Does anyone know if this had a longer running time originally? It really seems like it fades out in odd spots as though there were more to some scenes, and the characters seem like they are supposed to be doing more than we are shown. Maybe I'm wrong, but it's really short and seems like something is missing that's supposed to be in there.
shareread orson welle's book (with peter bogdonavitch) THIS IS ORSON WELLES, he talks about how it was chopped up and about how it was longer and in one scene a guy is talking after he's supposed to be dead... so it was way different till the BIGWIGS took hold... so not only were scenes cut but scenes were put into different order...
“So if Mother’s Earth, who impregnated her?”
It is very hard to understand how anybody could give credibility to Orson Welles in any reported statement by him discussing his work - especially quoted by Bogdanovich, who worships at the feet of anyone who is only half-way to being a movie icon. (Just read Bogdanovich's latest book, Who The Hell's In It, and note some of the jaw-dropping things he says about some of the people he managed to get an interview with as a young movie buff. He is utterly blinded by their fame. Bogdanovich is a mildly talented film-nut, a *beep* par excellence, who made two brilliant films probably by accident, then lost it - mainly, I suspect, because he was aping some of his inferiors). In any interview situation Orson would say anything whatever that would reflect, even indirectly, to his credit. Better yet, his devoted friends and supporters made (and still make) so many false claims on his behalf, that all Orson had to do was sit back, say nothing and let legend take its course. John Huston, his contemporary, never suffered the problems that Welle's suffered; neither did Hitchcock (Selznick and Rebecca apart), Kazan, Wyler, or the many other directors who were making meaningful pictures around that time. I believe that Welles secretly knew that he had little talent as a director and took any money he could lay his hands on to live the high-life, while all too many of his films remained unfinished. By continually blaming the money-men who gave him the money in the first place, Welles bamboozled a whole raft of supporters who simply refused to face the truth. Citzen Kane was full of invention and technical talent - mainly supplied by those around Welles, who did indeed have the genius to encourage them to break all the Hollywood-factory rules. The lovable old rogue could give great acting performance, given a strong director, but as a director himself, he just couldn't get it up.
> ...as a director himself, he just couldn't get it up.
It sounds like you haven't seen any of his other work. Your post reads like Pauline Kael's un-researched and unsupported "Raising Kane". Well, I suppose remarks like this can't do Welles any more harm now that he's dead.
--
Karl Morton IV
[email protected]
Dear Karl Morton IV
What I wrote about Welles was a string of facts, not suppositions or conjecture. I have only ever read Pauline Kael as a reviewer, and never about Welles. I have seen all too many of Welles' films and my judgement is based on my personal experience. That does not call for 'research'. If you found films like Confidential Report, The Lady From Shanghai, Touch of Evil, et al, the work of a major director, then you, like millions of others, must have been blinded by Welles' own carefully manipulated propaganda. As attested to by Graham Green himself, not to mention other creatives who worked on the film, Welles did not write his own material for The Third Man - in which he was brilliant - which he himself always claimed. In 1982, the distinguished film column in The Sunday Times said of him, "His talents now seem as deeply buried as a sixpence in a Christmas pudding." None of this means that Welles is not sorely missed - but only as a personality and particularly as an actor.
Mnk!
Then count me with the millions. All Welles' films have brilliant scenes even if the whole may be flawed. For the scenes themselves, they are worth the price of a ticket - Shanghai's mirror sequence, the opening scene in Touch, Chimes' depiction of Falstaff, in fact the unworldly feeling of a Welles' film. They are eerie, strange, uncomfortable. So, I have to respectfully disagree with you and place myself in the club of Welles' fans..of him as a Director.
sharePissant talk such as this will get you a better seat in heaven when you die and all the rest of us will bow to your greatness.
Nothing exists more beautifully than nothing.
Before i s**t-hammer your argument, i must acknowledge that you are correct to be suspicious of some things he, or anybody, says. All people tend to be self-promoters and therefore their statements should be investigated rather than accepted as fact. You are particularly correct in regards to Bogdanovich (though hes a better director than you suggest), who tends to worship his heroes to the point that he is incapable of criticism.
"John Huston, his contemporary, never suffered the problems that Welle's suffered; neither did Hitchcock (Selznick and Rebecca apart), Kazan, Wyler, or the many other directors who were making meaningful pictures around that time."
