By ALBERTO ANILE
I have often wondered why such a fascinating project (Orson Welles meets Luigi Pirandello, an authentic cultural short circuit) had been so little investigated and researched. For a long time, everything known about it coincided with a few words spoken by Welles himself to Peter Bogdanovich. Only Bret Wood, in his meticulous Bio-Bibliography, had dedicated half a page to this project, placing it in relation to others devoted to the theme of lost identity.
It may not have helped that the screenplay had the same title as a Mr. Arkadin version. And it is also possible that when faced with Henry IV the scholar of Anglo-Saxon culture automatically thinks of Shakespeare. But I believe that the decisive problem, at least for Anglo-American scholars, is that the Pirandello project was conceived and written by Welles during his Italian years, between 1948 and ’51, in a context therefore not exactly within reach for those who live in London or Chicago and do not speak the language of Dante and Machiavelli.
It was easier for me, who lived and continue to live in Rome, to find traces of it in the Italian press of the time: some 1948 news reports spoke of a screenplay by Welles from Pirandello’s Henry IV entitled L’imperatore (The Emperor). Through them I discovered that the actress Gisella Sofio had been contacted in 1951 for the role of the protagonist’s daughter. She confirmed to me that Welles auditioned her, that the audition went well but that her grandmother, also given the aristocratic origins of the family, opposed her film debut.
I couldn’t find the script; apart from Gisella Sofio, who had lost it some time ago, no one seemed to have ever read it. I put everything I knew and had found into my Orson Welles in Italia, published in 2006 and then translated by Indiana University Press in 2013, and I didn’t think about it anymore. Until I was contacted by a gentleman, Emiliano Campagnola, who, struck by the information in my book, confided to me that he owned a copy of the famous screenplay. A script that he had not found in Bloomington or Ann Arbor, nor among Beatrice Welles’ papers or inside Oja Kodar’s warehouses: the script had been written in Rome and had always remained in Rome. At a certain point he had been lucky enough to find it in front of him and, as an actor and theater director, he had analyzed it thoroughly and had thought of making a documentary film that would tell all the events.
With great generosity, he agreed to let me read it, allowing me first of all to satisfy my curiosity and then to be the first to give an account of it in a new Italian edition of my book, finally released last October 13th. I give here the main information about this elusive and extraordinary script, in order to facilitate scholars who do not know the Italian language.
It is a typescript of approximately 170 pages, with rare hand annotations. Except for a few lines in Italian, the script is all in English. It has no date, although it is presumable that it dates back to 1951. The title is Masquerade, followed by the indications “A screenplay by Orson Welles” and, further down in brackets, “Based on a theme by Luigi Pirandello.” The basic idea (the man who pretends to be a madman who believes he is an ancient emperor), several characters and even some lines are taken literally from Luigi Pirandello’s play, but the theatrical text is a starting point: inside Masquerade there’s much more.
The setting is the Adriatic sea, off the coast of Bari, on the small imaginary island of Illyria. The young Frida who in Henry IV lent herself to heal the madman, is here the sixteen-year-old Lise, the role for which Gisella Sofio auditioned. As in Pirandello, the protagonist lost his mind following a large masquerade party, after which he continued to live in the same regal clothes worn at the reception. The doctor who in the theatrical source tried to cure the madman has here the German name of Knoedler, and is a surgeon specialized in lobotomy.
To Bogdanovich, Welles said that “it was completely redone on the Pirandello theme – it wasn’t a movie version of the play.” And in fact – surprise – the real driving force of Masquerade turns out to be a character absent from Pirandello’s text, the father, who bursts in halfway through the screenplay. His name is James J. Hamsun: a close friend of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, he was a presidential advisor and manager of a large rubber products industry in Duluth, Minnesota, for forty years. It is he who provoked his son’s “madness” by lowering a solid brass candelabra onto his head during the fateful masquerade party. The quarrel between father and son seems to have been caused by ancient family disagreements, a separation between the parents for which the old Hamsun bears at least part of the responsibility. Was the son’s “madness” induced by the candelabra or does it represent his refusal to return to the civil society of which his father is a member? It’s a question that old Hamsun doesn’t even want to ask himself: for him, his son’s attitude is something to overcome, a bad memory that lobotomy could quell and possibly erase, even at the cost of killing the patient.
