Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“ROSEBUD – The Story of Orson Welles” by David
Thomson (first published in 1996); “DESPITE THE SYSTEM – Orson Welles Versus
the Hollywood Studios” by Clinton Heylin (first published in 2005)
Over four years
ago on this blog I wrote a pair of think-pieces about the writing of
biographies. They were called Why Writea New Biography? and The Toil ofBiography, and they express views that I would still defend. One of my main
contentions was that, if a genuine biography of somebody has already been
written, there is little point in writing a new biography of that person unless
real new material has come to light or unless the biographer wishes to give a
radically new interpretation of the subject’s life. I am talking here, of
course, about scholarly and well-researched biographies. I know that most
“biographies” on publishers’ lists are rip-off jobs, compiled largely from
secondary sources, and are not worth serious consideration.
I set off on
this line of thinking once again when I looked along my shelves and saw that I
had a number of biographies of Orson Welles, which I have read in the past two
decades. My thirty years of film-reviewing mean that I have shelves devoted to
film and film-makers. That includes analyses of Orson Welles’ movies, beginning
with Joseph McBride’s handy little study Orson
Welles (first published in 1972 when Welles was still alive); and The Citizen Kane Book (first published
in 1971, ditto), which includes the full shooting script and continuity cutting
script of Citizen Kane; but which
also includes Pauline Kael’s iconoclastic essay “Raising Kane”. This essay still
makes Welles-worshippers go ballistic and burst blood vessels, because Kael
argued that the whole conception of Welles’ masterpiece was more the work of
the main scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz than of Welles himself. (The argument
about this still rages. It is something akin to the argument about John Fuegi’s
excellent Brecht and Co, which
revealed how much of “Bertolt Brecht’s” plays were written by his
collaborators.)
I am not talking
here about these studies of Welles’ films, however. I am talking about biographies
of Welles.
David Thomson’s Rosebud – The Story of Orson Welles
(1996) and Clinton Heylin’s Despite the
System – Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios (2005) argue
diametrically opposed views about Welles, and as such they earn their place as
biographies worth writing.
Let me clear the
ground here a little.
The more
hagiographic view of Welles is that his genius was wilfully destroyed by the
Hollywood system, and that therefore his potential career as a great film
director was thwarted. The young 25-year-old Wunderkind comes to Hollywood
after staging his exciting and innovative stage productions, and after scaring
New York with his radio version of H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds. He directs his great masterpiece Citizen Kane. But the film makes him
enemies and the studio bosses gang up against him. His second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, is mutilated
by the studio’s re-editing. He is reduced to cheaper productions, vilified by
the press and eventually forced out of America by Hollywood’s refusal to
recognise genius when it sees it. He makes the rest of his career in Europe,
scrimping and scrounging for the budgets of films he really wants to make.
Often he does this by taking acting jobs in films he doesn’t really like. Only
once, almost by accident, does he again get to direct a film in Hollywood, and
it’s a goodie – the last real noir, Touch
of Evil. Despite this, going his own way in Europe, he manages to direct
some good films. Told thus, the story of Welles becomes the exemplary tale of a
crass, commercial film system bearing down on a great creative talent. Welles
as sacrificial victim in the cause of Art.
The
counter-narrative is radically different. I have never yet read a writer who
does not concede that Welles was genuinely talented and that some of his films
are outstanding. But the counter-narrative points out that Welles was as much
charlatan as genius, and that much of his bad luck was of his own making. True,
having as his debut feature film a thinly-disguised portrait of William
Randolph Hearst was always going to make him enemies. [See posting on The Chief, a biography of Hearst]. But
when working in the Hollywood system, Welles wilfully antagonised people he
didn’t need to antagonise. This included people who worked on his films. He was
notoriously bad with budgets, fought with many of the actors under his
direction and often squandered money he had been given on things other than his
films. He always relied far more on collaborators than he ever let on. Many of
his projects remained unfinished basically because his attention span was short
and he couldn’t be bothered completing what he had begun. If he didn’t make it
in Hollywood, it says as much about the good business sense of the studio
bosses as it says about Welles’ inability to fit in. As for the notion of crass
Hollywood failing to accommodate genius – what about those really great
directors (Hitchcock, Ford, Lang etc.) who, despite frequent differences with
studio bosses, nevertheless managed to make great films within the system?
Welles spiked his own career. And as an actor he was an awful ham.
That is the
battlefield of views about Welles – the genius beaten by the system or the guy
who wrecked his own chances.
