Orson Welles: Not just a winemonger and Muppet buddy.
As usual, when Welles made that statement he was telling the truth without quite telling the truth. He was responding to Bogdanovich's question, "Do you think magic has influenced your work in pictures?" To which Welles replied, "No." This was patently absurd, but very instructive. Welles had been a magician since boyhood. The actor-director-writer, whose work will be celebrated with a massive, ongoing Film Forum retrospective Feb. 20 through April 15, built much of his career around images of conjuring and transformation.
Along with Peter Conrad's excellent analysis of Welles' life and work Orson Welles: The Stories of his Life?currently in bookstores, and well worth buying?the Film Forum retrospective arrives at a crucial cultural moment, just in time to remind us what real artistry and real showmanship look like. Late in his life, many Americans knew Welles as the large, deep-voiced gentleman who sold wine on tv and occasionally held court with Johnny Carson or the Muppets. Between American cultural amnesia and Entertainment Weekly's relentless celebration of whatever happens to be hot this week, men like Welles?a giant in every sense of the term?are rarely acknowledged. I suspect that today, outside of moviemakers, film students, film critics and the occasional buff, few people know his name, except as a synonym for "Renaissance man" or "fat guy." That's doubly irritating when one considers how many contemporary filmmakers have borrowed his images, themes or structural gimmicks, from the time-shifting of Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan (Memento) to the low-angled, fish-eye-lensed, detail-packed compositions of Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton.
Welles' presence is keenly missed; the memory of him as an actor and filmmaker shames so much current work, even the good stuff. Alec Baldwin's turn as a ruthless casino boss in The Cooler is profane and volatile and fun. But when you think of what Welles might have done with it during his golden period as a movie star after World War II, when he was starring in films like The Lady from Shanghai, The Stranger and The Third Man?or for that matter, what Welles might have done with the Baldwin part on his hack-iest day as a hack actor in the mid-60s?and it's tough to be impressed. (Even when Welles slummed, he never quite slummed; he rewrote and improved his own dialogue, and contributed performances that were just big enough to goose an otherwise trivial picture a step closer to being memorable.) Bill Murray is sweet, funny and uniquely Murray-esque in Lost in Translation, and Ben Kingsley is disciplined, ruthless and tragic in The House of Sand and Fog. But Welles could have played both roles equally well, with the same concentration and wit?plus a ruined grandeur that was entirely his own.
And as a director, he was without peer. His worst movies are more inventive than much of what is now celebrated as the best. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is marvelous (and, I suspect, durable) entertainment?so straightforward, uncynical and unabashedly crowd-pleasing that it has brought out the robotic contrarian in critics who ought to know better. But it cannot hold the hem of a cinematic king's robes like Welles' Chimes at Midnight or Othello, low-budget visionary classics woven together from baling wire. For that matter, it is difficult for anyone who enjoys Welles' work as a director to watch Cold Mountain without thinking of how much more Welles could have done with a Civil War story drawn from Homer's Odyssey. (Imagine, while you're at it, the young, beautiful, baby-faced Welles in Jude Law's silent drifter role.) Welles was as much of a classic literature buff as Anthony Minghella, but unlike Minghella, Welles had an amazing poetic eye (it's nearly impossible to find a dull or undyamic shot in any of his movies), and he was the most anti-elitist elitist that one could imagine. Welles did not view even the greatest works of literature with anything like reverence; he did whatever he thought necessary to transfer the work from one medium to another, and charges of unfaithfulness rarely seemed to trouble him. Whether adapting Moby Dick for the stage or stripping down Shakespeare for the movies (no adaptation of the Bard's work is as visual, as concise, as furiously cinematic as Welles' Othello), he always believed that his first duty as an artist was to hold the audience enraptured.
From Kane onward, Welles was a bit of an exile in the entertainment business. That's ironic and sad when one considers Bogdanovich's fresh and valid assertion, made in the late 1960s, that contrary to the standard myth about his being a boy wonder who peaked early, Welles "developed much further technically and intellectually" after Citizen Kane. This period of sustained invention and improvement?which began after his studio-butchered near-classic The Magnificent Ambersons and continued throughout the 50s and 60s?coincided with Welles' being nearly shut out of Hollywood, except as an actor. During this period, he acted mainly to generate money for his directorial projects, many of which were shot in Europe with starting funds cobbled together from a variety of sources, and often dubbed by Welles himself. In other words, he was rising to new heights of craftsmanship at the same time that he was being denied financial and technical tools that might have made audiences more aware of his mastery. De Palma obsessives love to position him as a renegade exile artist a la Welles, but compared to the rotten treatment Welles received at the hands of his own industry, De Palma is Michael Bay. Welles' Othello contains a conversation between three characters done entirely with closeups; each closeup of an actor was shot in a different location, months apart. That's guerilla filmmaking?or maybe it's just magic.
Welles' work is suffused with magic, from the plumes of smoke signalling the demise of a press baron's life and materialist dreams in 1941's Citizen Kane to the dark incantations in his 1948 version of Macbeth, to his semi-documentary F is for Fake, which explored the connection between magic, lies and entertainment by touching on, among other things, author Clifford Irving's fictional "autobiography" of Howard Hughes. For decades, Welles could also be seen doing magic on tv and on stage, and telling interviewers about the formative influence of illusionism on his life. If you know even a bit about Welles, you may wonder if he was lying to Bogdanovich or simply to himself?or if such a distinction even matters. Welles publicly explored himself through his work as an actor and director with a fluency and frankness that few subsequent artists have dared attempt. As both actor and filmmaker, he concealed and revealed himself; he teased himself and us; he made serious fun. In the end, the point of Welles' explorations often seemed to be to force viewers to admit that one cannot really explain a man, a life or an ideal in two hours. His movies and performances admitted that humankind needs entertaining stories, but at the same time, his ironic self-awareness reminded us that not all needs are healthy.
Welles' complex artistic attitude?a willingness to conjure, summarize and entertain, while insisting that we recognize the essential untruth of such pursuits?was one of the great contributions to popular cinema during the 20th century. "What does it matter what you say about people?" says Marlene Dietrich's tough-romantic saloon proprieter in Welles' Touch of Evil, musing on Welles' corrupt sherriff character. "He was some kind of a man."
Or, as professional ruminator David Thomson asked in his splendid book on Welles, Rosebud, "Is there ever, with anything interesting, the hope of having the record straight? The walls that separate biography, autobiography and romance are not as distinct as the areas in a bookstore, and you should not put complete faith in them. No matter the amount of research that has been gathered and digested for the work of nonfiction, still the story has to be told. Readers want story; they want the thing to hang together. Readers love rosebuds."
The wonderful thing about "rosebud"?the one-word "secret" that supposedly will unlock the mysteries of the title character in Welles' Kane?is that it ultimately explains nothing. At the end of Kane, that word is consigned to the ashes of memory along with the child's toy that bears its name. In essence, the word was a delightfully arbitrary shared joke between the filmmaker/magician and his audience, an admission that audiences need simplifying devices?the pleasant lies of entertainment?even though the smart ones know that such devices are arbitrary, even dishonest: lies that we can all agree on. Contrary to the image conjured by Kane, rosebud wasn't a flower, or even a sled. It was a fig leaf.