(Editor’s note: We are pleased to present noted film historian and author Joseph McBride’s firsthand account of the recent Orson Welles symposium at the Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona).

By JOSEPH McBRIDE

“Surreal” was a word I and several other participants in the Barcelona Orson Welles symposium used to describe the experience of watching a restored print of his masterpiece, Chimes at Midnight/Campanadas a medianoche (1964-66), in the Spanish church where about thirty minutes of the film was shot. As the scenes in the royal court unrolled onscreen June 5, with John Gielgud chillingly majestic as the dying King Henry IV and Keith Baxter brilliantly mercurial as his son, Prince Hal (later Henry V), we found our eyes moving back and forth from the film being projected above the steps and platform used for the shooting to that atmospheric location around us. Sometimes we glanced between Baxter onscreen and Baxter sitting in the front row with Chris Welles Feder, the director’s firstborn daughter, the two stars of this memorable four-day symposium.

Both were deeply moved by the experience of seeing the film at the Cardona Castle, first constructed as a fortress in 866 by a Catalan count of Barcelona, Wilfred the Hairy. As usual with a film location, the church seemed smaller than it appears onscreen, where the richly textured lighting of Edmond Richard and Welles’s camera magic make it appear even grander. Welles also built the old king’s bedroom in part of the church, though with his characteristic inventiveness he filmed the insert of Baxter picking the crown off the floor on tiles placed in his own apartment.

The Cardona event was masterfully run by Esteve Riambau, the director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya in Barcelona and author of four books on Welles, including a new one on Chimes, Las Cosas Que Hemos Visto: Welles y Falstaff (Things We Have Seen: Welles and Falstaff). Riambau told me he had dreamed for years of staging this bus trip with the participants to the ancient village of Cardona, sixty miles from Barcelona. And he said afterward that the adventure was exactly what he hoped it would be. That probably is one reason Esteve seemed so preternaturally serene and relaxed while conducting the symposium (with the able logistical help of his associate Aurora Moreno).

It was also surreal for me to go so abruptly from participating in May’s Welles tribute in his hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin, to Spain, where he not only made his chef d’oeuvre but also had a home in Madrid in the 1950s and ’60s and loved more than any other country. All of us who had the privilege of going on the trip to Cardona can testify that it was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. I had gone to London’s Westminster Abbey in 2006 to see the entombed mortal remains of the fabled Prince Hal/Henry V, who died in 1422 at the age of thirty-five. And when I first saw Chimes in a Chicago theater in March 1967, little could I have imagined I would be visiting the Cardona Castle locations in the company of Prince Hal.

I took the Greyhound Bus to Chicago to see the film three times in one night at a theater, the Town Underground, that was being changed back shortly thereafter to a softcore porno house. As I write in my book Orson Welles, “I remember how the grizzled old winos who made up much of the audience [along with intellectuals from the University of Chicago] reveled in Falstaff’s humor, not fazed by the Elizabethan language; if Welles’s film could please these groundlings, it could have pleased anybody, I felt at the time, but it was not to be.” I knew this great film was getting shamefully poor distribution in the U.S. and worried that I might never see it again. That was in the days before DVDs and Blu-rays. Now, with the legal problems that have kept Chimes off theater and home screens for years being resolved and the partially decaying negative having been restored in Barcelona, we are finally getting renewed theatrical, archival, and home video releases of this great Shakespearean film in the U.K., the U.S., and elsewhere; now it is being given the attention that it deserves. The restoration of Chimes we watched in the church looked close to the original prints, even better than a version I had seen in January at New York’s Film Forum, although the sound quality could not be judged because of the acoustics in the ancient hall, whose visual ambience more than compensated for that problem.

Chimes was one of several Welles films to get special screenings at the June 2-5 symposium in Spain, Orson Welles, a multidisciplinary artist. The others included The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai, Macbeth, and The Trial. Stefan Drössler, the head of the Munich Film Museum, presented programs of some of the Welles rarities housed at the museum, including his ingenious partial restoration of the unfinished 1960s feature The Deep. He also gave a fascinating presentation (much of it with information new to me) about Welles in Germany. It emerged that Welles’s passionate attacks on neo-Nazism and other concerns about the possible renewal of fascism in Germany made him acutely unpopular there in the 1950s and beyond, making it impossible even for him to get a hotel room in Munich while he was filming on location for Mr. Arkadin. One of Drössler’s discoveries (from Belgium) was an audio recording of part of Welles’s introduction of what the archivist called a “strange” 1950 theatrical potpourri Welles put on in Germany of parts of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Shakespeare’s Henry VI, a magic act by Welles, songs by Eartha Kitt, and the director’s own condensed version of Faust, entitled Time Runs.

