ALL’S WELLES THAT ENDS WELLES
Another book about Orson Welles? Why? With very good reason as it happens. Unlike most previous biographies, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles? by Joseph McBride focuses on the last fifteen years of the great director’s life, from his return to Hollywood in 1970 after a long exile in Europe, until his death. McBride is eminently suited to the task: author of a dozen books on cinema, he knew and worked with Welles, most notably on his last feature The Other Side of the Wind, acting and fulfilling other functions on that film’s chaotic five-year shoot.
At this point in the twenty-first century it may be necessary to explain Orson Welles to the non film buff, so here goes: By the time he was twenty-three, George Orson Welles was a New York theatre legend; at twenty-five he co-wrote and directed Citizen Kane, maybe the greatest film of all time; at thirty he was labeled politically subversive and hounded out of Hollywood. He spent the rest of his life struggling to make independent films, one of which, Chimes at Midnight is possibly the best Shakespeare film ever made. If none of the above sounds interesting, stop reading now. However, many of us are extremely interested in Welles, and in the inevitable question – how could such a dazzlingly career in theatre, radio and film come to such a premature end, and why?
The received impression of Welles’s later years, fostered by countless books and magazine articles, is of a sort of cinematic King Lear, rejected by his peers and reduced to playing cameo roles in the kind of historical epic he despised in order to finance his own projects. McBride tells a much more complex story, taking us back to the seeds of that decline, in the bigotry, racism and good old-fashioned right-wing paranoia of America in the thirties, and nowhere more than in Hollywood.
Welles’s New York theatre work was overtly political; his Julius Caesar was played in modern dress, Caesar a Fascist thug; his Macbeth featured an all-black cast; the musical The Cradle Will Rock climaxed with an interracial kiss. Welles and his productions soon came to the attention of the FBI, and when Hollywood came to call Welles’s disturbingly liberal reputation preceded him.
Hollywood was very much a company town in 1940; New York, with its left-wing theatricals and intellectuals, was looked on with suspicion. Welles immediately fell foul of this mindset. He was branded a communist, a negro-lover, and most unforgivable of all, a genius. Somebody once said that Hollywood loves talent but hates genius; that phrase could be Welles’s epitaph. He was never a communist, but the convenient label stuck in the conservative press, especially in the papers of the William Randolph Hearst empire. His response was to play a barely-disguised version of Hearst in Citizen Kane, which pretty much sealed his fate in America. Welles’s portrayal infuriated Hearst and he attempted to have the Kane negative destroyed. When that failed he banned all publicity for the film and threatened to expose the less-than-blameless private lives of key Hollywood figures. The film establishment panicked and gave Kane only a limited release, resulting in its box office failure; within a few years Welles’s Hollywood directing career was over. He left for Europe in 1947, just as the first HUAC hearings on communism in the film industry were held, escaping what would have undoubtedly been his blacklisting. The next twenty-three years found him in Europe until his permanent return to the States in 1970.
Unfortunately, Welles fared little better in the more enlightened political climate of Europe — he was plagued by financial problems, fighting a continual battle to get backing for his esoteric projects. Some of the blame for this has to be laid at his own door as other expatriate directors, notably Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin, achieved successful careers in Europe. McBride is clearer about this than many previous biographers, who rely heavily on the accepted view of Welles as the self-destructive genius who dug his own artistic grave. The self-destructiveness is there in McBride’s pages but he correctly apportions much of the blame to the indifference of the film communities of both continents.
McBride’s book was originally published in 2006, and is now re-released with additional material detailing new developments in Welles’s legacy, most importantly the 2018 release of his final film The Other Side of the Wind. The artistic and emotional heart of the book is McBride’s account of that film’s frequently tortured five-year shoot. First-hand descriptions by McBride and cinematographer Gary Graver (who practically gave his life to Welles’s later career), draw a vivid picture of Welles’s increasingly unorthodox working methods.
The Other Side of the Wind, finally released forty-three years after filming ended, makes a remarkable final chapter in Welles’s story. Filmed from 1970 to 1975, stylistically it belongs to the sixties, appropriately enough as “the sixties” as we know them lasted into the early seventies. Shooting on a shoestring budget under frequently appalling difficulties, Welles nevertheless attracted a strong cast, including Kane alumnus Paul Stewart, Mercedes McCambridge, Lilli Palmer, Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston. Huston plays Jake Hannaford, a Wellesian veteran director in decline. He’s attempting to revive his ailing career with an avant-garde movie, “the old guy trying to be with-it”, as one character puts it. In the process Welles settles more than a few scores, skewering dim-witted executives, super-macho American directors, pretentious European directors, hot-shot young filmmakers, and of course critics, specifically Pauline Kael, played to the hilt by Susan Strasberg.
At the time of Welles’s death fifteen years later, the film was still unfinished, only partially edited by Welles himself. It took another forty-three years, and the tenacity of McBride, Bogdanovich, and others for the film to be completed and released.
It’s ironic that Netflix, the network Hollywood has been as wary of as it was of Welles, made possible the release of his final statement on the industry. Netflix put up the six million dollars needed to free the film from its legal entanglements and to complete editing and post production.
The long delay may be a blessing in disguise; if The Other Side of the Wind had opened in 1975 it would most likely have been seen as “the old guy trying to be with-it”. Viewed from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century it’s both a period piece and surprisingly ahead of its time in its use of hand-held camera, frenetic cutting (not daunting to an audience raised on music videos) and its intercutting of 35mm, 16mm and video footage. The visually beautiful movie-within-a-movie, whatever Welles and Graver’s original intentions, now plays as a witty send-up of the trashier aspects of the Easy Rider school of filmmaking. And unconsciously or not, there’s more than a touch of Fellini in the party sequence with its self-important denizens of the film community.
McBride makes a convincing case that Welles stayed busy as a filmmaker for his last twenty years, deploring the glib “Orson Wells; what went wrong?” line. But unfortunately careers are judged by achievement not aspiration; if nothing went wrong, where are all the films? Why were they left unfinished? You can’t blame people for not knowing about a body of work that for all practical purposes doesn’t exist. McBride knows a lot about these later aborted projects because he had the privilege of knowing and working with Welles. The rest of us might be forgiven for wondering what went wrong.
But for anyone interested in film, and interested in Orson Welles, if you’ve never read a book about him or if you’ve read a dozen, this loving, clear-eyed memoir should be required reading.
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Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career
Updated Edition | University Press of Kentucky
Joseph McBride
Film Studies/Memoir
400 pages | 6.125 x 9.25 | 12 b/w photos
ISBN 978-0-8131-5237-0 | Paperback $29.95
available at Amazon
