Chimes at Midnight (1965)

Campanadas a medianoche, Spain / Switzerland, 115 minutes

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: William Shakespeare, Raphael Holinshed, Orson Welles

Photography: Edmond Richard

Music: Angelo Francesco, Lavagnino

Editors: Elena Jaumandreu, Frederick Muller, Peter Parasheles

Cast: Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Jeanne Moreau, Norman Rodway, Alan Webb, Fernando Rey, Michael Aldridge

I was going to say I like director and cowriter Orson Welles as much as the next guy but maybe that’s not so true. I might be more of a dilettante. I love Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil and I like to look at The Magnificent Ambersons to grieve for what might have been (Booth Tarkington’s novel is surprisingly good too). After that it’s certain dazzling shots and moments in some of the others, at least as long as they don’t have very much to do with Shakespeare. My problem there—I’m not proud of it—is I’ve never had a Shakespeare phase, not even in college, and I don’t know his work well, though I generally admire everything I’ve seen or read.

For that matter, Chimes at Midnight is not just a Shakespeare adaptation, it is a reimagining and refocusing of Falstaff, a recurring Shakespeare character, along with his relationship with Prince Hal. Per Wikipedia, the script for Chimes at Midnight includes verbatim text from five of Shakespeare’s plays: Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Richard II; Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It is a deep dive into a pool where I don’t how to swim well. And it’s not the first time Welles did something like this. Besides previously making pictures based on Macbeth, Othello, and Twelfth Night, he mounted a stage production on Broadway in 1939, Five Kings, based on nine Shakespeare plays. In many ways Shakespeare was a theatrical medium itself that Welles worked in well, capable of working up pastiche for anyone who would have it.

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

USA, 87 minutes

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: Sherwood King, Orson Welles, William Castle, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle

Photography: Charles Lawton Jr., Rudolph Mate, Joseph Walker

Music: Heinz Roemheld

Editor: Viola Lawrence

Cast: Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders, Ted de Corsia, Erskine Sanford, Gus Schilling

By the time The Lady From Shanghai was shot and released in 1946 and 1947, Orson Welles, the director, cowriter, and star, had already so thoroughly alienated himself from Hollywood powers and money that he was denied credit for directing—his involvement is given in the opening titles as “Screen Play and Production.” In a way these tales of Welles and his titanic studio battles are just cases of petty on petty. Welles wanted to make great pictures—he wasn’t even 30 yet when he proved he could. But he could also be petty and passive-aggressive himself with the money people he resented. For The Lady in Shanghai, for example, he had his then wife Rita Hayworth cut her long red hair and dye it blonde. He probably knew what was going to happen—the studio got mad at him.

So it’s a two-way street between Welles and the studio heads, although the studio heads were always the ultimate power. Even as they attempted to rework his stuff, thrashing through edits and retakes, the mauling could go well above and beyond mere fixes. They often came back at him in ways that felt personal. Perhaps the most notable and painful example is the ballroom scene in The Magnificent Ambersons, reportedly in the vicinity of an hour or more in Welles’s original rough cut. The studio not only took it out but also destroyed the negative, making it impossible for anyone to ever see it. And so it went for most of the rest of Welles’s life. It was as if he and the studio powers could not help themselves. Welles saw himself in the business of making great pictures, which, especially in the Hollywood system of the ‘40s, tended to take great amounts of money. And Welles always seemed more interested (understandably enough) in the strategy that asks forgiveness later instead of permission first.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

USA, 88 minutes
Directors: Orson Welles, Fred Fleck, Robert Wise
Writers: Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles, Jack Moss, Joseph Cotten
Photography: Stanley Cortez, Jack MacKenzie, Orson Welles
Music: Bernard Herrmann, Roy Webb
Editors: Robert Wise, Jack Moss, Mark Robson
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorhead, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Ray Collins, Richard Bennett, Erskine Sanford, Donald Dillaway, Orson Welles

I found myself surprisingly put in mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby the last time I looked at The Magnificent Ambersons. It's not just the similar title constructions—in the case of Ambersons the adjective appears mostly offered with at least irony, if not sarcasm, unlike the intermeshed and more complex layers of meaning intended for Gatsby. The Magnificent Ambersons is based on Booth Tarkington, of course, so as with not just Gatsby but also Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and many others it also consorts in a certain ideal of the turn-of-the-20th-century Midwestern American idyll, rendered more caustically by H.L. Mencken as the "booboisie." I also thought the lovely overboiled language of Welles's voiceover narration occasionally strayed into Fitzgeraldian realms. And of course there's a number of incidental touch-points in their parallel stories of lifelong love for a woman cruelly denied.