I cry bull****! This statement is wrong in a number of ways. One, it fails to mention the fact that directors like Kazan, Wyler and most others (Ford, Hawks, etc...) worked in an anonymous style that supported simple storytelling (the predominant American form). Hitchcock was more of a stylist, but his stories hide as simple entertainments. Welles' first two films on the other hand are NOT genre pictures, and they are deeply expressionistic. Both traits were rather unfashionable in those days... Welles refused to work anonymously (aside from The Stranger, which was commercially successful and allowed him to work again, until he reverted to his personal style.)
Furthermore, these filmmakers DID suffer from studio's recutting their films. John Huston, for example, had his film "The Red Badge of Courage" massacred by MGM. And Wyler worked under the thumb of Samuel Goldwyn (a vulgarian known for demanding control of his films - he even fired Howard Hawks once because he didnt think directors should be writers!). Hitchcock and others like Ford and Hawks became producer-directors for that very reason. They wanted control over their work.
"Citzen Kane was full of invention and technical talent - mainly supplied by those around Welles, who did indeed have the genius to encourage them to break all the Hollywood-factory rules."
One of the jobs of the director is to demand the best from your collaborators. If Welles did this brilliantly in Kane, how can you say he was a bad director?!! YOU ARE CONTRADICTING YOURSELF...
In any case, the inventions of Citizen Kane can be seen in later Welles' films, so Welles is far more than some guy who just sat back and his collaborators do their thing. The long take, deep-focus expressionism (all of his films are expressionistic - Welles was the filmmaker most aware of style as content) was developed even further in The Magnificent Ambersons (which was not shot by Gregg Toland!). Touch of Evil is a total conquest of film technique along those expressionistic lines. And the non-linear storytelling of Kane is central to Welles other works, especially Mr. Arkadin and F is For Fake. As he grew as a filmmaker, it even influenced his style, which is why his films as a director became more and more fragmentary in their editing style.
"I believe that Welles secretly knew that he had little talent as a director and took any money he could lay his hands on to live the high-life, while all too many of his films remained unfinished."
Its true that Welles left a number of unfinished films, but thats got nothing to do with a lack of talent. It's a lack or organization skills! Yes Welles liked to live well and indulge (which explains why he got so fat, and, like another American genius, Marlon Brando, destroyed himself physically because of his disenchantment with the film business), but that doesnt mean he was a fraud. He was a tireless worker, acting in sh***y movies to pay for the stuff Hollywood wouldnt finance. The fact that he was able to cobble together a few films at all is overwhelming!
Yes he could be reckless. But to paraphrase Kael the first casualty of the moviemaking obsession is judgement.
i agree with cgboy welles had an extraodinary vision of what film could communicate by its own intense visual style.welles could compose a frame as well as anyone his only draw back as an artist was his time period. the studio system was an obstacle as much as a facilitator of invention and change and only someone of welles genius could have succeeded as much as he did.i think otello and falstaff are probably his best work only in so far as he was working with the languages greatest dramatist but all his work was original and remains vitally important.
