, or in Welles' beloved Todd School, back in Illinois, The Fourth Reich might have been ready to flourish.

[Looking at developments down to our day, Welles and Huston may have been right!]

You point out two apparent inconsistencies, first, in the time of year for exams, and less so, the Supreme Court Justice's work schedule . On the former discrepancy, I might suggest that the school is on a quarter system, as my alma mater of Kent State was when I attended there. Exams were always just before Thanksgiving, then, around Spring Vacation, at the end of March, and finally in late May or early June.

The matter of Judge Adam Longstreet's workload is easier to explain, again within the context of a story, by simply assuming that by 1945, a Supreme Court Judge could entrain at Washington's Union Station and be in New England within several hours. Remember, too, that he has returned home for two important occasions, Thanksgiving in the year that the War ended, and on the date of his only daughter's wedding.

If you reject those explanations, then I, of course, agree with you that the factors you name indicate plot holes.

But remember, too, that a great deal was cut out of THE STRANGER, and a number of elements were changed. Welles, if you are correct, may not have been responsible for the allusions that do not work.

Glenn

Peter: As I suggest, the mulberry bush is being deprived of its berries, and I'm not sure why you insist upon this point that Harper School is not "unique." What does that mean? Harper School is a prep school in a town of the same name, where an American Supreme Court Justice makes his home; it is a school where the students adopt a kind of English dress code; and it is a school which hires foreign-born instructors without much vetting. Is it meant to be Todd School, in a literal sense? Obviously not.

Harper School is not Summerhill, but it is not P.S. 352, either.

But in terms of the theme of THE STRANGER, in that deeply passionate sense with which Welles invested his movies, Harper stands for the America closest to his heart. It is a little American town, containing a little American private school, representing the finest virtues of American enlightened democracy. The town has been "invaded" by a European clock from the Dark Ages, symbolizing the ancient European struggle against barbarism, and the school has been "infected" by an escaped Nazi war criminal who intends to start that clock ticking again, in America.

During an interview conducted by Hedda Hopper on the set of THE STRANGER, published in the LA Times, October 28, 1945, Welles discussed his work on the picture. He declared, "My real interest in life is education. I want to be a teacher."

When Miss Hopper wondered if he might really mean indoctrination, Welles told her that, on the contrary, he was only interested in helping people to come to their own conclusions; that he had a personal and financial stake in Todd School, back in Illinois. "One day I shall leave all this behind me, go back there, and give full rein to my ideas. That's when life will really begin for me." [Simon Callow, HELLO AMERICANS, p. 277]

Peter, per your request, the above passage from Callow seems to me pretty compelling evidence that as Orson Welles was making THE STRANGER in late 1945, he saw in his typical doppelganger way a direct connection between Rankin/Kindler at Harper School and himself at Todd.

Do you want more? I have more.

Meanwhile the above material should provide additional reason why the last of Todd School's buildings must be preserved.

Glenn

You're welcome, Peter.

The daunting argumentative problem you have faced is the logical, intellectual, often legal one of "trying to prove a negative." As you know, it is almost impossible to accomplish on the plane of simple assertion.

Toddy Baesen, Ray Kelly, Dave McCarthy and myself have offered you various evidence from the film, and what we know of Orson Welles' background, from what is clear in the nature of his state of mind and interests during the second half of 1945, just after the end of the War in Europe. We suggest that Welles had long been obsessed with the rise of fascism abroad (the "modern dress" Julius Caesar," 1937), and its coming to America (the Radio play, "His Honor, the Mayor," 1941). He had brought his concern with totalitarianism to his first efforts in the Movies (the unmade treatments and scripts for Smiler with a Knife, The Road to Santiago, Carnival in Rio, and Don't Catch Me). All of these projects stressed how insidious within the structure of a society, and to the psyche of individuals, the fascistic virus often was.

I have uncovered, as you requested, Welles' declaration of his commitment to the importance of education, of his concern with informing a democratic populace, of his dream to leave his career behind and go back to Todd School as a teacher with his wife, Rita Hayworth, statements made to Hedda Hopper on the very set of THE STRANGER, in October 1945.

[It strikes me, Peter, that you are a bit of a stranger to the admiration and pride Americans displayed toward the promise of education in a small town, prior to 1960's. You are pretty derisive in your dismissal of both American small towns and their schools. You call them a cliche. They are the kind of "cliche" which made America, but now looked down upon. It is the kind of attitude which I'm afraid will give another four years of Bushism.]

Following revelations of the Nazi annihilation camps, the opportunity to re-write and direct what would become known as THE STRANGER (also an unwritten agreement promising him a four picture, hands-off deal) prompted Orson Welles, according to Clinton Heylin (Despite the System, pp. 174-175), to deliver a 164 page script, plus a 53 day shooting schedule, in less than a week.

Welles was working from a "Temporary Draft," dated August 9, 1945 [ring a clock tower bell, Peter?], which bore on its title page "just two names, Orson Welles and John Huston, in that order" (Heylin, p. 174). That treatment was essentially the film Welles produced six weeks later, less the excised framing dream sequence, and his study of how the "rat-lines" were bringing escaped war criminals into South America, and hence to the United States.

THE STRANGER was to register in three ways: 1) in the pure but troubled Emily Dickinson dream sequence of Mary Longsteet (Loretta Young); 2) in the desperate hunted forest animal mentality of Albert Speer-like Franz Kindler (Welles); and 3) the innocent, oblivious normality of the Woodstock sort of town Orson Welles grew up in, as represented by Mr. Potter (Billy House), owner of the general store, and other townspeople. The conflict was to center on the town square, with its abandoned clarion tower and disabled (ancient European) clock.

To most of us here, Harper, Connecticutt, appears to be a Wellsian 18th Century version of Woodstock, Illinois, and Harper School representative of the kind of American school Welles so much admired in the example of his own prep academy, Todd School for Boys. Welles loads the film with allusions to Todd School.

But as you claim that a bald head and a fireplace from MAD LOVE cannot be referenced in CITIZEN KANE (even though that's how film analogies have always been made), you say that the symbolic implications of Todd School in THE STRANGER must be "unique." The Harper lads must be putting on a Welles' adaptation of Macbeth under the town clock. Skipper Hill must be a character in the cast list.

In other words, Peter, your literal imposition of "no evidence" must trump the available evidence we have found.

You win.

If only Franz Kindler had stepped in front of the clock, when the townspeople were gathered at his feet, and shouted: "Ein Todd, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer!" But he did not. Or if he did, Sam Spiegel had it cut out.

That's another negative which can't be proved.

Glenn