Two prevailing and diametrically opposed attitudes seem to dictate the way most people currently think about Orson Welles. One attitude, predominantly American, sees his life and career chiefly in terms of failure and regards the key question to be why he never lived up to his promise—”his promise” almost invariably being tied up with the achievement of Citizen Kane. Broadly speaking, this position can be compared to that of the investigative reporter Thompson’s editor in Citizen Kane, bent on finding a single formula for explaining a man’s life. The other attitude— less monolithic and less tied to any particular nationality, or to the expectations aroused by any single work—views his life and career more sympathetically as well as inquisitively; this position corresponds more closely to Thompson’s near the end of Kane when he says, “I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.
—Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Battle over Orson Welles, 1996 (Reprinted in Discovering Orson Welles).
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THE BATTLE OVER ORSON WELLES – ROUND TWO
By Lawrence French
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As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes throughout his recent book, Discovering Orson Welles, the old legends and outright lies that followed Welles around for the last years of his life die hard, even when many were so obviously false. In fact, despite the major strides made by Joseph McBride’s What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?, and Mr. Rosenbaum’s own book, many of the old Welles myths are prominently regurgitated in two error-ridden articles that appeared in national magazines this week.
First there is “The Player Kings” a long piece by Claudia Roth Pierpont in the November 19 issue of The New Yorker that contrasts the Shakespeare adaptations of Welles and Laurence Olivier. Secondly is a much shorter piece (as far as Welles is concerned), that compares Francis Ford Coppola to Welles in the December issue of Vanity Fair. Of course, The New Yorker is where Pauline Kael’s now thoroughly discredited piece “Raising Kane” first appeared, and following in that stellar tradition of excellence, we get a piece where facts are ignored to better suit the agenda of the writer. Actually, Ms. Pierpont appears to have done some research and read a couple of Welles biographies, including Simon Callow’s (where she apparently borrows most of her information). But unlike Mr. Callow, she fails to get the “facts” straight.
However, one thing she certainly can’t be accused of, is plagiarizing either Joseph McBride’s or Jonathan Rosenbaum’s recent books on Welles. She clearly hasn’t read either one.
First, here is the official New Yorker press release on the article, which notes that Sir Laurence had many successes in Shakespeare, while Welles had many failures.
How the Rivalry of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier Made Shakespeare Modern
In “The Player Kings” (p. 70), Claudia Roth Pierpont looks back on the parallel careers of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier, “the twentieth century’s two greatest dramatic illusionists.” Pierpont writes that the two actors “had more in common and, ultimately, had more effect on each other’s work—as friendly, if occasionally cutthroat, competitors; as reinventors of Shakespeare for a modern audience—than has been noted even in the mountains of books that each has inspired. . . Growing up an ocean apart, they had emerged independently, in the mid-thirties, as the biggest theatre personalities and Shakespeare revolutionaries of the age.” Pierpont traces their twin oeuvres through decades of successes and, in Welles’s case, failures as they attempted to bring Shakespeare to the screen—from Olivier’s celebrated “Henry V” through Welles’s neglected late masterpiece “Chimes at Midnight.” In the process, they tackled many of Shakespeare’s titanic roles, including Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Richard III, in projects that seemed to feed into each other even as the two men endeavored to upstage each other.
Here are the last two paragraphs of the article:
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The rise of this looser aesthetic has been a boon to Welles’s reputation. In the nineteen-eighties, “Macbeth” was restored to his original version, and in the following decade “Othello” was restored to a version superior to the original, in terms of sound—just when many English-speaking critics were coming around to the idea that technical flaws it were part of his works “raffish” charm. Yet, while books and seminars on Welles today abound ad nauseam, the audience for his Shakespeare trilogy remains small. Although “Macbeth” and “Othello” are available on DVD, neither has received the deluxe treatment awarded to Olivier’s Shakespeare films, to “Citizen Kane,” or, for that matter, to Welles’s unfinished botch of a film, “Mr. Arkadin.” “Chimes at Midnight,” caught in a legal wrangle, has not been shown theatrically in this country since its initial failure, nor has it been released here on DVD. In recent years, Roger Ebert has campaigned for its release (“How can it be that there is an the Orson Welles masterpiece that remains all but unseen?”), and scenes have started showing up on YouTube, which may help bring it back to light at last. Welles, who considered “Chimes” his finest work—”If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that’s the one I would offer up”—ruefully told of a Hollywood producer who, during Welles’s later years, inquired if he had ever thought of playing Falstaff.