shareSorry to reply so late to your 's**thammer' reply. I stand by what I said. Being a director takes a great deal more than simply having great ideas. You also have to have the talent to mount them and steer them through the minefields of raising the money, employing the talent, being able to keep the story on the course you've intended and, especially in Welles' case, finishing them! What Welles did to Universal, who'd backed him to the hilt on It's All True, his South American disaster, for which he left The Magnificent Ambersons unfinished and uncut, virtually guaranteed that that studio would never back him again. As for his photographic 'style and content', indeed Welles used his camera to atmospheric effect, but he did nothing but fight with Stanley Cortez, and wanted him fired because Cortez insisted on doing things his own way. And I do not contradict myself when I said Welles is a bad director - of course you can except Kane. But you can except little else. Only a misguided fool would insist on having his actors perform and mouth to prerecorded tracks of their performances. And if you think that Welles' performance in Touch of Evil, using his Mr Magoo voice, was worthy of the name, pity you. And Charlton Heston as a Mexican police chief? Marlene's corny performance as a hooker? Puhleese! I wish I could comment on Confidential Report but neither I nor most other people who saw it - including reviewers - could understand the meandering plot. Of course, Welles' Mr Arkadin disguise was interesting, as his heavy disguises usually were (vide Journey Into Fear, Macbeth, et al). Worse, you must know that he tried to buy Kane's screenplay credit from Herman Mankiewicz, who agreed, but that the Writers Guild said 'no way', giving Welles only additional dialogue credit when Mankiewicz won the Oscar for it. And whenever one reads his supporters, such as you, defending Welles' unufinished movies and running out of funds, it is always the 'moneymen' who cut off his water, or the studio heads who mangled the editing. How many excuses can you make about how many pictures? Most self-respecting directors would simply demand that their names were removed from the credits. Yes, the end shoot-out mirror sequence was brilliant in The Lady From Shanghai, but it wasn't wholly original; and Welles' performance was appaling; his Oirish accent laughable; the opening sequence written for morons. Does the mirror sequence make it a good film? And then there was The Trial, interminably boring! What I said about the other directors - whom you seem to think were workaday hacks - holds true. They had the knowhow; knew the system. Welles didn't, and he got out of Dodge within three years, going off to play politics on the radio, and staging spectacles in the theatre. This is where, probably, he rightly belonged. I can't believe you have read Simon Callow's two major works on Welles, otherwise I'm sure you would have been enlightened. Welles was a conjuror in fact and by temperament. He failed miserably as a director in the film medium and I'm sure he'd gleefully agree with everything I've said. We all loved him, but for different reasons - a wonderful raconteur and a superking-size personality, and sometimes a great actor - but you ought not really to allow your heart to govern your head.
shareMnk, are you an idiot full-time or do you just moonlight? Despite the length of your posts, and the constant reference to simplified synopsis of biographies I can't believe you've actually read, you seem to have about as many active ideas as those children who burst onto the Citizen Kane board on a regular basis and declare it "overrated, a boring mvie!" You seem to maintain the old-fashioned (modified post-Kael) idea of Welles that allows critics and audiences to utterly dismiss everything he did after Kane just because it was not like Kane, or because it might (gasp!) be difficult or strange or new. You also seem to have not made any effort to verify through different means that Welles was as you say, because said different means (i.e. biographies that don't presuppose that Welles was a prick and a liar and a loser) seem to suggest different. Welles by no means told the truth all of the time, but no less than anyone else, and certainly no less than anyone possessed of his theatricality and refined gift for storytelling would be expected to do. The majority of Welles's associates, close or otherwise, tended to speak of him in glowing terms, moody and difficult as he could be (those sound suspiciously like words one might apply to an artist, don't they?); Houseman alone tended to be consistently negative about him, especially about his writing abilities, and given the complexity of the relationship beyween Welles and Houseman and the bitterness of that close relationship's end, it is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the fact that Welles never attacked him back - if an old friend was telling ugly stories about me behind my back (especially if said stories were unsupported by fact) I would certainly have not been so charitable.
At any rate, the Bogdanovich book is as accurate as any of the other biographies, and far more accurate than, say, the "biography" written by David Thomson, which contains no original research and more factual errors per page than a White House press report. Thomson seems to be the last of the Kaelites: he fully understands that if you create and misrepresent spurious information about someone then you can make them look pretty bad.
As for Welles as a director.... Orson Welles was the greatest film director of the modern era (meaning that, to me at least, he was an inferior magician to Méliès, perhaps had less command of pulp fiction than Feuillade, couldn't stand up to the editing prowess of the early Eisenstein, wasn't as consistently funny as Chaplin was in his early short films, and was not as inventive a stager of Shakespeare as Percy Stow). This is a personal opinion, of course, but a little illumination can easily defeat your argument - or it would if you had an argument.
