At the End of the Street in the Shadow

Orson Welles and the City

Matthew Asprey Gear

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850902
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The films of Orson Welles inhabit the spaces of cities—from America's industrializing midland to its noirish borderlands, from Europe's medieval fortresses to its Kafkaesque labyrinths and postwar rubblescapes. His movies take us through dark streets to confront nightmarish struggles for power, the carnivalesque and bizarre, and the shadows and light of human character.

This ambitious new study explores Welles's vision of cities by following recurring themes across his work, including urban transformation, race relations and fascism, the utopian promise of cosmopolitanism, and romantic nostalgia for archaic forms of urban culture. It focuses on the personal and political foundation of Welles's cinematic cities—the way he invents urban spaces on film to serve his dramatic, thematic, and ideological purposes.

The book's critical scope draws on extensive research in international archives and builds on the work of previous scholars. Viewing Welles as a radical filmmaker whose innovative methods were only occasionally compatible with the commercial film industry, this volume examines the filmmaker's original vision for butchered films, such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Mr. Arkadin (1955), and considers many projects the filmmaker never completed—an immense "shadow oeuvre" ranging from unfinished and unreleased films to unrealized treatments and screenplays.

PAN-AMERICA

CHAPTER 4

DARKNESS AND FEAR

The Early Anti-fascist Thrillers

Aside from Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, most of Welles’s creative energies in Hollywood were devoted to contemporary political films about the American hemisphere. He attempted to interrogate the threat of fascism in a string of projects dating from 1939. Most never reached production.

Recurrent and politically significant settings of the Pan-American film projects include urban political frontiers (port cities and the border town) and the impoverished urban periphery (the shantytown). These are spaces of authoritarian control and social exclusion where fascist manoeuvers frequently burst to the surface. Welles would consistently develop experimental techniques to illustrate such manoeuvers.

Later in the 1940s, a number of Hollywood directors would pursue synoptic overviews of urban space, often in films shot on location on the theme of police investigation and surveillance, such as The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948) and Side Street (Anthony Mann, 1950).¹ Earlier in the decade, and through his perspective of anti-fascism, Welles had frequently pursued comprehensive visions of the total city. In this pursuit he attempted to synthesise the ambitions of the international ‘city symphony’ cycle of the silent era with Hollywood narrative filmmaking of the 1940s. He experimented with long and mobile shots that would track ambulatory characters, vehicles, and ritual human and animal processions through diverse passages of urban space. He conceived ambient sound schemes, planned intercutting between contrasting social spaces, and the integration of synoptic maps and architectural models into the mise-en-scène. In his early years at RKO (1939–1942) he had access to expensive studio sets, miniatures, matte paintings, and optical printing. As he shifted from studio-based to location-based filmmaking, Welles sketched and was sometimes able to implement innovative methods of transforming found urban spaces into cinematic spaces that expressed his ideological and personal vision. This programme reached its zenith in Touch of Evil, when he converted Venice Beach in Los Angeles into his fictional Texan-Mexican border town, ‘Los Robles’.

* * *

Welles’s first feature project under contract to RKO was an experimental and Americanised anti-fascist adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was never produced, despite extensive scripting and pre-production planning. Following Kane and Ambersons, he shot but was unable to finish It’s All True, a celebratory semi-documentary anthology intended as an emissary for President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. Although Welles rather dubiously disavowed any particular fondness for the thriller genre – “I can pretend no special interest or aptitude”² – the rest of his anti-fascist Pan-American film projects fall into that genre.

