Quote of the Day (Orson Welles, on Happy Endings)

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”—American actor, director, and screenwriter Orson Welles (1915-1985), quoted in Orson Welles: Interviews, edited by Mark W. Estrin (2002)

Review: Orson Welles’ ‘The War of the Worlds,’ (Re)staged Live at Barrymore Film Center, Fort Lee NJ

In a way, it was natural that Barrymore Film Center would follow the 1953 movie adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds with an even more unusual event: a live stage reading of the notorious 1938 radio broadcast that propelled its 23-year-old wunderkind director, Orson Welles, into the national consciousness.

Eighty-five years after radio listeners heard that Martians had landed in rural Grover’s Mill, NJ, would you believe it happened all over again in another part of the state Saturday night? Only this time it wasn’t millions of listeners unnerved, but a more select group of a few hundred attendees in suburban Fort Lee.

Over the years, several plausible reasons have been suggested for why the CBS broadcast became such a sensation, including an announcement at the start of the show noting that this was a dramatization of the Wells novel that was missed by listeners switching from another station, as well as the air of verisimilitude created by Welles through faux news reports on the invaders and the names of real New Jersey locations (instead of the British ones in Wells’ novel).

But, as I listened to the actors reading with gusto the original radio script by Howard Koch (who would secure even greater fame in a few years with his work on the movie Casablanca), I couldn’t help feeling that Welles had tapped into contemporary fears to an extent that he and his Mercury Theater company of actors didn’t remotely anticipate.

Director Ray Faiola, assuming Welles’ original role in setting the stage for the terror, somberly intoned that “Business was better; the war scare was over”—clear references to America finally easing out of the Great Depression and to the false “peace in our time” proclaimed a month earlier by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after appeasing Adolf Hitler at Munich.

Within a few short years, terror was coming not from a fictional War of the Worlds but an actual World War II, with devastation engulfing entire nations rather than simply patches of the Garden State.

At the same time, I felt my own sense of unease about the script’s application to human beings of our time unaware of what they were doing to the climate as I heard the lines, “With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space.”

Throughout, Faiola—a retired director of audience services for CBS, and currently appearing on the small screen in “The Secret Diary of an Exchange Student,” “Darcy,” and “Confession”—ably read Welles’ lines from decades ago, even as he monitored the effects from technical supervisor Eldric Etra.

 (An extra thrill of the proceedings was hearing once again the incidental music of composer Bernard Herrmann, who would go on to score Welles’ Citizen Kane and much of Alfred Hitchcock’s best work from the Fifties and Sixties.)

At the end of the show, after all the terror of the events he narrated, Faiola seemed particularly amused as he read Welles’ non-apology apology after CBS urged him to make a statement on the hullabaloo:

“Of course we are deeply shocked and deeply regretful about the results of last night’s broadcast. It came as rather a great surprise to us that the H. G. Welles classic—which is the original for many fantasies about invasions by mythical monsters from the planet Mars—I was extremely surprised to learn that a story which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect on radio listeners.

Faiola and the quartet of actors with him onstage—Sean Marrinan, Wayne Pyle, Craig Marin and Kevin Miller—have had considerable experience with bringing back to life the world of radio drama, as they have been longtime participants in Halloween “Terror at the Mike” thriller series that have been staged in Ellenville, NY. The audience on Saturday night was the great beneficiary of their feeling and reverence for the medium.

It appears that this might have been the first time that the Barrymore—which opened a little over a year ago—has tried this kind of experiment. Judging from the healthy attendance and the appreciative response of the crowd, I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of re-staged radio dramatization becomes an annual event—maybe even around Halloween again?

Flashback, September 1949: ‘Third Man’ Exposes Evil in Postwar Vienna

The Third Man, which premiered in the U.K. 70 years ago this month, is now frequently regarded as the greatest British film of all time. 

No wonder—it featured a supernova of creative forces in front of and behind the camera: producers Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, director Carol Reed, assistant director Guy Hamilton (who later graduated to helm three James Bond features), stars Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, and, in a small but pivotal role, Orson Welles. 

The production history of this drama set in postwar Vienna is fascinating in and of itself, including the clash of wills between Korda and Selznick, the accidental discovery of the musician who contributed the distinctive “zither music,” Anton Karas, and the hurdles thrown up at will by the willful Welles.

But the prime mover behind this classic thriller may have been Graham Greene. Not only did the finished feature stick closely to both the novella he wrote as, in effect, a treatment as well as the screenplay, but it sounds themes he returned to consistently throughout his five-decade writing career. 