While you are correct to attack the ironically named "geniusboy" for dismissing some of the most interesting Hollywood directors as generic (the idea that Ford's films are anything less than one of a kind, uncomplex, or "mere entertainments" is nothing less than laughable), your seeming inability to spot what is so magnificently interesting and engaging about Welles's directorial work is more ludicrous. I can only assume that either you have not actually seen the films you attack but only read about them, or at the very least that you have put no effort into such viewing. Anyone who has seen a Hawks film should recognize that Welles had a similar conception of staging and dialogue, and that both were "overlapping" in nature, perhaps theatrical but no more so than anyone else. Many of Welles's films feature multiple characters speaking at once, much as in Hawks's classic His Girl Friday and elsewhere, although Hawks was proficient more at giving the illusion that everyone spoke at once while Welles seemed happy to let them actually do it. One of the reasons that a film like Touch of Evil or Mr. Arkadin can be "tough to follow" (although to me they've never made anything other than sense - perhaps something as simple as paying attention is rewarding after all, n'est-ce pas?) is that so much happens at once. Some, rather than naming this baffling, would call it "rich." Those are the people who care about movies.
Welles's staging is less stagey than Hawks's, though: Hawks gains reality by presenting the figures and the set in a theatrical way, keeping the camera a respectful distance from the action and adhering more or less to one angle during a scene, with appropriate cut-ins for effect (as per a standard Hollywood editing style), thus allowing the performers to cover as much ground character-wise as possible. Welles, to some extent, began by using a style not dissimilar, although his actual compositional style is derived from Soviet and German cinema of the 1930s (not just in Kane, although very much so there), although the important thing to remember is that such style was not in wide use at the time in Hollywood, except by Gregg Toland, which is most certainly why Welles requested him to begin with (I know, I know - you are shocked to think that Welles may have requested him because that would imply that Welles had some kind of vision of the film before it went into production that looked not unlike what eventually appeared on-screen - you seem to have read Robert Carringer's book but skipped every other word). Anyway, his early style is Hawksian in the sense that he preferred the master shot (as did Ford), but he went a step further in often deciding to use only the master shot (as did Mizoguchi, as would Antonioni and almost every European director of the sixties and seventies), which, combined with the wondrousness of deep focus photography provides the scenes with a realism (at least in the Bazin sense - I think of it as heavily stylized realism) that Hawks's shots do not generally have, if not the energy. But Welles's staging didn't end with Kane. His use of space in his other films is unmatched. Characters wander about large areas, dodging around obstacles and creating a three-dimensional quality. There's a shot in Touch of Evil in which Heston chases a suspect in this matter that is great fun, providing a use of location (this is a real exterior of course) that most directors never bother with. And this scene has nothing on a similar sequence in Chimes at Midnight involving trees that is funny (Welles is amongst the funniest of all "serious" directors, and Chimes is his warmest and most genuinely funny film) and nothing short of exhilarating.
In his later films he switched from long takes to frenzied editing and got even more interesting effects: the battle sequence in Chimes at Midnight, modeled though it may be on Eisenstein's Aleksandr Nevsky, is intense, brutal, panicked, suffocating, and yet the shots of Falstaff running about are wonderful comic relief; in short, nothing less than the best battle scene ever put on film. Well, except maybe for Kurosawa's Ran, but that was done twenty years later. But the montage in a later Welles film is wonderful to look at. The flow of his editing is one of a kind and the images provided are always stimulating, even if they had by 1966 become fairly standard: high- or low-angle wide shots that emphasize the physical presence of the actors (and Welles in particular, more so as his physical presence became more, er, imposing over time) and the shadows that hang around like spiderwebs above or below them. You can guess what these shadows represent. And yet the most powerful scene in the film is a long take that features the characters standing well away from the camera, almost obscured in the distanceby the vastness of the barn-like brothel, and involves little that is showy or pretnetious. It's a simple recitation of Shakespeare. This scene is, in fact, very Hawks-like.
Generally I believe that the main function of the director is to provide the film with interesting mise en scène; his or her other functions are somewhat secondary, albeit important. Obviously there are no complaints with Welles. True his images were oft-inspired by German expressionistic films, and his use of powerful foreground objects isn't exactly out of the ordinary between the end of World War II and the rise of the New Wave, but he was doing it before most directors and there are absolutely no arguments about his prowess in it. He's not the best: Mizoguchi's brilliant choreography of human figures is something to behold, a feat beyond mortal man. But waht Welles could do was use the camera itself as an expressive device. His shadows identify states of mind (obviously) and uncertainty, his deep focus backgrounds provide a world for his films to exist in (always the sign of a great director is the reverence for settings and peripheral characters; Ford's "cavalry trilogy" is great for this), and his shots are always pictorially interesting. Freeze a frame and use it on your computer desktop.
