Saturday Evening Movie Thread 09/07/2024 [TheJamesMadison]

Orson Welles

As a fan of the cinematic work of Orson Welles, I find myself in a certain precarious spot. There's been a brewing backlash against Welles, mostly centered around his most famous film, Citizen Kane, for more than fifty years. In 1962, it was the first time that the BFI Sight & Sound poll had listed Welles' freshman effort as the greatest film ever made. It held that distinction every decade through 2002 until the poll in 2012 when it was supplanted by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. For fifty years, the BFI, critics, and Welles' biggest, most vocal fans like Peter Bogdanovich heralded Citizen Kane as the accomplishment in cinema. Heck, here's William Friedkin talking about how his only film school was sitting in a theater and watching the film 8 times through in one sitting.

That's a set up for expectations gamery and overall backlash against critics.

Welles' biggest enemy has turned out to be his biggest fans. They have propped him up to such a degree that no film could ever match the expectations set before it. The general resistance to critical opinion that has developed slowly but steadily for the past several decades (just ask horror fans how critics have treated their favorite genre since the 70s), and you've got a recipe for, "The critics like it? Well, then I hate it."

And I think that's deeply unfair to Welles and his work. I come into this discussion and run through his films already a fan, having seen everything at least once before, and I know that I'm going to be hitting this resistance. So, in order to try and bridge the divide, I have to think about how I'm going to talk about Welles and his work, and I have come to this conclusion: I must resist hyperbole. I cannot speak in language that waxes poetic about how great and beautiful everything is. That will be designed to turn off people who are predisposed to resisting him just based on the metatextual fog that has surrounded him.

And I do that for one reason: I think Welles' movies are fun. They aren't art house cinema. They're not Tarkovsky or Bresson. They're closer to Hitchcock than anything else in more ways than one. It's just that Hitchcock understood mass appeal a whole lot better than Welles did.

Three Elements

Having gone through everything again, I came away from Welles work with three main elements that made him entertaining to watch. The first is his visual sense, the second is his strong command of story, and the third is his overall playfulness.

The Visual


This is where discussions by his fans tend to reside, the technical. Roger Ebert's very good audio commentary on the Citizen Kane home video release is almost all about how the tricks were done, how they were unique for the time, and why that's important. I mean, that's great and all, but if someone is watching these things and doesn't care about any of that, what does that matter? Well, I'm of the opinion that a film's visuals are and important part to the package, and a beautiful looking film is nothing to sneeze at.

And all of Welles' films are simply very good from a visual perspective. I'll bypass the examples from Kane and focus on later films. His main mode of using the camera was the long-take. He was very proud of one in particular from Macbeth that lasts almost an entire reel (more than ten minutes). What's interesting about it is twofold. Firstly, the only film that Welles storyboarded, preplanned visually, was Kane, something he had to do in order to get the studio to sign off on his unprecedented creative freedom (that they later regretted because of the feud with William Randolph Hearst). On every other film, he'd light the set, and then he'd figure out where to place his actors. When you imagine a more than ten minute long shot in a Shakespeare adaptation, the immediate thought to come to mind would be something static as people strut and fret from one side of the stage to the next, especially in the days before the invention of the Steadicam. Dollys were heavy, loud, and difficult to use, and Welles glides his camera back and forth on one for more than ten minutes, each stop of the camera putting his actors in new compositions with their surroundings, the exterior set of Dunsinane Castle.

His own personal favorite of all his efforts at long takes was in The Magnificent Ambersons, his second film, but it's hard to see that now since the studio cut up the film. There are these long takes with those roving cameras on dollies, and it's all done in this ornate house set with everyone dressed in these heavy, period clothes. His heart was in bringing the theater to the screen any way he could, and what was amazing was how cinematic he made it all.

Story


When Welles was working on Man in the Shadow as an actor, he was impressed with the writing by Albert Zugsmith, telling him that he wanted to direct one of his scripts. When Zugsmith showed him a pile, Welles asked for the worst one and two weeks to rewrite it himself, leading to the writer handing over his script of the adaptation of Whit Masterson's book, Badge of Evil. This, of course, became Touch of Evil, widely considered one of Welles' best films. He took a bad script from a moderately successful novel and turned it into this seedy noir thriller that failed to make any money but has stood the test of time as one of his most beloved films.

