Orson Welles: Hello Americans (48 page)

Now, in 1945, he was developing a film with a rather elaborate provenance: based on a story by Victor Trivas, drawn from original material by Decla Dunning and Philip MacDonald, it had been written for the screen, under the title
Date with Destiny
, by Anthony Veiller and John
Huston. Huston, like Welles, had regularly availed himself of the facilities of Spiegel’s fun palace on Hollywood Boulevard, and had already collaborated with him on an unrealised version of the play
Russian Life
; as a serving officer at the front, he could neither direct
The Stranger
(as
Date with Destiny
had become) nor even accept a writing credit. Spiegel had already cast Welles in the central
role of Charles Rankin and now – when Welles asked him point-blank – invited him to direct the film too, under certain very stringent conditions, the most critical of which was that the final cut rested with Spiegel. In fact, Welles was quite familiar with this condition; only on
Citizen Kane
had he had final cut. The financial deal was reasonable, even generous, in itself ($2,000 for each of
the eight weeks of the shoot, plus $100,000), but it came with a requirement to indemnify any losses in case of failure to complete the film; in any dispute, Welles agreed to submit to the studio’s will. Moreover, Spiegel also demanded a guarantee to that effect from Rita Hayworth, which she duly gave. These conditions were imposed by William Goetz and Leo Spitz, who created the Haig Corporation specifically
to finance 70 per cent of
the
negative cost of the film. It is reasonable to assume that Bill Goetz, who had produced
Jane Eyre
and had regarded casting Welles in
Tomorrow Is Forever
as an enormous coup, was instrumental in his appointment as director, but neither he nor Spiegel was going to allow Welles the slightest opportunity for self-indulgence.

But Welles had no intention of indulging himself.
In later life he dismissed
The Stranger
as his attempt to prove to Hollywood that he could make a mainstream film under budget and on time, which was no doubt true, but at first he was genuinely enthusiastic about the project. The subject matter had much to recommend it to him, from both a political and an emotional point of view. Rankin, the central character, is not what he seems – always a
favourite figure in Welles’s work: he is in fact the disguised mastermind of Hitler’s concentration camps, Franz Kindler, biding his time in a small town in Connecticut before resuming the struggle for world-domination or total annihilation. Nazi resurgence was something of a preoccupation of Welles’s for many years to come, and his newspaper columns were frequently devoted to the danger it represented.
The degree of his input into the script has never been clearly determined, though it seems almost certain that he must have been responsible for the speeches in which Rankin/Kindler analyses the nature of the Nazi quest, so familiar are they in theme and cadence to Welles’s own speeches, articles and columns.

In fact, as with every film Welles made in Hollywood after
Citizen Kane
, it is difficult
to judge his contribution to
The Stranger
with absolute precision, since none of them was released, or indeed exists today, in exactly the form in which he made them. The screenplay lost thirty-two pages – over an hour of screen time on the usual calculation of two minutes per page – even before filming began, this service being helpfully provided by Spiegel’s nominated editor, the veteran Ernest
Nims. Welles managed to assemble a couple of his old associates behind the camera: Perry Ferguson, who had been responsible for
kane
’s sets (though they are credited to Van Nest Polglase), was the designer; and the cinematographer was Russell Metty, who had shot
kane
’s very witty trailer (and, incidentally, and rather less wittily, some of the reshoots on
The Magnificent Ambersons
). Welles tried
to get Bernard Herrmann to write the music for him, but he and his wife had just had a second child and were reluctant to come out west; instead Bronislaw Kaper churned out an all-purpose high-romantic suspense score (though he must be forgiven much for invariably referring to the film as
The S. T Ranger
, in a droll reference to the producer’s alias).

In front of the camera was a group of actors
with none of whom Welles had ever worked before, which was not his ideal situation. Not one of them was his first choice. Wholesome, naive Loretta Young, playing Rankin’s wife Mary, was under contract to Goetz’s Universal Studios and came with the deal; Edward G. Robinson as the Nazi-hunter Wilson was Spiegel’s idea. Welles argued bootlessly to persuade the producer that it would be much more
interesting to turn the character into a woman, to be played by Agnes Moorehead, but Spiegel never took this suggestion seriously. Welles satisfied his taste for Edwardian acting by asking Philip Merivale (the original Colonel Pickering in
Pygmalion
, and the first actor to play the part of Higgins in America) to play Judge Longstreet, Mary’s father, meanwhile indulging his passion for vaudevillians
by creating a role for the comedian Billy House as Potter, the owner of the town’s soda fountain, the hub of its communal life. Despite the relatively poor opportunities for the high spirits in which he preferred to work, Welles set about making the film with a will, and despite the physical problems involved in erecting a 124-foot tower (claimed at the time to be the tallest set ever made for
a film, though surely
Ben-Hur
and
Intolerance
must have been larger) and re-creating a Connecticut town on the Universal lot, the film was comfortably completed in its allotted thirty-five days over eight weeks. The discipline he brought to the process is symbolised by his personal discipline in losing some twenty pounds in weight, though this owed more to regular amphetamine injections than to
abstemiousness.