I had the honor and pleasure of joining Chris Welles Feder for a Barcelona program we called “Portrait of Orson Welles.” She expertly “directed” the event by suggesting we interview each other with questions we wrote and shared in advance, to best give the program its personal insights, since she is one of the few people around today who knew the young Orson, and I came to know him well in the latter part of his life. She shared many warm and insightful stories about her father as a young man on the set of Macbeth (in which she plays Macduff’s son) and on location for The Lady from Shanghai (in which she played an American tourist but wound up on the cutting room floor, whether by his doing or Columbia’s). Chris observed her father’s immense vitality and energy and sense of command while directing Shanghai on location in Acapulco, and his dizzying ability to line up multiple scenes simultaneously while carrying off his virtuosic filming of Macbeth as a Republic Studios quickie. Chris recalled riding with him to the studio each day in his limousine during the Macbeth shoot, with him mostly absorbed in his script and sketches, disappointing her with his neglect of her presence.

Her account of her father’s long absences from her life, mixed with times of great happiness together, and the pain it caused her to see him only intermittently over the years makes her 2009 book In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles a melancholy as well as beautifully sketched portrait. Her ability to forgive and understand him shines through the book and also touched the audience in Barcelona, who found her a captivating and wise storyteller. Among the riveting stories she told was of her father’s lecture to her about the importance of transcending the racist environment she was forced to inhabit in South Africa as a girl when her mother (Welles’s first wife, Virginia Nicolson) moved there with her third husband, a reactionary British Army veteran. Chris has always regarded her father as the humane, progressive touchstone for her own mature moral and political values.

I thanked Chris on behalf of all of us Wellesians for generously emerging from her private life to share her memories of her father for the past ten years at festivals and in her memoir. One of her many admirable qualities is how she has managed to establish her own independent identity, including as a writer and editor of educational works, while not being swamped by her father’s celebrity as so many children of movie people are by their parents. Although she admitted to the audience that she now wants to go back to being “just Chris,” we hope she also will continue sharing her inspiring memories and thoughts with us.

For my part, I recounted to the Filmoteca audience my Walter Mittyish experience of becoming a character in a Welles film (the comically gauche young film critic and historian Mister Pister in The Other Side of the Wind) even while in the process of writing the first of my three books on Welles. I told how I had experienced both kindness and bullying from Welles, to keep me in character over the six years of filming (1970-76, while I grew from twenty-three to twenty-eight), and how that heady experience, my “true film school,” has informed my scholarship. I cited Henry James’s advice that a biographer should be both a participant and an observer; the challenge is finding a fair balance between both roles, as I have always tried to do. And I spent some time at the Filmoteca trying to correct some of the still-persistent myths about Welles. One point, which Chris and other participants who knew Welles personally eagerly seconded, was that his great sense of humor rarely comes across in screen portrayals of the filmmaker, when in fact everyone who worked with him was massively entertained, so much so that one’s face actually hurt after a long day of work with him. Welles loved actors, thought they were the most important people in films, and made a point of telling stories and jokes on set and even singing songs from his appearances in musicals at the Todd School for Boys, especially Finesse the Queen.

I also corrected the strange myth (prevalent more in America than elsewhere) that Welles was lazy and often inactive, pointing out that the chronology of his life and career by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Welles-Peter Bodgdanovich interview book This Is Orson Welles runs 131 pages, enough for ten lifetimes of an ordinary artist. I recalled how Welles would work eighteen hours a day with his mostly young crew on Other Wind and his cast of various ages; Welles always seemed the liveliest and most creatively incandescent person around. As for the myth that he tended to abandon films (unfortunately repeated as a central focus of the new French documentary by Elisabeth Kapnist, Orson Welles, Autopsie d’une legende/Orson Welles, Shadows and Light, in which I appear), I noted that each unfinished Welles project has its own sad reasons for incompletion (proving what Jean Renoir says as Octave in The Rules of the Game, “On this earth there is one thing that’s terrible – it’s that everyone has his reasons”).