Why is that? How is that? I was reading the essay about Macbeth in the Olive release, and the author, Jonathan Rosenbaum, made a good observation that Welles was a certain combination of low-brow and high-brow, a combination that clashed with the more strictly middle-brow tastes of the era. His essay was, obviously, focusing on the Shakespeare adaptation, namely the high-brow source of Shakespeare (while noting it's previously low-brow status) against the rugged, primal setting that Welles had put it in. Touch of Evil is, I think, a prime example of that. His style is both deeply established in cinematic tradition, especially those stemming from German Expressionism, while also being almost extreme in effect, with these tortured angles on almost every shot. At the same time, the story itself is this combination of extremely seedy with implied rape, drugs, and murder all while there's this very-well drawn portrait of two men at it's center, Captain Quinlin and Vargas, who represents two sides of the same lawful coin.

The story itself is this twisting series of events as Quinlan finds his man responsible for the bombing that starts the film, plants evidence, and then has to cover his tracks as Vargas zeroes in on him. There is the inclusion of a Mexican crime boss who gets caught between the two, Vargas' wife who becomes a pawn, and even Marlena Dietrich in a largely excisable role as someone from Quinlin's past. The plot itself is twisty, but ultimately, at the film's core, it's a story of a man, and Welles never loses sight of that, grounding the audience in this seedy portrait of border-life with a great character while also giving us a character to root for in Vargas. Released maybe 10 years later, this could have been a hit at the box office. Released in the late 50s, no studio was really ready for it, and the audience wouldn't accept it. He released the right movie at the wrong time (never mind the fight with the studio over final cut).

Playfulness


This is where I have to bring in Hitchcock again. The combination of Welles' experimental edge and the fact that he always felt like a big kid in a box of toys while I watched his films reminded me of no one more than Alfred Hitchcock.

That ten minute long shot in Macbeth that includes dollying back and forth to keep actors in frame? Does it sound similar to Hitchcock's Rope? Well, Welles did it first. Macbeth came out in 1948, and Under Capricorn, the stylistic predecessor to Rope from Hitchcock, came out in 1949. This isn't an effort on my part to place Welles above Hitchcock in any way (I don't value originality in artists, all that much), but just to demonstrate that Welles and Hitchcock were experimenting in similar veins. As an aside, I think the dual tracks of experimentation in long-takes were simply coincidental since Welles was doing very long takes in The Magnificent Ambersons and Hitchcock had been doing similar things since he'd gotten over the growing pains of the sound era with movies like Murder!.

Another thing is the pair's efforts at playing the audience. The odd combination of low-brow and high-brow that marked Welles' work played less well with mass audiences than Hitchcock's understanding of time and place that kept things like murder clean in North by Northwest, but Welles' command of tension and suspense was no less accomplished than the Master of Suspense. The final reel of Othello is some of the tensest film I've seen as the titular Moor looms over his innocent wife in deep, dark shadows, all perfectly framed and executed through the edit in a manner that Hitchcock himself, I would not be surprised to find, would admire.

But it's not just tension. Something like The Lady from Shanghai ends with that famous sequence in the funhouse (that the studio forced him to cut to the bone) with mirrors multiplying characters as they face off in the finale of the noir's ghoulish premise. Chimes at Midnight combines five different Shakespeare plays (mostly just two, Henry IV in its two parts) into one film centered around his favorite character of Falstaff, mostly played with this light and infectious tone that just feels fun to me (it goes appropriately heavy in the final act as Falstaff meets his own tragic end, falling out of favor of the newly crowned Henry V).

He made three noirs, all of which are quite good as well, and those are just playgrounds for tense playfulness. His Shakespeare adaptations are freewheeling affairs. He loved to experiment. He was just fun.

Reputation


There's a great moment in Filming The Trial, an 80-minute long Q&A that Welles had imagined to become something else, when he's asked by a student from a film program in Southern California a question. These students are significantly snootier than Welles ever is, and the low point is when one of them asks him if he's frustrated that all of this "escapism" (the thing was filmed in the early 80s, so he's obviously referring to Star Wars) has supplanted "real" art at the cinemas.

