By RAY KELLY

Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles —  one of the 20th century’s most celebrated writers and the other one of its finest filmmakers — enjoyed what the latter described as “a very strange relationship.”

In a 1974 television interview, Welles recalled how they clashed in 1937 during the making of  the documentary The Spanish Earth, which Hemingway co-wrote and Welles narrated. They subsequently developed, according to Welles, a friendship that was renewed at several points in the years before Hemingway’s death in 1961.

Author Matthew Asprey Gear (At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City) probed that “strange relationship” and the influence Hemingway had on Welles’ projects in “Three Dangerous Summers: Orson Welles’s Unrealized Hemingway Trilogy,”  It was recently published in The Hemingway Review.

Those “dangerous summers” included the posthumously completed The Other Side of the Wind and the unproduced Sacred Beasts and Crazy Weather. Gear was kind enough to discuss his research with Wellesnet.

What attracted you to exploring the influence Hemingway had on various Welles projects?

It really goes back to 2014 when I was researching the Welles archives at the University of Michigan. I saw how extensively Welles had attempted to make creative use of Hemingway’s life and legacy in various unrealized projects of the 1960s and 70s. At the time it was a largely invisible aspect of Welles’s work, although Josh Karp’s 2015 book on The Other Side of the Wind would soon open the conversation.

A few years later I was in Ronda in the south of Spain to visit the resting place of Welles’s ashes on the ranch owned by his friend Antonio Ordóñez, the famous bullfighter. Bronze monuments to Hemingway and Welles stand outside the plaza de toros in town. Certainly both of these romantic American expatriates were aficionados – both were prominent Anglophone explicators of Spanish folk culture — but it wasn’t evident that Welles actually disliked Hemingway’s popularization of the ‘mystique’ of the bullfighter and found his afición essentially voyeuristic, sadistic, and ‘second-hand’. But here they were immortalized as statues, and their interpretative disagreements on the matter of bullfighting were now basically obscure. Welles’s writings on the subject were mostly hidden away in archives.

So I decided to write an article that would trace Welles’s critical engagement with Hemingway in various screenplays and unfinished films. I would also try to coax an appraisal of their divergent views on the bullring, the setting of their larger arguments over masculinity. In the summer of 2018 I was able to pursue research at the Welles archive in Turin, Italy, thanks to a fellowship from the Ernest Hemingway Society. The posthumously completed Other Side of the Wind handily appeared on Netflix the same year. Nevertheless, I felt that critics addressed Hemingway’s influence on the film in very superficial ways.

More generally, this new article is another installment in a series of studies I’ve made of Welles’ creative responses to various writers. In the cases of Joseph Conrad, Booth Tarkington, and Graham Greene, Welles adapted their novels into screenplays and found a way to blend his own worldview with theirs. At other times he was more adversarial with his literary sources. Adapting Kafka’s Trial, Welles reworked the material to accommodate a post-Holocaust take on power and guilt in the 20th century.

Hemingway is a slightly different case, because Welles did not directly adapt any of his stories for film (although there was a radio version of A Farewell to Arms). And yet the first unproduced incarnation of The Sacred Beasts sounds like it would have been a kind of unofficial dramatization of Hemingway’s Dangerous Summer articles that appeared in Life magazine in 1960. It would also have been highly critical. The worldviews of Welles and Hemingway are very far apart.

You mentioned the two men had “locked horns” over years. What was the relationship like between the two?

Welles claimed they were great friends, although I’m skeptical. They had intermittent contact across more than twenty years, and their relationship seems to have been marked on both sides by wariness, mockery, and occasional outright contempt – but they also had relatively friendly encounters.

They were very different men. From the beginning Welles ridiculed Hemingway’s macho attitude and knee-jerk homophobia. In later years, particularly after Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, Welles was evidently fascinated by the underside of his outwardly macho behavior – the unacknowledged mental illness, the fascination with death, the alcoholism masquerading as good living, and what Welles appears to have suspected to be the sadistic homoeroticism of some of Hemingway’s male friendships, particularly the one with Antonio Ordóñez.

There are three Welles projects you link to Hemingway —  Sacred Beasts, The Other Side of the Wind and Crazy Weather. How does each tie to Hemingway?

