Delusions of genius

IF, as the saying goes, genius is defined by an infinite capacity for taking pains, then Orson Welles was no genius. If, as another saying goes, God is in the details, then there was nothing godlike about him, either -- despite the worshipful posturings of his many acolytes.

That said, a raft of questions is left bobbing on a vast sea of biographical and critical speculation about the man and his work. How, people go on wondering, could the man who created “Citizen Kane,” arguably the greatest of all American films, fritter away the rest of his life -- nearly half a century -- on movies spoiled by his own inattention or by the machinations of others or, worse, simply abandoned with many of their most significant elements lost? Movie history is rife with tales of genius thwarted, trashed, traduced (D.W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, plus dozens of lesser talents), but the story of Orson Welles has become central to a core myth, beloved by passionate cinephiles and the ever-contemptuous literati, that Hollywood wantonly, inevitably destroys its most gifted creators.

I think that notion is nonsensical. You cannot read the second volume of Simon Callow’s projected three-part biography, “Orson Welles: Hello Americans,” or Joseph McBride’s more personal and passionate “Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?” (to be published in October) without coming to believe that Welles was the primary auteur of his own misery. Neither writer addresses that point directly, but each lays out the evidence plainly -- Callow with cool objectivity, McBride with denials of Wellesian fecklessness that ring increasingly hollow as film after film stumbles toward its grim, might-have-been fate. The problem with both is that neither quite links the flaws in Welles’ nature with the failure of his films.

The simple truth is that Welles, who was orphaned as a child, was raised by a foster father, Maurice (“Dadda”) Bernstein, and nurtured by a schoolteacher, Roger Hill, to believe in his own genius -- no questions asked, no limits set. McBride quotes Welles, late in life, commenting on a character in the screenplay “The Brass Ring” (published but, of course, unmade), thus: “He is a man who has within himself the devil of self-destruction that lives in every genius.... It is not self-doubt, it is cosmic doubt! What am I going to do -- I am the best, I know that, now what do I do with it?”

In Welles’ case, the answer comes back: After 1942, he did almost nothing of unambiguous value.

Callow tells the story of the years between the premiere of “Citizen Kane” in May 1941 and Welles’ self-exile in Europe, beginning in 1947, in sometimes exhausting detail -- a mere six years out of a 70-year life. But he obviously believes -- and makes us believe -- that they were crucial in determining the unholy mess that followed.

It is true that “Kane” was not a commercial success in its initial release. Neither was it an unalloyed critical success. Nor did it fully enchant Hollywood, ever suspicious of outsiders. But it raised a most gratifying hullabaloo, and even the skeptical could see that it was a picture to be reckoned with, as a summary of sound and filmmaking techniques to date, and, possibly, a harbinger. Nothing in the “controversy” surrounding the film (people did not yet see that it was less a fictional biography of William Randolph Hearst than a fictional autobiography of George Orson Welles) precluded a great career for its director, co-writer and star. And we know now -- even from the severely truncated form in which it exists (about one-third of it was cut by the studio, RKO) -- that Welles’ next movie, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” was quite likely a masterpiece too.

But he did not see it through. Welles was seduced away from postproduction on “Ambersons” by the U.S. government: He was asked to make a film in Brazil in support of our wartime good-neighbor policy. He thought it was his patriotic duty to do it (and perhaps also he wanted to avoid the draft), and he was confident that other hands could shepherd “Ambersons” through postproduction. Besides, he had a work print of the film with him, and phone and cable lines were up and running. He would supervise it by remote control, while improvising “It’s All True,” a scriptless, multi-part semi-documentary on certain aspects of South American life.

In the end, he neither successfully defended “Ambersons” nor finished “It’s All True.” The former’s first preview (in Pomona) was disastrous; George Schaefer (the head of the studio and Welles’ chief supporter) was engaged in a desperate battle to save his own job; and, frankly, Welles was largely drunk and disorderly in Rio, paying at most intermittent attention to his film’s fate. He was repeatedly urged to drop everything and return home to “fight his corner,” as Callow would have it, but he did not. So RKO subjected his film to the death of a thousand cuts -- the most serious of which was to the final sequence, a long, mournful elegy for lost American innocence destroyed by rampant industrialism: It was not a message that people wanted to hear as our productive might was mobilized to prosecute World War II.

Eventually, the studio dumped the film: In Los Angeles, it played on a double bill with one of the “Mexican Spitfire” movies. Eventually, Welles would admit that this was the mistake from which his career never recovered. McBride reports him weeping as he watched “Ambersons” on television years later.