He experimented with sound too, and was one of the best users of sound in all cinema (listen to Citizen Kane with the image turned off sometime). Obviously a background in radio is quite a useful thing. Your comment on Macbeth is the kind of thing that causes my eyes to roll all the way back into my head, like two golf balls drowned in quicksand, but I guess I can't blame you: you sound like the kind of person who thinks that anything out of the ordinary is automatically a bad idea, and that experimenting with anything, is wasteful because it's already been done another way. Bravery is but waste, and cowards should rule the day.
Perhaps the most impressive about Welles is how ahead of the curve he was. Othello, Mr. Arkadin, even Touch of Evil predict the idiosyncratic editing style of the initial New Wave fairly well (no coincidence that it was instantly canonized by French critics when it came out). I always thought that Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player seemed like an attempt at Arkadin. And Godard worshipped Welles, even if Welles thought little of him. Godard , much as he would have loved to, could never have directed a Welles film. And yet Welles's F for Fake could be a Godard film easily, or maybe a Rivette film. And F for Fake is still experimental by today's standards (so, for that matter, is Citizen Kane) - film is still behind Welles, trying desperately to catch up.
Not that Welles is strictly a "technical filmmaker" as that guy in Annie Hall might say. He manages to draw great performances from his performers. Of course, he had good taste in actors: many of the Mercury players used in Kane went on to do great character work in Hollywood, especially Agnes Moorehead, who garnered several Oscar nods and deserved countless others, and Akim Tamiroff is an impossibly wonderful and watchable performer, even when he is appeared in grandiose Hollywood glitzbombs like Sam Wood's For Whom the Bell Tolls. But he manages to do wonders with the cast of The Magnificent Ambersons too. I would argue that even Tim Holt does a good job. Snide losers will always chant "Charlton Heston isn't a Mexican dammit!" as though that wasn't the most obvious thing in the world, and as though that has something to do with Welles as the director (Heston was placed in the part by the studio - that's what happens when you work for a Hollywood studio), but Heston's performance in Touch of Evil is actually quite good (for Heston). And it's not like this irony was not lost on Welles - one of the funniest lines (in a movie packed to the brim with them) is the knowing: "You don't talk like one. A Mexican I mean." A bit of advice on criticism: it's not a good idea to complain about something that the artist anticipated and addressed well before you did. Dietrich, by the way, is neither corny nor a hooker, but as I don't think you've seen the movie I'm sure the idea is lost on you. The exaggerated artifice in any Welles movie is palpable, but Touch of Evil probably has more than most. Anthony Perkins is quite excellent in The Trial. His paranoia is strident, his sense of vulnerability so powerful that he might as well have performed the role naked. It's not up to his role in Psycho, but what is? And Welles himself was a fine actor, if an old-fashioned and theatrical one. It's interesting, conisdering his disdain for Method acting later in life, that he all but pioneered it in the room-trashing scene in Citizen Kane. His performance in Touch of Evil is terrifically sleazy. No great makeup artist, though: his makeup as Arkadin is ridiculous. You can see an inch of the webbing on his wig! Welles the actor is the major flaw in Arkadin, oddly enough.
Chimes at Midnight is Welles's best film. Sure, it was made cheap and looks it, and the sound is really pretty terrible, with most of the actors overdubbed by Welles himself, but it is his most human film and his most emotional. It contains his best performance. It is the best version of Shakespeare ever put up on screen and, yes, that includes Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Ran, if just barely. The fact of its cheapness is, in fact, the only argument I've ever seen leveled against it. Perhaps not an illegitimate complaint if one's only conception of greatness in film involves Hollywood megamovies, but it does betray a prejudice against something else that Welles represents: independence. Hollywood seems to have fostered an idea that it alone matters and it alone should decide what should be taken seriously, both in this country and elsewhere. So a truly indpendent artist like Welles, or Cassavetes after him, is ignored as best can be. Hollywood loves it when people think the way they do, and loves to make believe that those they oppose are failures.
So, anyway, your hatred of Welles is unfounded, lazy, heartless, brainless, pathetic, the ramblings of an unfocused, boring mind.