I mentioned that in the course of my rather dizzying recent travels to talk about Welles during his centenary year, someone observed to me that such other great directors as Stanley Kubrick and David Lean also had numerous unfinished projects, but because they worked with large budgets, their abortive “films” exist only as scripts and notes and drawings (some since published). And Welles, the guerrilla filmmaker, would actually put as much of his projects on film before he could be stopped by financial or other problems bedeviling an artist working in an expensive popular medium. That is much to his glory rather than to his discredit.

The other major star of the Spanish festivities was the eloquent and dashing Welsh actor Keith Baxter, who had first played Prince Hal for Welles in his 1960 stage version of Chimes in Belfast and Dublin and repeated the role onscreen. Baxter said he owes his whole long and distinguished career to Welles, since he had been working as a dishwasher when Welles cast him at a one-day London audition. Once, on a Madrid location for the film version, Baxter took a coffee to Margaret Rutherford when she was sitting under a bush. He asked her if she was cold, and she said, “Oh no! Working with him is like walking where there is always sunshine.” I told Baxter I consider his Prince Hal one of the two greatest (non-Welles) performances in Welles’s film work, alongside Agnes Moorehead’s harrowing Aunt Fanny in The Magnificent Ambersons. Baxter modestly noted that there are brilliant performances in Chimes by other actors, notably Sir John Gielgud as well as Rutherford.

I was fortunate to have several good long talks with Keith, who is a marvelous raconteur with many sharp, amusing, and informative observations of the filming with Welles. Besides playing a major role, Keith also served as an all-purpose crew member and double for other actors (playing fourteen parts besides Hal). Keith told equally hilarious and insightful stories about Gielgud and other British acting giants he knew, including Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, as well as about his friend Tennessee Williams. Keith told the audience at the Cardona screening that his return there after fifty-one years was somewhat melancholy, since he felt the presence of many “ghosts,” especially those of Welles and Gielgud. Keith recalled that the filming of Chimes was filled with laughter, even while they did somber scenes, such as when he is helping his dying father onto the throne, seen from a camera high above them. When they each stumbled, Welles called out, “You’re like the Dolly Sisters!,” and Baxter and Gielgud cracked up when Welles called “Cut!” Baxter gave a gracious introduction to the screening along with Chris and our host, the alcalde (mayor) of Cardona, Ferran Estruch i Torrents, who also welcomed us at the city hall. Keith marvelled at how young the alcalde is (twenty-nine), only a little older than Prince Hal in the film.

Unfortunately I had to miss Keith’s talk with Frederick (Fritz) Mueller and Elena Jaumandreu, editors of Chimes, and Luciano Berriatúa, who restored the film in 2012 for the Filmoteca Española, because I was giving a presentation on Ambersons to an audience of students and faculty at Pompeu Fabra University’s School of Communication. My visit to Barcelona was sponsored by the U.S. Consulate General Barcelona as part of our State Department’s program to promote understanding of American cultural achievements. I told my host at the consulate, Elena Pujol, that it was gratifying that our government, which had helped persecute Welles politcally, now was helping honor this great artist overseas. Welles has always been more honored in Europe than in his native country. I saw evidence of that in the students at the university and their enthusiastic reaction to his work.

While the majority of them had seen Citizen Kane, about a fifth had seen Ambersons, and they were enthralled by the first part of the film I showed along with the film’s trailer and clips from Roger Ryan’s creative 1993 reconstruction of Welles’s original version. They seemed horrified by my accounts of how the film was butchered and pleased to learn that we Wellesians are trying in various ways to display traces of his original, much darker vision of the film, if not the full Welles cut itself (I told them of my plans to make a visit to Brazil soon to search for the lost print, however quixotic that quest may be). It was pleasing to see the excited and involved response of these students, for one of our most important jobs as Welles scholars is helping introduce his work to young people around the world. At the Filmoteca that same night, I showed the 1942 release version with the trailer and Roger’s clips, which I had earlier shown with equal success at the Film Forum and at Welles conferences at Bloomington, Indiana (with Roger participating), Woodstock, Illinois, and Kenosha.

As regrettably happens at any scholarly conference, the strictures of time and the inability to be in two places at once kept me from attending all the events in Barcelona. But other important programs, some of which I did attend, were presented by distinguished Welles scholars including François Thomas, Jean-Pierre Berthomé, Josep Maria Català, Richard France, and Carlos Tálaga.