But, at the time, Welles sailed blithely on -- starring in other people’s films, making some of his own (“The Stranger,” which was minor and profitable; “The Lady From Shanghai,” starring his by-then-estranged wife, Rita Hayworth, and radically recut by the studio). All the while he pursued his own deluded definitions of genius. One element of that fantasy was the notion that great gifts in a particular field guaranteed his authority in totally unrelated realms. For a time, he wrote a daily newspaper column proclaiming his political and social opinions, while at the same time doing weekly radio broadcasts in which he lectured an ever-dwindling audience on similar topics. He was everywhere in public life, so much so that Franklin D. Roosevelt put it in the addled filmmaker’s head that he might someday be president if he so desired.

But Welles’ political opinions, situated at the more radical edge of the liberal spectrum, were not to everyone’s tastes, and neither was his solipsism. Even people who admired his movies quite fairly wondered by what right he dared instruct them in public philosophy. These activities prevented the coherent pursuit of film projects, for Welles was not yet the anathema to the studios that he would become. It was “Macbeth,” made for the low-end but initially supportive Republic Pictures, that sealed his fate. It is often visually striking, a daring attempt to strip away centuries of theatrical convention and locate the drama in primitive, almost prehistoric, times. But it needed a lot of work, and it was from the heavy postproduction chores that Welles sidled away, attempting to finish the film as he had “Ambersons” -- by cable -- while working in another country.

McBride holds that Welles’ exile was a response to the threat of political blacklisting, but that’s dubious. During the decade when the blacklist was enforced, Welles worked steadily as an actor in movies set for American release. If he was hiding, he was doing so in awfully plain sight. It was the same with the movies he managed to direct; they had to play in America if they were to be profitable. No, his problem was that he could not submit his wayward spirit to institutional discipline.

This brings us to a point his most ardent admirers have never grasped. The rebel pose makes for fine romantic copy, but the fact is that genius in the movies is the antithesis of genius as Welles flightily defined it. It is akin to an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Every great director I’ve ever known spends months in the editing room, more months on the dubbing and scoring stages, driving themselves and everyone around them crazy with their slavish devotion to detail. When they’re not doing that, they’re wheedling money out of their backer or fending off suggested improvements. It is how great movies are made.

And great careers. In his entry on Welles in “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film,” David Thomson remarkably asserts that his was “the greatest career in film.” I would argue that it was no career at all. Think about it: One indisputable masterpiece, one presumptive one, a handful of movies (“Touch of Evil,” “Chimes at Midnight,” “The Immortal Story”) for which cases can be made by devotees like McBride, a lot of pasted- together work (“Othello” and several versions of “Mr. Arkadin,” none of them any good) and a lot of unfinished work (“Don Quixote,” “The Other Side of the Wind”) that has its interest but is always accompanied by an asterisk, directing us to the bottom of the page and a footnote rationalizing the failure of fruition. Deny it though his supporters will, a defensive pattern emerges here: If a genius’ work remains so often incomplete or is taken over by others, then we can never definitively judge that genius or, heaven forfend, declare it defective.

Comparing this “career” to those of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch and a dozen other American cinematic masters is ludicrous. All made at least one great and any number of really good movies -- in part because they all knew how to game the system. Charlton Heston warned Welles not to bristle when the Universal suits came on the “Touch of Evil” set. Hear them out, charm them, twist them artfully to your will, Heston suggested. As anyone who heard Welles on talk shows in his later years will know, a display of rueful, self-deprecating and apparently good-natured irony was well within his range. But he would have none of it. He was too committed to the adversarial mode. Genius, forced to walk among mere mortals, must tread heavily and carry a big stick.

McBride argues that Welles remained, until his dying day, manically busy, and there is no disputing his energy. He relentlessly pursued backing from increasingly dubious sources and endlessly spun ideas, but the truth was that, “Kane” aside, Welles was much more an adapter than he was an originator of screen ideas. And he had no middle range: He was either making versions of Shakespeare or cheesy crime novels. At the end, he was not even doing that. He claimed to prefer the “roughness” of scriptless improvisation. Sometimes he just wanted to turn the camera on himself while he bloviated. Even McBride, whose dark suspicions about his idol -- Welles often treated him abominably -- are surfaced but never resolved, concedes the hopelessness of these “one man band” (Welles’ phrase) projects. He was finally building rejection and failure right into his original concepts -- a much more efficient method of self-destruction than running out of money and interest before completing a film.

The history of the 20th century offers no more grandiose conversion of high promise into sad failure. Or, if you prefer, no more chilling example of a man turning his life into some sort of presumptively tragic, but finally absurdist, art.

*

Orson Welles

Hello Americans (Volume 2)

Simon Callow

Viking: 452 pp., $32.95

*

Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?

A Portrait of an Independent Career

Joseph McBride

University of Kentucky Press: 384 pp., $29.95