David Thomson’s Rosebud – The Story of Orson Welles is
essentially the case for the prosecution. When I made notes about it in my reading
diary, I summarised it thus: This book comes close to being a de-bunking of
Welles’ life by one who is a rather disillusioned former admirer. Thomson
clearly admires Welles’ best movies – Citizen
Kane, Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight. Thomson’s basic
theses are that Welles was a great theatrical improviser who worked best in the
spirit of a magician or a conman putting one over an audience; but that unfortunately
he was very undisciplined and easily bored. This meant that his improvisations
entailed changing scripts unnecessarily, wilfully wasting budgets and generally
alienating casts and driving friends away. He might have been at his best in
the innovative stage productions he did as a very young man in the 1930s. Unfortunately
they are now irrecoverable, so we have to rely on hearsay and old reviews to
guess if they were any good, and there is the strong possibility that they
would now be seen as overblown, ranty and pretentious. With regard to his Hollywood
career, Thomson says, Welles generally engineered his own destruction, and was
treated much better by studios and Hollywood professionals than Welles’
partisans have ever allowed. He was a better adaptor of other people’s scripts
than an original writer of his own (thank you, Herman Mankiewicz). Despite some
innovative techniques in his work, Welles’ outlook tended to be very conservative,
involving an elegiac tone even before he’d reached 40. Citizen Kane says goodbye to a style of journalism that was already
dying when the film was made. The
Magnificent Ambersons farewells a social caste that had disappeared before
the First World War. And thus it continues until Welles sounds his “chimes at
midnight”. His attitude to women in his films is retrograde. They are mainly
the passive playthings of male characters (victimised Dorothy Comingore in Citizen Kane; fetishized Rita Hayworth
in The Lady from Shanghai; terrorised
damsel-in-distress Janet Leigh in Touch
of Evil). According to Thomson, most of Welles’ unfinished projects were
unfinished because Welles preferred it that way. There is a great autobiographical
element in all Welles’ work, good and bad. Thomson makes it clear that though,
when young, he had his male admirers, Welles was not homosexual. He was a
voracious, and easily bored, womaniser when young; and when old, a lousy father
to the three children he’d had by three separate wives. But most of his films
centre on the “betrayal” of one man by another, and his youthful relationship
with collaborator John Houseman does have odd undertones. Welles’ own behaviour
was that of an overgrown spoilt child who didn’t like other children getting
the attention. Welles was often a fraud in the way he would claim much greater
knowledge and experience than he ever really had. And – excluding the few
really good ones – most of the films he produced outside the studio system were
lamentably bad.
So much for the
case for the prosecution.
As you might
expect, Clinton Heylin’s Despite the
System – Orson Welles versus the Hollywood Studios is very much (and very
stridently) the case for the defence. Specifically answering Thomson and others
who have been less than worshipful of Welles, Heylin advances the theory that
Welles was a genius who bore the creative burden of living up to his own
genius. Going carefully through studio memos, drafts of scripts, and letters
and quarrels with studio personnel, Heylin does show the extent to which Welles
really was messed about by Hollywood and how much some people really did have
it in for him. In Heylin’s eyes, Welles’ years in Europe really were creative,
and his unfinished projects were unfinished, not because he lacked creative
energy but because, in most cases, he was not able to sustain the interest of
backers.
I should add, by
the way, that I have
So where do I
stand on these diverse opinions of the director and actor? I appreciate how
careful Heylin is in the defence of Welles and his diligence in hunting out
evidence of Welles’ victimization. He is also right to call out Thomson and
others on errors of fact they have committed. Even so, I tend now more to
Thomson’s view. The best part of forty years ago, I remember writing a lengthy
appreciation of Citizen Kane, ahead
of a television screening of the film, for the old (defunct) Auckland Star. I mooted the idea that it
was the greatest film ever made. Later I used the film in media studies
classes. I once showed Welles’ “voodoo” version of Macbeth to a class studying Shakespeare’s tragedy (they weren’t
impressed). I like Touch of Evil,
with Welles’ character amply illustrating the Marlene Dietrich character’s
comment “Honey, you’re a mess!” And –
as far as I can remember it from a viewing long ago – Chimes at Midnight, Welles’ Falstaff film, is pretty good. There
are also some arresting performances by Welles in films directed by other
people – Mr Rochester in the 1944 version of Jane Eyre, but especially Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s and Graham
Greene’s The Third Man. It may be the
image of Welles in this film that sticks most in the greater public’s mind.
The rest of
Welles’ film career, however, is a train wreck. His version of Kafka’s The Trial is okay at best. It may be the
fault of the studio that took it out of his hands, but The Magnificent Ambersons is magnificent only in fragments. A film
like The Stranger is as
undistinguished as any comparable thriller – neither particularly good nor
particularly bad. But if I wished to really punish somebody, I would make him
or her sit through Welles-directed rubbish like Mr Arkadin, The Immortal
Story and the slapdash documentary F
for Fake. And for sheer ham, it would be hard to beat the overblown
performances Welles gave in most of the films that weren’t his.
I simply do not
believe that this was a genius bubbling with ideas. I believe this was a very
talented man who went to pieces outside the studio system that could have
supported and sustained him by giving him some of the discipline that he badly
lacked. A pity, of course but, unless we are interested only in gossip, do we
not judge artists by the art they actually produce, as opposed to what their
admirers think they could have
produced?
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