One contentious note that came up in some of the discussions at the symposium was the future of The Oher Side of the Wind. With the current attempt to complete it actively underway — an attempt I consider the best chance the film has ever had to reach its audience – Chris and I and other participants in Barcelona expressed positive views of the film’s importance as Welles’s testament about his art and the film industry that often rejected him. We believe there is abundant material to complete a major, innovative, avant-garde feature film. But dissenting voices were heard at the symposium – Baxter’s and Drössler’s.

Baxter told us he had been tentatively cast in Welles’s earlier incarnation of the project, The Sacred Beasts, which he reported was then (1964) entitled Sacred Monsters or The Other Side of the Wind (the early use of that title may conflict with Oja Kodar’s claim to have come up with it later). The early abortive version, which Baxter calls “the better film that will never be made,” would have centered around a diabolical macho director (played by Welles himself) playing dangerous physical and psychological games during filming with his star (Anthony Perkins) and his potential replacement, a young bullfighter (an actual matador, Aurelio Ninez). Baxter, playing the screenwriter, is hired in the film because he wrote a play called The Matador (the director not realizing that is the name of the setting, a gay bar in Soho), and Jeanne Moreau, as a model who is the director’s lover, witness the director’s cruel machinations with increasing disenchantment and horror. Finally the Perkins character takes the Welles character on a fatal drive that for both men represents the culmination of suicidal despair. Baxter, who wrote a 1998 memoir entitled My Sentiments Exactly, has now written a fascinating article, “The Other Side of Pamplona,” on that abortive film project. And the 82-year-old Baxter continues his prolific work as a stage director.

Partly, perhaps, because of his disappointment that Welles did not make Sacred Monsters, Baxter watched Drössler’s presentation of his forty-minute compilation of Scenes from “The Other Side of the Wind” with what the actor later told the audience was dismay. He said he was “appalled” by it, particularly by the scenes of Kodar strolling around seminaked, which reminded him of a softcore porno film. Baxter said he found the scene with Lillli Palmer as a Dietrich-like friend of director Jake Hannaford (John Huston) much more compelling, since he considers Palmer a real star and more truly sexy. But much of the Drössler assembly is from the film-within-the-film made by Hannaford, which Welles told me was supposed to be a spoof of pretentiously bad filmmaking (read: Antonioni), although Kodar, who wrote and directed some of those scenes, evidently believes they comprise a genuine work of art. That is still a bone of contention among scholars and one of the vexing problems remaining to be sorted out by those completing the film.

Drössler – who declared several years ago at a Munich Film Museum event with me on Other Wind that he thinks the film should never come out, to which I strenuously objected – expressed skepticism in Barcelona that it will actually be completed. He suggested that people think twice before contributing to the Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign. Such disagreements even among devoted Wellesians show how difficult and unusual this project remains and how those of us who passionately defend it and hope for its completion will have to keep doing so despite all odds. I’ve always realized Other Wind will not be popular with some members of the audience who will find it too avant-garde and too unlike other Welles films. Those are among the qualities I value in it, for Welles was always experimenting and breaking daringly new artistic ground, which also caused his other films to have trouble on their first release.

Finally, on a lighter note, when we took a guided tour of Cardona locations, we stopped at a beauty salon whose exuberant blonde proprietress had done the wig for Marina Vlady in Chimes, a visit that reminded us of what a small army is involved in the making of even a relatively inexpensive ($800,000) period film. We also stopped in a small plaza between a church and a hotel. This was around the corner from a restaurant where the alcalde put on a feast for us; the establishment had catered the cast and crew meals when the film was on location half a century ago. Our guide explained that after the open-air lunch was finished each day during the filming, one of the picnic tables would be cleared so Welles could stretch out for a nap. After a suitable interlude, he would stir, rumble to get his voice up to speed, command, “Vamos!,” and everyone would scurry after him to resume the day’s shooting. Often during filming, when Welles needed someone to help him direct the Spanish extras in complicated maneuvers, he would deputize Baxter to lead the charge, telling the extras, “Follow Señor Baxter!,” “Follow Il Principe!,” or “Follow El Rey!” For us longtime members of what we call VISTOW (Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles), such affectionate reminscences of the great man at work in Spain recall his human side and remind us of why we remain so loyal to his memory and legacy – why we will always “Follow El Rey.”

***Joseph McBride is the author of seventeen books, including What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006),  and Orson Welles (1972; revised and expanded edition, 1996). He spent six years in the 1970s playing a film critic in Orson Welles’s legendary unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind.  McBride is a professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching film history and screenwriting since 2002.

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