But the paradox is that whereas The Great Gatsby may arguably be a very nearly perfect work of art, The Magnificent Ambersons is famously only the smoking hulk of whatever it might have been. It's known at least as much for being the movie "they took away" from Welles and wrecked as anything else. Here's what Wikipedia has on what happened and specifically what was lost. Look at the movie, read it, and weep. That's how things work around here apparently. RKO execs slashed away some 40 minutes of footage from Welles's early cut and reshot the ending. They monkeyed with everything—the story, the music, the photography. They say a copy of that early cut was shipped to Welles in Brazil, where he was already at work on his next project, but it has since never turned up. The cut footage moldered for a time in a vault but eventually was destroyed to make room for more important things to store there, perhaps Oscars®.

The Third Man (1949)

UK, 104 minutes
Director: Carol Reed
Writers: Graham Greene, Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, Orson Welles
Photography: Robert Krasker
Music: Anton Karas
Editor: Oswald Hafenrichter
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Bernard Lee, Wilfred Hyde-White, Ernst Deutsch, Siegfried Breuer, Erich Ponto, Paul Hoerbiger

In his introduction on the Criterion DVD, Peter Bogdanovich calls The Third Man "perhaps the greatest 'non-auteur' film ever made," going on to compare it with Casablanca as an "extraordinarily happy accident." That's probably fair enough. There's plenty of talent to go around here: Graham Greene wrote both the screenplay and the literary property on which it's based. Cinematographer Robert Krasker is positively heroic about converting postwar Vienna into a malevolent place of inky blacks, confusing geometries, and outsize shadows. And of course Orson Welles, in spite of his limited screen time—he doesn't even appear until the first hour has passed—imposes enough sheer presence to make it feel as much like a Welles picture as any on which he carries the director's credit.

Obviously I still need to see some of director Carol Reed's other efforts, particularly of the period—Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, which immediately preceded The Third Man, are widely praised. But Bogdanovich's assessment does confirm my impression of this as one of those unique and special projects where so much falls into place just right, with contributors working together well and at the same time achieving personal heights.

Touch of Evil (1958)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Orson Welles
Writers: Orson Welles, Whit Masterson, Paul Monash, Franklin Coen
Photography: Russell Metty
Music: Henry Mancini
Editors: Walter Murch (1998 re-edit), Aaron Stell, Virgil W. Vogel, Edward Curtiss
Cast: Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, Joanna Moore, Ray Collins, Dennis Weaver, Valentin de Vargas, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joseph Cotten

For all the unprecedented latitude that Orson Welles enjoyed in making his first feature, Citizen Kane, it sometimes seems like he spent the rest of his career paying for it—and I think that's more reality than perception, or than rotten luck on the part of Welles, or even than a natural result of an obnoxious personality clashing with Hollywood bigwigs. Across the fullness of his career, it's almost as if he were cursed. The Magnificent Ambersons (another one we will be getting to) may stand as the most egregious example of a film taken away from Welles and wrecked, but Touch of Evil certainly fits the profile too, and has the added distinction of being Welles's last attempt to make a Hollywood picture.

It's altogether an extraordinary way for Welles to end the sour relationship with Hollywood, featuring a cast full of fine performances and surprising grotesqueries, a screenplay tight as a drum that relentlessly goes from dark to black, a bracing performance of his own, and a few technical tricks still up his sleeve as well.

Citizen Kane (1941)

USA, 119 minutes
Director: Orson Welles
Writers: Herman Mankiewicz, Orson Welles, Roger Q. Denny, John Houseman, Mollie Kent
Photography: Gregg Toland
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: Robert Wise
Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, George Coulouris

When something is as universally adulated as this—not just ranked high but routinely rated #1 in critical poll after critical poll—it can paint a target on its back for contrarians such as myself. It seems hard to believe that anything could possibly foster such agreement and it smells like the kind of thing that annually delivers up Oscar travesties, the hoariest industry trend of all by now.

But a few little items in recent years have helped me better get over myself in this regard, and I pass them along for what they're worth for anyone who might be struggling with a similar predicament. First, I read about an encounter reported by Jonathan Rosenbaum that occurred in a film class he took in the early '60s, when he was given to understand, after asking about the exclusion of Citizen Kane for any consideration in the class, "that Orson Welles's film was basically uncinematic and therefore only impressive to amateurs who understood little about the medium." That's the kind of thing guaranteed to raise the hackles of any self-respecting contrarian.