On Orson Welles by Christopher Mulrooney Christopher Mulrooney is a poet, whose poems and translations have appeared in poems and translations in The Pacific Review, Loop, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Combo, Folio, Perihelion, Poetry and Audience, Frank, Poetry Salzburg Review, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, Tiger, and Renditions, among others. He is also the author of notebook and sheaves.

The Magnificent Ambersons

The Magnificent Ambersons

A full sixty minutes have been removed, which is to say forty per cent of the picture.
Torso as it is, we are used to such things. Mighty aware that jot and tittle matter not a little, that abbreviating a work "lengthens it only" (Schoenberg), that Shakespeare's last curse falls upon the mutilators of his tortured œuvre.

Sculpturally, this is an improvement on Citizen Kane, whose formal innovation was carefully reflected in the script of The Best Years of Our Lives, as it was foretold in the Garbo Anna Karenina; but here analysis of the completed work is unavailable to us, and restoration seems an unlikely proposition under the present circumstances. Poetically, the work incorporates the careful ambiguity of Kane in a painstaking study of immaturity. It is possible to imagine Resnais departing the storefront tracking shots sans Baxter & Holt.

Judging a man's mystery of life is a formal response to a problem of form; the sins of youth are a special case. The ending burkes the formal elaboration that would have symphonically relieved the stresses of composition cautiously laid out in the remnant, but it is not in itself unsatisfactory; and, again, the fearful weight of memory would be squared with a perception of events geared to time not experience, as in the earlier film. Furthermore, the deus ex machina conclusion needs more preparation before intruding the stern eterne. Because, of course, as before Welles takes the mickey out of the device as far as possible: Morgan's fall into his bass viol precipitates Isabel's marriage to Minifer, whose investments bring down the house and effect George's enlightenment-again, to free the study of time from the trials of experience vs. youth; relativity is perhaps lacking somewhat in the present formulation of the equation.

So much for that. The opening titles are a hallmark of style visible through Preminger's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, that great Biblical epic. The famous end titles are perhaps a justification of a Radio Picture.

The quick-change act at the beginning is borrowed from Keaton, who learned his art from Méliès, who is playing at the Bijou. Similarly, the rise of the automobile is seen reflected in shop windows. Major influences are in Amarcord, Daisy Miller, Wise Blood, and Fanny and Alexander.

Welles' repudiation of the film is a blind. There is a kinship here with Hitchcock, Ophüls, Capra, and Lang. There are oft-noted technical marvels. There is marvelous, subtle work among the actors. And there are two great inventions.

In the church scene between Welles and Loretta Young, he combines the ten-minute take with montage to produce an entire scene edited within the camera.

His evocation of a New England town with an academic component is strikingly Nabokovian, to such a degree that one might think a theoretical possibility of influence exists (they have in common Edgar Allan Poe, whose story "The Devil in the Belfry" is probably the ultimate source of The Stranger).

A film much appreciated by filmmakers (notably Hitchcock) and television directors, if not by critics.

The Lady from Shanghai

The scandal of its mutilation by the studio, reportedly on the scale of The Magnificent Ambersons, is unspeakable.

It opens on the river and the Brooklyn Bridge at night. There is the delicate cranework used expeditiously. In the West Indies, it anticipates L'Avventura.

O'Hara, a brilliant character in an epigrammatic script, sums up his environment in a tale of frenzied sharks. Before Winter Light, "the end of the world".

The hilly seacoast of Beat the Devil.

There is the town by night from the hills, and Rita Hayworth skittering along the bottom of the image, then descending out of frame.

Again, at Sausalito, the characteristic low horizon is a small dock emanating from the right, with a small boat dancing on the bottom of the image, left.

"I don't want to be near that or any other city when they start dropping those bombs," says lying Grisby.

Everett Sloane invents Marty Feldman, or someone very like him.

An octopus falling and rising announces the celebrated aquarium sequence.

Ted de Corsia is Paul Stewart in Citizen Kane. The voice of the serpent in George Pal's 7 Faces of Dr. Lao is heard.

"Oh, Fassbinder!"

An excruciatingly slow dolly-in on Sloane and Hayworth in a two-shot finally separates them at either side.

The courtroom scene is a masterpiece of revelation by composition. A courtroom as small as a cineplex, where a woman is observed carefully placing a bit of rubbish under her seat.
The judge, in his chambers, moves his chess pieces before a window on the city.

O'Hara's furious escape finally breaks free in a great release of energy into an exterior.

Chinatown, homage to Hitchcock.

Homage to Huston (The Maltese Falcon). "Stand Up or Give Up" in the Crazy House.

The king's secret is stated in the sequence of vignettes that are the core of the film. The flea circus is the gang Arkadin belonged to. The antiques dealer symbolizes mere acquisitiveness. The Baroness marks the acquisition of taste. The heroin addict Oscar is mere craving, and Sophie is the exercise of power. Finally, Zouk is old age, pining for a goose liver.

The masked ball sequence is Goya. The waist-high upward-tilted camera fixes every shot like Gaudí. Significant influences are in Fellini's Amarcord, Reisz's The Gambler, and Polanski's Chinatown.

Touch of Evil

The restoration makes clear that it is not a flawed masterpiece but a far advancement on all that had gone before.

The tilt-up of Mr. Arkadin is here. Pans move from tight compression to infinite expansiveness or the other way around. Two shadows on a wall (The Third Man) move to oil derricks in the receding distance, with Vargas in the middle scuttling away.

Quinlan in a night exterior, with a palm tree behind him in the desert breeze waving like peacock feathers.

The Stranger's crane is now fully active. The bordertown arcade is firmly ensconced in the convertible.

Psycho begins here.

The long takes accomplishing the interrogations are intensely brilliant articulations matched by a cut to an exterior.

W.C. Fields (played by Ralph Richardson), Edward G. Robinson (Akim Tamiroff).

The last shot replaces The Third Man's cypresses with oil wells.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002