By then, he was famous for being grotesquely fat, for appearing on talk shows, for selling cheap wine on TV. But he was famous most of all as the man who had got everything he wanted, and then—as a reporter says of Charles Foster Kane— lost it. The more often “Citizen Kane” showed up on lists as the best movie ever made, the steeper his descent appeared. By now, Welles’s monumental failure is as ingrained in the notion of who he was as the sound of his voice, even though “Othello” and “Chimes at Midnight” are more humanly rich achievements than “Kane,” and among the greatest Shakespeare movies ever made. Welles admitted to “thousands” of regrets, but he did not offer blame for the way things turned out: he did not care to look back at all. The real masterpiece was always the movie waiting to be made. Like Olivier, Welles kept on working to the end. He died of a heart attack, at seventy, in 1985, apparently in his sleep. He was found the next morning with a typewriter balanced on his belly. He had been working on the script for his latest project, a video version of “Julius Caesar” in which he was to play every role. His plans for filming “King Lear” were also well under way.
Ms. Pierpont takes the usual cheap shots about Welles, noting in later years he was “famous for being grotesquely fat, for appearing on talk shows, for selling cheap wine on TV,” and offers up many other dubious opinions, such as the ridiculous assumption that “Othello was restored to a version superior to the original, in terms of sound.”
How anyone could prefer the “restored” sound is simply beyond my comprehension, given how badly it was botched by the team of “restoration experts.” Quite remarkably, their work made errors that weren’t even in the original soundtrack! Now, for instance, we get to see several scenes featuring actors mouthing lines without dialogue coming from their lips—most memorably Iago speaking without sound before Othello’s ship lands. And in one astounding instance of the sound editor’s incompetence, we see Cassio mouthing lines spoken by Michael MacLiammoir, which are supposed to be spoken by Iago. On top of this, many actors readings of text have been altered from Welles intended versions. To better match the actors lip-sync, the sound editor simply snipped out a few of Shakespeare’s words. I guess that is what is meant by a “looser aesthetic” that has been such a boon to Welles reputation.
However, as dubious as these opinions are, they are open to debate. It is on the basis of simple facts concerning Welles career that Ms. Pierpont shows her shocking ignorance. Below are just a few of the corrections to the factual errors in her piece (that probably many reading this already know) and that are contained in just the last two paragraphs of her long article. I can only imagine what kind of misstatements the Laurence Olivier half of the piece contains.
* Macbeth is NOT currently available on DVD in America.
* Although Mr. Arkadin was not edited by Welles, it was certainly “finished” and released by its producer, just as The Stranger, The Lady From Shanghai and Touch of Evil were finished and released, but not in versions edited by Welles.
* Chimes at Midnight certainly was shown theatrically after it’s debut in 1967. In fact, throughout the seventies it played in revival cinemas in many major America cities. In New York it frequently played at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, where I first saw it in 1978, and it was even listed in the movie revival pages of The New Yorker. And when Chimes opened at The Little Carnegie theatre in March of 1967, it played for several weeks, not closing almost simultaneously as when it opened, as Ms. Pierpont exaggerates.
* According to Ms. Pierpont, “Welles was famous most of all as the man who had got everything he wanted, and then—as a reporter says of Charles Foster Kane— lost it.” This is a truly bizarre observation. What is the mysterious “everything Welles wanted?” Are we to assume it was final cut on his movies, which he lost after Citizen Kane? If so, Welles didn’t lose it, since he had it on all the independently financed movies he completed after Touch of Evil in 1958. This would include The Trial, Chimes at Midnight, The Immortal Story, F For Fake and Filming Othello.
* Unless Ms. Pierpont spoke to Welles’ driver Freddie, or Paul Stewart (and heard stories markedly different than what they told Gary Graver and Oja Kodar), Welles typewriter was certainly not balanced on his belly when he died, but was on a nearby table. But as Oja Kodar told me “writers and even Orson’s friends were throwing a fake light on Orson. If it makes a great story, why not continue with it. It didn’t matter if it hurt Orson or not. If it makes a great story, keep on telling it.”
* Welles plans for King Lear were not “well under way,” but in fact had collapsed in May of 1985 when the French ministry of culture withdrew its support for the project.
Saving the best for last, here is a real gem from earlier in the article:
“None of the era’s big directors, not even the ones who subsequently worked with (Gregg) Toland—William Wyler, Howard Hawks, George Cukor—seemed to regard Welles’s achievement (on Citizen Kane) as a serious model. The only exception, working far from Hollywood, was Laurence Olivier.”
Oh, really? No big Hollywood director was influenced by Citizen Kane? ” I’m sure this will be big news to any first year film student, and certainly anyone familiar with the work of director George Cukor, since Mr. Cukor not only never worked with Gregg Toland, but also candidly admitted the influence Citizen Kane had on his camera style for both Keeper of the Flame and Gaslight when I spoke to him in 1981.