The Mercury production of Eric Ambler’s 1940 novel Journey into Fear was the first of these spy thrillers to reach cinemas, under Welles’s (partial) supervision. Of the other many Pan-American thrillers Welles developed at least until the end of the 1970s, only The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Touch of Evil were actually finished and released, and all three were travesties of the director’s editorial wishes. These three were later categorised as film noirs. Welles’s Pan-American and anti-fascist emphases in these three films were frequently blunted by studio interference. As the earlier, more Wellesian versions of these three films no longer exist (or were never finished), scholars have long found it fruitful to examine evidence of the director’s original conceptions in production documents. In fact, the long-term Pan-American strain of Welles’s oeuvre can only be comprehensively appraised with recourse to such scripts, treatments, correspondence, and pre-production art for both his produced and his unmade films. These documents contain sketches for innovative approaches to creating cinematic cities that did not find fruition in any of the commercially released films. Welles accrued masses of written texts during the sometimes permanent pre-production stage of a project. The surviving documents are, however, often fragmentary and occasionally of ambiguous authorship. In the early to mid-1940s, Welles commissioned writers such as Norman Foster, Paul Trivers, John Fante, Paul Elliot, Brainerd Duffield, Fletcher Markle, Les White and Bud Pearson to draft treatments and screenplays which would be the rough material for Welles’s rewrites and final revisions (as he had used Herman J. Mankiewicz’s preliminary drafts in the writing process of Citizen Kane).³ He had managed to stamp his personality on a vast turnover of weekly radio dramas by the same method. But these collaborations complicate Welles’s auteur status and demand a careful appraisal of the many surviving documents, which range from Welles’s own meticulously detailed and industry-standard ‘Revised Estimating Script’ for Heart of Darkness (“I did a very elaborate preparation for that, such as I’ve never done again – never could”⁴) to an uncredited, incomplete, hand-annotated draft adaptation of Michael Fessier’s novel Fully Dressed and In His Right Mind (1934). There are also drafts annotated with studio censorship guidelines, storyboards, and other types of production artwork.

The best approach is to contextualise these pre-production documents, by Welles’s own definition totally provisional, as best as possible within the known details of his creative process. From early on Welles showed no particular loyalty to conventional industry-standard screenplay formats and much interest in expanding the definition of screenwriting as a practice. During the making of the ‘Carnaval’ segment of It’s All True in 1942, he explained to RKO that he considered the ‘minutes’ of his detailed nightly discussions with research collaborators “the nearest thing we have to a script”. These minutes recorded the fruitful debates within the collaborative creative process, provided a clarifying recap of the segment’s thematic and structural evolution, and determined the logistical approach to realising new ideas on film, even if they were not comprehensible to everyone; the minutes “can mean little to anybody except ourselves”, stated Welles.⁵

* * *

Welles had already performed Heart of Darkness in a radio script by Howard Koch in 1938. For his own screenplay, he altered Conrad’s late nineteenth-century Congo setting to a contemporary unnamed ‘dark country’.⁶ Welles declared, “The film is frankly an attack on the Nazi system.”⁷ He intended to play both the American narrator, Marlow, and the object of his search in the jungle, the insane ivory agent Kurtz. In preparation Welles commissioned a comprehensive study of tribal anthropology,⁸ similar to the exhaustive research into Brazilian culture he would gather while making It’s All True.

Welles’s ‘Revised Estimating Script’ of Heart of Darkness is dated 30 November 1939, less than three months after Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. Following an introduction to the film’s unprecedented technique – a first-person method that will present the action almost entirely through the eyes, ears, and inner monologue of Marlow – the action proper begins in New York Harbor, a port setting that will turn up again in drafts of The Smiler with the Knife, Don’t Catch Me, The Lady from Shanghai, and The Cradle Will Rock. The city appears in long shot, “seen from the East River just at dusk”, followed by a “SERIES OF DISSOLVES showing the movement of traffic on the river”.⁹ We see Manhattan from afar against the sunset sky. Marlow narrates, “Further west – on the upper reaches – the place of the monstrous town marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in the sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.”¹⁰ Then we see a series of ‘lap dissolves’ to various places in the city at the very moment its lights illuminate: bridges over the Hudson and East Rivers, parkways, boulevards, and skyscrapers.

In his first Hollywood script, Welles brings his extensive radio experience to the task of attempting to revolutionise cinema sound. He makes notes for a now commonplace ambient use of fragmentary diegetic sound sources to help convey the city’s spatial distinctions:

As we move down the length of the Island, snatches of sound and music, the beginnings of life of the city at night, are heard on the sound track. In Central Park, snatches of jazz music is heard from the radios in the moving taxicabs. The sweet dinner music in the restaurants of the big hotels further West. The throb of tom-toms foreshadow the jungle music of the story to come. The lament of brasses, the gala noodling of big orchestras tuning up in concert halls and opera houses, and finally as the camera finds its way downtown below Broadway, the music freezes into an expression of the empty shopping district of the deserted Battery – the mournful muted clangor of the bell buoys out at sea, and the hoot of shipping.¹¹

Welles would sketch versions of this sound scheme for different projects throughout the years – most notably to accompany Touch of Evil’s long opening tracking shot through Los Robles ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Prelude: A Nuisance in a Factory | Hollywood: 1939–48, 1956–58
• Welles’s U.S.A.
• Pan-America
• Interlude: A Free Man Is Everywhere | Europe & Beyond: 1947–55, 1958–85
• Postwar Europe
• Immortal Stories
• Index