The film as we have it is unlike anything Welles had made so far, though as a narrative it has something in common with
Journey into Fear
. But where that odd gallimaufry, with its cast of Mercury regulars and its striking textures and quirky camera moves, was all Wellesian style and no substance,
The Stranger
is more formally melodramatic, building through an increasingly tense
action to a bravura climax that owes a great deal to the Victorian theatre. The acting, particularly in the cases of Robinson and Young, is mainstream Hollywood: linear, text-bound, existing within a narrow compass emotionally and expressively; this was perhaps inevitable in view of the uncommonly stilted dialogue (realising that her newly wed husband is indeed a Nazi psychopath who has just nearly
murdered her brother, Young screams, ‘It was I you intended to kill!’ ‘No!’ roars Welles. ‘Why wasn’t it I?’ she ripostes, stamping her foot, ‘
Franz Kindler!!!
’). Welles himself gives a performance in a very different vein, one of great intensity (his unaccustomed
slimness
adds to the neurotic charge), but without the psychological verisimilitude that might have lent credibility to what, as written,
is essentially an operatic figure, tormented, hysterical, deceitful, visionary, murderous. He goes hell for leather for a characterisation which, set to music by Verdi or even Wagner, would have brought the house down, but in a film designed to give troubling reality to the still-present threat of Nazism, it stretches belief: a child of three would spot that something was seriously untoward.
Every potential threat to his cover is indicated by heavy breathing, whitened knuckles, popped eyes; whenever he goes into the forest to kill a man or to commune with his dog’s corpse, he sheds his suave exterior, his hair becomes not so much dishevelled as longer, rougher, sweatier as he hunkers down to breathe heavily and Hunnishly. This sort of behaviour, de rigueur in Nibelheim and its environs,
seems disproportionate in Harper, Connecticut, or indeed anywhere else in the wider world in 1946. It offers an interesting preview of Welles’s performance in
Macbeth
, and is, needless to say, utterly compelling, but it is neither convincing nor in any way affecting – one is not touched, or scared, or appalled by the man. One just watches a performance desperately in search of a context. His expressive
repertoire is essentially formulaic, a sequence of coded gestures, like kabuki or what we know of the Elizabethan theatre: in the realistic universe provided for the film by Welles the director, Welles the actor seems simply stylised. As for the movie itself, it is (as it now stands) curiously unsatisfying as a narrative, largely because of lacunae in both story and relationships caused
by the cuts imposed by the producers; the effect is immensely plotty, both complicated and illogical.

After opening titles over a sixteenth-century German Gothic clock at the top of the bell tower in Harper, Connecticut (how it got there is never explained), and a first scene in which Edward G. Robinson is established as a Nazi-hunter (Wilson), there is a highly evocative sequence in which a
character called Meineke (Konstantin Shayne, a very Wellesian actor both in nervous energy and expressiveness of physiognomy) is released from prison in the hope that he will lead them to his old boss, Franz Kindler. This is exactly what he does, travelling between the continents by ship to find him, while Wilson, at a discreet distance, tracks him. The cinematography of this sequence is composed
in shadows and sudden lights, not unlike Struss’s approach to
Journey into Fear
, but even more like Metty’s own inspired work for Welles on
Touch of Evil
more than ten years later. As soon as we – and Meineke, with
Wilson
in hot pursuit – arrive in Harper (a beautifully designed set, little used, apart from the gigantic bell tower, which compulsively draws the eye to itself, presaging the climax
that inevitably ensues), the camerawork becomes as conventional as the acting. Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young) is casually introduced into the action – on the day of her wedding to Rankin/Kindler – when Meineke comes to her house in quest of her fiancé. He’s not there, so Meineke swiftly goes off to find him, stopping Welles in his tracks to eye-popping effect shortly after we have seen him chatting
to the schoolboys he teaches (Welles introduces a few charming
hommages
to Todd, his old school; even the notice on the gym door is signed ‘Coach Roskie’, Welles’s – rather under-employed, one imagines – sports master when he was there). Meineke comes to him, he says, with a message from the All-Highest, who turns out to be, not der Führer, but God, so Rankin/Kindler takes him to the forest and
kills him, then rushes back home to get married. Shortly after the wedding, Wilson is invited to supper; during a discussion about the future of Germany, Rankin, after cowering a bit like a cornered dog, makes an eloquent, purportedly critical, speech about how Germans will never give up till they have found their new Messiah – who will be, he says, another Barbarossa. ‘All Germans aren’t like that,’
pipes up Mary’s young brother, Noah. ‘What about Karl Marx?’ ‘Marx wasn’t a German, he was a Jew,’ – says Rankin quickly, too quickly, and this remark lodges in Wilson’s mind, convincing him that Rankin must be Kindler.

