By MIKE TEAL
“Travel was always Orson’s addiction. Also his education.” – Roger Hill
Around the World With Orson Welles has just been released on a very sharp looking Blu-ray and DVD, for the first time with all six episodes. In addition, it contains, the 2006 reconstruction documentary “The Dominici Affair,” which utilizes footage from the seventh, unfinished episode, “The Tragedy of Lurs.”
This series, done with Associated-Rediffusion for Britain’s ITV in 1955, does not have a very significant place in Welles’s career, and Welles rarely mentioned it, basically dismissing it as not much more then vacation home movies. In fact, the six completed episodes represent only about a quarter of what Welles was originally contracted to provide, and to consider those six episodes to be Welles films is questionable, since they were completed by others.
Still, they are each Welles creations, at least in part, and touch on some of the major themes that ran throughout his oeuvre, though without most of the visual and sonic razzle-dazzle of the theatrical films. Like the BBC’s Orson Welles’ Sketch Book series, this is Welles “unplugged,” so to speak, although occasionally one can see some of the quirky editing rhythms favored by Welles in the films.
Here is what viewers can expect from the seven installments on b2mp Blu-ray and DVD set:
Basques
The fact that the series as a whole is a bit of a mess becomes apparent in the first two episodes, dedicated to the Basque region, that enigmatic no-man’s land between France and Spain. Welles created enough material for about an episode and a half, and so to fill out the second episode, ten to fifteen minutes of scenes are repeated from the first! One of these days, some Welles non-purist should try and concatenate them into one 40-minute film.
Welles reports that smuggling, and whaling were both dreamed up by Basques. This provides allusions to both Mr. Arkadin, where Guy Van Stratton is a smuggler, and Moby Dick Rehearsed, both of which were done by Welles around the time this series was created. The Bull fireworks (Toro de Fuego) at the end recall “Bonito the Bull” and anticipate the first incarnation of The Other Side of the Wind. National Borders, which Welles criticized as far back as his Commentary radio show from the forties, remind us of the sketchbook episode on the Police, and Welles uses part of the program to celebrate their elimination for one day each year (Pentecost).
For much of his television work, Welles seems to have a liking for what might be called “creative conversation”, obviously doctored later, as in Filming Othello, and The Orson Welles Show, the failed talk show pilot from the late 1970s. This is in some ways analogous to the technique of “creative geography”, found in several of Welles’ later, independant films, like Othello. In his conversation with the female author, he opines about how childhood has been made too soft by technology in America, and contrasts that to the tougher, more natural and self-sufficient lifestyle of the Basques. We see fisherman as in “Four Men on a Raft”, and sheepherders, as in Don Quixote. This is another of Welles’ many tributes to a simple, pre-industrial style of living. Welles even compares the Basque people to Native Americans.
Revisiting Vienna
In this episode newly rediscovered by Ray Langstone, we touch on a few locations used in the famous Third Man film, and also see Anton Karras playing his zither. But Welles doesn’t dwell on this celebrated past success, and quickly goes off in other, lesser known directions related to the great Austrian city. For example, Welles, a lifelong opera fan, notes how Opera is very important to Viennese, and tells a funny Lohengrin swan story. This harkens back to the second Basque episode, where Welles was introduced to the Handball-like Basque sport of Pelotte, and noted how the score was sung in operatic fashion instead of spoken.
The main bulk of the Vienna program is given over to cafe society, with it’s coffee houses and magnificent Viennese pastries, like the famous Sachertorte. Welles uses this ostensibly lighter subject to sneak in more serious discussion of how coffee houses were where artists and students exchanged ideas about politics. With the Cold War, politics in Vienna had lost it’s potency, and so had coffee houses goes the reasoning. Also interesting is how Welles unabashedly allows his camera to be seen in the mirror while interviewing a lady coffee shop owner, who bears an interesting resemblance to Baroness Nagle in Mr Arkadin.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés
This is another episode that was padded out with stock footage of Art Buchwald and other celebrities. Welles’s contribution is a lengthy interview with the ex-patriot sculptor Raymond Duncan, brother of the famous dancer, Isadore Duncan. Welles puts himself in the same position as Thomson, the reporter in Citizen Kane, and most of the interview is seen over his shoulder. Duncan relates his feeling that independence is the greatest thing in the world, and that people should not need what they cannot make.
Duncan was interested in Greek things and thought the true American spirit of independence and individuality was being overtaken by a spirit of conformism. Duncan by contrast, says never do what what everybody else does, never be ordinary or common. To do what everybody does is to imitate them. He wanted to teach Americans how to be American, and to show them that the value of a thing is not in having it, but in having made it. Welles obviously recognized a kindred spirit in Duncan.
Once again, cafe society is extolled as Arkadin music is heard. Paris sidewalk cafés, like the ones from Vienna, hear ideas from all over the world, but unlike the more conservative, Mozart-filled cafes of Vienna, are more implicitly socialist, and with more emphasis on flamenco dancing and jazz. Shots of Welles looking on and observing look like the same shots from the Basque episodes, and were probably inserted by someone else later.
At the end, Welles puts in word for train and other types of old-fashioned travel, like boats, etc., and implies that the wonderful thrill of making a journey is being lost to some extent in the age of air travel.
Chelsea Pensioners
With indigent old age comes a loss of individuality in state institutions. Welles interviews several old widows who live in assisted housing, and then several retired soldiers living on a government pension. The interview with the widows is funny and charming while the one with the soldiers is rather dreary, but both seem to be intended as a contrast to the the attitude of facelessness and disposeability America has towards it’s elderly poor. This may be a case of Welles revisiting one of the central ideas from his original version of The Magnificent Ambersons, which showed Aunt Fanny rotting away at the end in an overcrowded boarding house.
Bullfighting
At least half of this episode is hosted by Kenneth Tynan and his wife instead of Welles. Welles comes on somewhere in the middle and makes what seems like an extended cameo in his own show. However, both the Tynans and Welles offer some interesting points and descriptions of what an actual bullfight is like and what it means. Welles again touches on the opera theme when he describes a bullfight as a “tragedy in three acts”, and Tynan provides an interesting metaphor of the bullfight as symbolic of the struggle between men and women. All in all, one of the most entertaining, although messiest, of the episodes.
The Dominici Affair
The footage from this unfinished episode is embedded in a documentary that gives background on the case as well as how the episode came to be left unfinished. The famous triple murder case remains controversial to this day, but Welles apparently was convinced that water, or the lack of it, played a central role in the slayings. An indigent and isolated old farmer/sheepherder protecting his pitiful, arid land from encroachment by strangers was apparently the cause of the crime in Welles’s view. In a strange way, this is reminiscent of the man-ape sequence at the beginning of Kubrick’s 2001, where two tribes are fighting and killing each other over a small watering hole. This would no doubt have appealed to Welles’s notion of protecting one’s turf as a small scale example or metaphor for nationalism, the ultimate in the idea of the “territorial imparative.”
This new DVD / Blu-ray of Around the World With Orson Welles is worth getting and an example of what a Welles project looks like when completed by others. This would put it in the same category as Jess Franco’s Don Quixote de Orson Welles, the It’s All True documentary from 1993, and (hopefully) the upcoming completion of The Other Side of the Wind. Some purists may not agree, but to my mind, Welles completed by others is better then no Welles at all.
A similar set is available in Europe from BFI.
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