One of the interesting elements of Masquerade is that it resonates with religious overtones, echoing The Unthinking Lobster. “We forget ugly things,” says the Emperor. “That’s the mercy of God. If the ugliness stayed with us always we should none of us be sane.” In another scene, Burns, the factotum who works for the old Hamsun, observes: “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world today: lack of faith. It’s a terrible loss.” Many pages later, Lise appears to answer him: “Faith? Faith in what? God’s Justice, or the goodness of men? Nonsense. You have to be a saint to love God in spite oh His faults, if you want to believe that people are good you have to be a fool…”
But above all it is family anxieties and childhood traumas that are boiling over. In the second half the script settles decidedly on the father-son confrontation. Both reluctant to meet, the two finally face each other. The Emperor ends up attacking his parent and runs away believing he has killed him. When he realizes that the old Hamsun is still alive, he leaves Lise a letter announcing his own suicide.
Many of Welles’ films end with the death of the protagonist but few with suicide. Just Othello and Mr. Arkadin, that is, the film shot before and the one realized after the writing of Masquerade. Even the unfinished The Other Side of the Wind ends with a (presumable) suicide, and the thematic crux actually has to do with a father figure and a filial one. Indirect, metaphorical disguises, as will also happen in Falstaff; only at the beginning of Citizen Kane (not surprisingly a debut, the film in which an author tends to put everything in) Welles explicitly recounted his childhood condition, as a boy traumatically abandoned by very different parents. But while his mother, lost at just nine years old, lent herself to being idealized, with the figure of his father, Orson had a relationship that was, to say the least, unresolved. At the age of six he witnessed the argument after which his parents separated, while his mother’s lover, Dr. Maurice Bernstein, became a sort of adoptive parent and, at the same time, dad Welles’ worst enemy. Who slowly let himself go, sinking into alcoholism.
Orson has repeatedly claimed to feel responsible for his father’s death, which occurred when he was fifteen; the medical report concerns illnesses linked to alcoholism but Welles foreshadowed a suicide attempt which would have been prompted by his refusal to see him in the last six months. A conduct which, although dictated by the attempt to curb the parent’s alcoholism, he has always considered inexcusable. Nor could the use of psychoanalysis have rid him of the sense of guilt. As he told Barbara Leaming, “I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it.”
All of Welles’ films focus on the theme of betrayal but Masquerade would have been the only one to clearly apply it to the relationship between a father and a son, more explicitly than in Falstaff, stirring up his deepest anguish. “The loss of his father was irremediable,” wrote Simon Callow, “a shattering blow. Having never really had him, he searched for him all his days, sometimes trying to be him, sometimes trying to create an image of him that would absolve the disappointment of the past.” In Masquerade, it is clear that Welles, as an actor, would have reserved the role of the son, close to him first of all in age (in 1951 he was thirty-six years old), but it is easy to recognize him also in the character of the father, an elderly tycoon as charming and impulsive as Charles Foster Kane, and like the real Welles, determined to keep his traumas. “I won’t be analyzed!”, Hamsun shouts at a certain point. “All the experts have been here one time or another, and when they come back to report they all start in analysing everything, and ’specially me.” A point reiterated when the scientist Knoedler recites the words of Job after reading the suicide note: “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh, up, and is cut down, like a flower. He fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay…” He utters these words not because he is religious – specifies the surgeon – but to respect the wishes of the deceased “quoting the Bible instead of Freud.”
It is a passionate, surprising, complex screenplay. Being a director like Welles, it is impossible to imagine in what style and changes it would have been made if a far-sighted producer had stepped forward, and if Gisella Sofio’s grandmother had said yes. Masquerade remains above all the (unrealized) film in which Welles lays himself most bare, in his anguished family traumas and in relation to his religious beliefs, two topics about which he chose to reveal as little as possible during his lifetime.
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