Easily among the most famous literary converts to Roman Catholicism in the last century, Greene still resisted making his chief characters simple conveyors of virtue. Riven by doubt himself even after converting, Greene depicted characters twisting in the coils of sin, utterly unable to escape even when they knew the right path to take. The Third Man was no different.

Until relatively late in his career, Greene classified his novellas as one of his “entertainments,” a name given to distinguish his crime melodramas from his other, supposedly more profound, works. But, as he recognized as time went on, that division was too neat and facile.

Like many entertainers, Greene knew how to pay more attention to his work by joking about it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the satire directed at the hack writer of Westerns, Holly Martins, when a literary group he’s to address presses him for something profound.

"They want you to talk on the crisis of faith," he is told.

"Cri-? What's that?" Martins asks, stupefied. 

"Oh, I thought you'd know,” comes the reply. “You're a writer."

In a discomfort he could never have previously imagined, Martins must address this “crisis” not only in a lecture hall or on the printed page but also in his own life. He will have to answer to what extent his loyalty matters when the friend he thought he knew so well, Harry Lime, turns out to have made a fortune peddling diluted penicillin that resulted in the maiming and deaths of countless innocent children. 

Divided politically by four occupying powers who often find it hard to speak the same language, the Vienna of The Third Man is riven spiritually by the eternal sins of greed and hatred. Through the Oscar-winning cinematography of Robert Krasker, the “old Vienna of Strauss music and bogus easy charm” has been reduced to a city of shadowy, slightly tilted streets. 

Martins, a penniless pulp fiction writer, finds it even more dangerous here than his earlier callow predecessors, the American innocents abroad of Henry James. Amid proud but crumbling buildings, it is not merely hard to see here, but even to maintain one’s balance. It is a striking visualization of Greeneland.

With the war having reduced survivors to a Darwinian struggle for existence, crossing borders, geographically and ethically, becomes commonplace, even expected. Identities are cast aside, then utterly confused. Martins is mistaken at the hotel for a more acclaimed author; Anna Schmidt mixes up his first name with that of her onetime lover and Martins’ friend, Harry Lime; Martins drunkenly calls the unillusioned British Major Calloway “Callaghan”; and the plot centers on the uncertainty identity of the title character.

But it is in the sewers of Vienna that Greene finds the ultimate metaphor—a Stygian repository for human waste to which the desperate run for an illusory escape. Even amid the loud roar of this rushing underground river, humanity runs aground. From here, fate—what passes for the justice of God in this fallen world—arrives in the form of a relentless police manhunt.

The late, fine mystery novelist Philip Kerr suggested that, in the confrontation between Martins and Lime on the Ferris wheel in Vienna’s Prater Park, Greene underscored the moral hypocrisy of the Western victors of the war, as Harry disclaims any sense of responsibility for his victims: “Victims?” says Harry. “Don’t be melo­dramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money?”

There is another way, however, to view this scene: as one where the devil cites scripture to his purpose. Lime, a figure of energy and charisma, binds men and women to him. But all of that intelligence and charm, instead of being directed toward life-affirming ends, is devoted to selfish ones. Rapid by necessity on his feet, he is just as agile with his tongue, as made beautifully clear in a speech ad-libbed by Welles:

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love--they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

But all of this is clever, honeyed words. Not only does Lime take facts taken out of context (the Renaissance was hardly confined to Italy), but he doesn’t address the sources of Martins’ rage: How can Harry endanger the lives of innocent people? If he loved Anna as much as he said, why did he betray her to the Russians by disclosing the secret of her forged papers?

Greene’s friend Kim Philby—the British intelligence operative who sold secrets to the Russians—has been proposed as a model for Lime. (Philby’s given first name was Harry.) But it might be even more appropriate to regard Greene himself as a possible source for the character. Not only was his real first name Harry, but the character was associated with a fruit of a green(e) color. 

And both author and creation remain nominal Catholics, with Lime remarking cheerfully to Holly, "Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and mercy and all that. I'm not hurting anyone's souls by what I do.The dead are happier dead. They don't miss much here, poor devils."

If Harry Lime lives—and he does, more so than any other character in the film or, arguably, throughout all of European film noir—it might be because Greene (himself a serial betrayer, of his marriage vows) was a paradoxical secret sharer of his sinful humanity. 

In a famous address on “The Virtue of Disloyalty” given at the University of Hamburg, Greene observed: “Loyalty confines you to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids you to comprehend sympathetically your dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages you to roam through any human mind: it gives the novelist an extra dimension of understanding." 