Welles, as was his wont, cuts the kid off with perhaps a couple of words left in the question and announces, "I love escapism," before explaining how one of his earliest creative jobs was to write nonsense science fiction (Spider Women from Mars, he says), and that he's always enjoyed it.

This kid, while Welles was alive, was convinced that Welles was this snooty artiste who looked down on popular entertainment. Why would he think that? Because his films were never popular, and because his fans were all kind of snooty. Welles ended up being forced to deal with this perception of himself, and all he wanted to do was entertain. He was somewhat particular in terms of subjects that he chose (Shakespeare is almost never box office gold), and he was always being sideswiped by timing (The Magnificent Ambersons finishing just before Pearl Harbor was something like a death sentence for his vision of the film), but he was really just trying to entertain. He wanted to find ways to engage audiences with what resources he had, but what's interesting is that it never feels like he's chasing a trend.

He was always his own man in the face of all the adversities he faced professionally, and that just did not jive well with a studio system that really needed studio-men. The studios could tolerate individual talents with large egos if they brought in money (Wyler and Hitchcock are key examples), but Welles just couldn't connect with audiences the right way at the right time.

Legacy


And that leaves his legacy, largely formed by his own fans who hold him in such esteem that they end up repelling as many people as they attract. When Peter Bogdanovich, in his ascot and quasi-Connecticut accent, tells you that Welles is the greatest filmmaker ever, many people will just hear the messenger and not the message. When William Friedkin says that Citizen Kane changed his life, people are left wondering why the film didn't change theirs.

And I find myself caught in the middle, frustrated with everyone because his advocates are doing it wrong while those unfamiliar with his work are simply tuning him out because of something that's not his actual work. One thinks that Citizen Kane is the most overrated movie ever? That tells me nothing. You could still think it's great, just not, you know, Predator great. Which is fine, but the conversation isn't about the movie, it's about expectation. I just want to talk about the movie, and Welles' fans make it almost impossible to do that.

So, if I were to recommend the discovery of Welles, I'd suggest this: Start with his noirs. Start with Touch of Evil, The Stranger, and The Lady from Shanghai. These are the most generally entertaining films he made. They hit the most mass-appeal touchpoints, especially a few decades after their release, compared to the others. Then, having gotten through and, hopefully, enjoying those, go with his Shakespeare adaptations: Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight. That's more than half of his filmography right there.

Having enjoyed those, then you delve deeper and finally discover Citizen Kane alongside The Magnificent Ambersons, The Trial, and even F for Fake, his quasi-documentary/magic trick. If you want to go further, you can always then go into his unfinished work like Mr. Arkadin and The Other Side of the Wind, leaving The Immortal Story (the closest he came to making an Ingmar Bergman movie) for last.

I hope I can convince at least one person to discover and enjoy his work.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Alien: Romulus (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, meh. I don't hate it. It's not good, though. Not even close." [Theater]

The Stranger (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "The Stranger may be minor and less personalized Welles, but it's still Welles. He's playfully working within genre and doing it well." [Personal Collection]

The Lady from Shanghai (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a fun genre exercise given real flare by Welles the director." [Personal Collection]

Macbeth (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "Welles has always struck me first and foremost as a playful director, and here he goes for home runs of style in adapting a play he obviously loved. It's fun. It's got terror. It's got drama. It's got acting. It looks great. This is just good, old fashioned entertainment." [Personal Collection]

Othello (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's kind of an incredible achievement overall, especially with the backstory as part of the experience, making it kind of surprising that it works at all. But it's doesn't just work. It's a marked success, one of Welles' best films, and a supreme example of his ability to wring quality from distress." [Personal Collection]

Touch of Evil (Rating 4/4) Full Review "In terms of art, though, I think it's hard to argue with the results. When Welles had more control, the results were simply better." [Personal Collection]

Chimes at Midnight (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This film is filled with such warm humanity, with Welles' love of the subject, and Welles' talent on full display (including what may be his best performance), and I just fall into its groove and stay there. I really think this is the pinnacle of a very strong filmography." [Personal Collection]

F for Fake (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review ""It's pretty, but is it art?"" [Personal Collection]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 9/28, and it will talk about the films directed by Tony Scott.