On the most basic level, you find explicit references to the writer in the materials for each project. Welles speaks of the proto-Jake Hannaford character in his on-camera Sacred Beast pitch as a “pseudo-Hemingway.” A character in The Other Side of the Wind calls Hannaford “the Ernest Hemingway of the cinema,” and although in the film Hannaford and Hemingway exist in the same universe, Hannaford absorbs many of the writer’s biographical details and traits. Crazy Weather focuses on an American bullfighting aficionado named Jim Forster, somebody whose understanding of masculinity, women, and Spain has been too narrowly shaped by Hemingway’s writings.

You have studied the existing notes, drafts and scripts for Sacred Beasts and The Other Side of the Wind. Can you compare and contrast the two stories?

I have not studied any documents that I can explicitly identify as Sacred Beasts script material. I’m not sure much survives. Nicolas Ciccone wrote an excellent article for Wellesnet about fragments of a mid-1960s draft of the screenplay he recovered in the Michigan archive. This seems to have been an early version of the Wind story set on the French Riviera, without the film-within-the-film component.

My main source of information about The Sacred Beasts was Orson Welles in Spain, the Maysles Brothers documentary shot in 1966. At that early stage the project’s setting was Spain and bullfighting was a key aspect of the story. It would have focused on the “voyeurism” and “emotional parasitism” of a group of jet-set bullfighting aficionados led by the pseudo-Hemingway movie director. Welles felt contempt for such people. He did not exclude his own enthusiasm for bullfighting from interrogation, however, and later said he had come to “suspect my afición.”

This early conception of the film seems to me essentially a fictionalized version of Hemingway’s Dangerous Summer of 1959, when the writer was accompanying Ordóñez from corrida to corrida, playing up to the press as a kind of self-caricature, and trailing his own jet-setting entourage of sycophants such as A. E. Hotchner. Welles caught up with Hemingway, probably for the last time, in Paris in October of that year. He later remembered that Hemingway had started to talk about suicide in an obsessive way during their last meetings. By then he was a very sick man. According to Peter Viertel, Welles was unimpressed by the Dangerous Summer articles when they appeared in 1960. He found them excessive in their bias toward Ordóñez and full of disingenuous commentary. And this was notwithstanding Welles’s own enthusiasm for their mutual friend Ordóñez.

By removing almost all of the Spanish and bullfighting elements when he began shooting Wind, Welles was able to distance Hannaford from the most obviously biographical Hemingway details.

Little has been written about Crazy Weather. What was its central theme?

Crazy Weather follows a couple—the American Jim Foster and his Spanish wife Amparo—driving a convertible to a summer fiesta in an unidentified provincial town in Spain. On the highway Amparo accidentally hits a young man (‘the Boy’) and supposedly injures his hip. The Fosters agree to drive the Boy to his destination. This deceptive young man exploits existing tensions between husband and wife. His agenda seems less the seduction of Amparo than the provocation of Jim’s machismo. He sabotages the car. The Boy’s behavior nearly leads to a fist fight with Jim.

Jim and Amparo drive on to the fiesta alone, argue, and separate for the afternoon. Amid the town’s bustle, Amparo meets the Boy again. Later, suspecting his wife of infidelity, Jim picks up a young German backpacker. We’re never really sure if either partner has been unfaithful.

Crazy Weather sets up a generational clash of sensibilities: amoral transnational youth versus a comically antiquated, Hemingway-inspired code of American masculinity. The story sketches a new, dynamic Spain in the waning years of Franco. The triangular plot in some ways resembles Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1959).

The archives preserve an incomplete treatment (plus a few scripted scenes that seem intended to appear towards the end of the film) written in collaboration with Oja Kodar in France in 1973. According to Kodar, it began as a story she was writing. That same year Welles and Kodar based another new script on another of her stories. The script is called variously Blind Window, House Party, Mercedes and, in a later revision, Mercy. I plan to publish a study of this unmade project in the future.

In addition to the US collections, you researched the collection in Turin. What did you find there that was unique?

I highlighted a few items in an article for Wellesnet not long after my visit – a play called Brittle Glory, and scripts for Treasure Island, an unproduced Jacob section intended for The Bible… in the Beginning, and Ivanka (an early version of The Big Brass Ring).
Turin also holds a wealth of documentation detailing Welles’s disastrous attempt to shoot Isak Dinesen’s The Heroine in Budapest in 1967. The producer was Alexander Paal. It’s an utterly fascinating story of broken promises, threatened blackmail, and midnight flits through gaps in the Iron Curtain. I hope Simon Callow tells it well in his next book.

 

 Matthew Asprey Gear is the author of At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles and the City (Columbia University Press, 2016). He also teaches an online course, The Other Side of the Shadow: A New Look at Orson Welles.

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