Thereafter Wilson slowly stalks him, enlisting the help of Noah, while making enquiries about town, trying to locate the missing Meineke. Rankin meanwhile confesses to Mary that
he saw Meineke on the day of their wedding: Meineke was trying to blackmail him over an accidental homicide from his old student days. Rankin gave him all the money he had, he tells her, and the blackmailer disappeared. Soon afterwards Meineke’s body is discovered, and Rankin now admits to Mary that he killed him: what else could he do? Mary, terrified, stays loyal to him, even after Wilson and
her father (old Judge Longstreet) have shown her footage of the death-camps, and told her that her husband is in fact Franz Kindler. Rankin knows that he must now get rid of Mary, too, and devises a plot to kill her, sawing through the rungs of the ladder to the bell tower and sending for her, while he creates an alibi – and gives the film some tension – by playing checkers with Billy House in the
soda fountain. Rankin returns home and is shocked to find Mary there: her old maid, told not
to
let her leave the house under any circumstances, has feigned a heart attack, and so Mary has asked Noah to go to the tower for her, which he does, accompanied by Wilson; both have a narrow escape. When Rankin realises what has happened, and that he has probably been responsible for Noah’s death, he
screams at Mary, smashing his grandfather clock in a sequence that recalls Charles Foster Kane’s impotent fury when Susan Alexander leaves: there is real danger and rage here, an emotion that Welles seemed effortlessly able to summon up. Quite why he should be so remorse-stricken at the thought that he might have killed Noah, when he unequivocally intended to kill Mary, is unexplained.

By now,
Wilson and the family are knocking the door down, and Rankin makes a swift retreat. Night falls, and Mary sleeps. She is troubled, however, and rises somnambulistically from her bed, picking up a box and throwing a coat over her nightgown, and heads through the cemetery for the bell tower. She climbs to the top, where she finds Rankin in full Hunnish mode: shaggy, longhaired, unshaven, pointing
a gun at her. She tells him that she’s come to kill him. Soon they’re joined by Wilson, who confronts him with his past. ‘I followed orders, I did my duty,’ he says, wild-eyed, as Mary shoots him in the shoulder. Finally he staggers out onto the parapet; the mechanism of the clock springs to life as he scampers round to safety; suddenly turning, he is impaled on the sword of the Teutonic knight who
is circling Satan round the clock, and he and the knight fall 124 feet to the ground. The breathtaking brilliance of the staging of this piece of Grand Guignol is bizarrely undercut by Wilson’s jaunty last line to Mary as she descends the stairs leading from the tower: ‘Sweet dreams!’ he chortles. Kaper’s music – strings, horns, piano arpeggios – swells headily:
THE END
, says the final caption.
Indeed.

Kaper’s music is blatantly incongruous, purveying a curiously inappropriate swirling romanticism in flat contradiction to the theme and tone of the film. The question of tone is one that hovers over a great many of Welles’s films, always excepting
Citizen Kane
and largely excepting
The Magnificent Ambersons
. It is not coincidental that those two films were scored by Bernard Herrmann,
whose music (as well as having uniquely atmospheric properties) was always solidly based in formal structure, integrating the elements and lending the film a powerful sense of unity. It is easy to mock Kaper’s workman-like score; the problem is that its excitable lyricism spreads a layer of monosodium glutamate over the whole film, and Welles’s genius for detail, for tension, for atmosphere, is diffused
and
diluted. The use of sound, so potent in both
Kane
and
Ambersons
– where Herrmann so well understood when to shut up, recognising the power of silence punctuated, perhaps, by a clock or a sleigh-bell or the whirr of an engine – is negligible here. A question almost impossible to answer at this distance, and in the absence of letters or memoranda, is whether Welles willingly acceded to the corny
music and the absence of a sound score, or whether he was overruled. Whichever it was, it shows a tragic indifference to his great strengths as a film-maker. Not that either score, musical or sonic, represents the greatest problem with
The Stranger
as it stands, but they do administer the
coup de grâce
. The truth, once again, is that the film Welles actually shot was infinitely more interesting
and ambitious than the one posing under the same name and now widely available in a spanking new print. Whether it would have been, in the last analysis, a better film we can never know, but it is almost a relief to know that Welles’s originality and imagination had not deserted him completely, which is the inevitable conclusion after a viewing of
The Stranger
as it was released. Thanks to the
diligent labours of that tireless Welles sleuth, Bret Wood, it is now possible to discern the film that might have been; what he has uncovered reveals a framework that not only enhances the narrative, but suggests the mind of an artist at work.