That “extra dimension of understanding” elevates The Third Man to an unforgettable cinematic experience long after Anna cold-shoulders Martins at the wintry second funeral in the haunting final scene.

Quote of the Day (Orson Welles, on ‘Intimate Dinners for Four’)

“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people with me.” —Actor-director-writer-gourmand Orson Welles (1915-1985), quoted in Simon Callow, “The Glutton Who Gorged Himself on Women,” The Daily Mail (U.K.), Dec. 4, 2015

This Day in Film History (Birth of Orson Welles, Genius-Manchild)

May 6, 1915—George Orson Welles, who dropped his first name and thus stood out even more than his sizable talent and ego would have warranted alone, was born in Kenosha, Wisc. Appropriately enough, his first name would come up again in the headstrong young protagonist of the pivotal film of his career, the one that demonstrated his creator’s enormous skill and his crippling inability to work with others in bringing his cinematic visions to fruition: the 1942 period drama The Magnificent Ambersons.

Welles was like a little kid, so fascinated by a brand-new toy that he was easily distracted by the one he already possessed. In 1942, he had been so excited about the prospect of directing a documentary at the behest of the State Department, It's All True, that he assigned work he considered beneath him--editing and dealing with studio bosses--to his assistant, Robert Wise. He was not around, then, when Ambersons was reduced to 88 minutes, a shell of its former length.

Interest in the centennial of the creator of Ambersons and Citizen Kane, the perennial winner of those Greatest Film of All Time lists, has been intensifying for awhile now, not just because of his achievements but also because of the grand projects he left unfinished at the time of his death 30 years ago. 

The saga of The Other Side of the Wind is typical in this regard. It appeared, for the longest time this year, that Welles’ film about a director struggling to make a movie would at last be finished in time for this centennial year. But, earlier this month at the University of Indiana, film historian Joseph McBride elicited from a fellow panelist the news that potential distributors of this film want to see a negative before committing themselves any further, posing the risk of further delays.

Longtime readers of this blog know that my interest in Welles, a multifaceted but troublesome genius, runs deep. One way of thinking about how strong that interest is might be by this fact: I know that I saw an entertaining, somewhat fictionalized account of the young Welles’ Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar—a movie called Me and Orson Welles, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Zac Efron, Claire Danes, and Christian McKay as a charismatic but willful Welles—but I can’t recall a single other film I saw on the big screen that year (2008).

I have given full vent to my fascination with Welles in seven prior posts. If read in the following order below, as the events occurred chronologically, they will demonstrate how Welles developed his projects, how he unintentionally sabotaged them through his ego and wandering attention span—and how nevertheless, against all odds, he still managed to complete as much as he did:

* Welles’ First Break (1934)—a supporting role in Katherine Cornell’s Romeo and Juliet.

*The Second Hurricane (1937)—how Welles directed high-school students, only slightly younger than himself, in an Aaron Copland opera created just for them.

*The War of the Worlds (1938)—the radio show that scared America out of its wits.

*Citizen Kane (1941)—Welles’ original title, “American,” perfectly fit his masterpiece of the corruption--and loneliness bred by--power.

*The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)—how Welles’ eagerly awaited follow-up to Citizen Kane Changed the Course of His Career.

*RKO Ends Contract With Welles (1944)—two years after the wreck of Ambersons, the studio cut Welles--and a contract guaranteeing unprecedented creative freedom for a director--adrift.

*Othello (1952)—in an act of guerrilla film financing, Welles took his daring Shakespearean adaptation on the road.

After all I have written about Welles, I am still eager to write even more about this magnificent but maddening moviemaker: how he experimented with radio before and after War of the Worlds; why the FBI was so interested in him; how he improvised his famous clock speech in The Third Man; how one film project of his after another from the Fifties through the Seventies never fulfilled the promise of Kane; how he died old and embittered…and that’s just the start. I can't wait.

Come to think of it, he never could, either...

Quote of the Day (Orson Welles, on Why He Felt Qualified to be a Politician)

“I have all the equipment to be a politician: Total shamelessness.”–Filmmaker Orson Welles, explaining why he seriously considered a 1952 run for the U.S. Senate, quoted in My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, edited by Peter Biskind (2013)

Any better confirmation of what the great (and greatly egotistical) cinema genius meant than this week’s sad-funny spectacle of Anthony Weiner (as outlined on the Huffington Post—not to mention every late-night comic and tabloid worth its salt)?