And what does this have to do with Journey Into Fear? It was directed by Norman Foster, and I know this because Orson Welles (and a lot of other people) said so.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/welles.html
"Tis a coward I am - but I will hold your coat."
I have to disagree with you. I've always said that Welles has been significantly overrated as a filmmaker and as a cinematic legend. I don't see him as one of the great geniuses in the history of cinema (maybe not even in the history of American cinema), and I never will, but I do believe he had great talent as a director. Unfortunately, that's all he had, as a filmmaker. His ability behind the camera was unmatched in American filmmaking at the time. But he only understood how to master the element of form, not the element of content. That's where he fell short (though there were exceptions, like "F for Fake"). Furthermore, he wasn't willing to bend to the studios' will, and his European sensibilities did him no favors in the hyper-commercially driven American film industry. All that being said, there's a few places where I think you've made some pretty over-the-top statements that have no basis in reality. First off, you can't make comparisons between Welles and directors like Hitchcock, Kazan, or Wyler -- all of whom worked within the studios' parameters to make films that would please the bigwigs. A bit less so in Hitch's case, of course, but still much more so than Orson Welles, who wasn't willing to make these concessions at all, and as a result, he did, indeed, deal with problems that many of his contemporaries did not have to face. Welles was more of a genuine filmic artist than Wyler or Kazan or Hitch could have ever dreamed of being. That has never taken well in America, and particularly not in the '40s and '50s. So to imply that the success of other contemporaneous filmmakers is evidence of a lack of directorial talent on Welles' part seems ludicrous to me. That would be like claiming that Jacques Rivette's lack of recognition in the nouvelle vague is evidence of his inferiority to a filmmaker like Claude Chabrol or François Truffaut. In reality, of course, it had nothing to do with talent or quality as a filmmaker, and everything to do with the fact that Chabrol and Truffaut were willing to bend to the whims of their audiences at the time, and Rivette stubbornly stood by his own vision with little or no regard for what would conform to the popular culture of the day. It's no different with Welles. He was absolutely given the shaft by the Hollywood film industry, and while he never was and never would have been the filmmaker that legend has suggested he was or would have been, he certainly could have done greater things had the executives gotten out of the way and given the artist his path to creation. If Welles was guilty of anything, it was naiveté for expecting that something like this would ever happen in a film industry like America's. That and maybe obstinance. Furthermore, to say that the innovations and successes of "Citizen Kane" were the result of the technicians surrounding Welles and not Welles himself is ridiculous. The stylistic achievements of that film were echoed throughout Welles' entire career. Welles' ultra-expressionistic mode of filmmaking was unheard of in American cinema prior to his emergence on the scene (barring maybe the films of Josef von Sternberg). His use of light and shadows and distorted camera angles had a profound influence on American cinema, and "Citizen Kane" was by no means the best example of that. That style, found to a lesser extent in "Citizen Kane", can be seen much more intensely in his later films.
I agree with you that Bogdanovich is an unabashed idolizer of anything resembling filmic talent, although I love the guy regardless, and I agree that anything Welles said of himself, his work, or his experiences in Hollywood should be taken with a grain of salt, as the man was, first and foremost, a personality. His comments were mostly concerned with making an impact, or conveying a certain self-image. I don't think truth or reality were ever really in the picture for Welles. And he admitted this himself. He even seemed to take pride in it. He went as far as to call himself a charlatan, and this is what the film "F for Fake" was all about. My agreement in all those areas notwithstanding, however, I think you are guilty of underestimating Welles' talent as a director just as much as many others are guilty of overestimating it. And one thing that is, for me, beyond debate, is that Orson Welles was absolutely the victim of a film industry that gave no quarter to artists whose primary talents didn't show in the profit margins.
Yes, there were approximately 20 minutes cut from the film after its initial preview (June, 1942 - 91 min.). The majority of cuts were related to Howard and Josette's romance, which was much more explicit in the original version, and to the various political conversations going on between the fellow travelers.
shareYes, to get back to the question: it was originally 91 minutes long. I've just seen a partially restored version at the British Film Institute (or National Film Theatre as I still call it). The restoration includes some screens of dialogue (text only), a few still from the cut scenes, and an alternative ending a few minutes in length. Incidentally, I take exception to Mnk! asserting his opinions as "facts".
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