A star but not a team player
Rob White
DESPITE THE SYSTEM by Clinton Heylin Canongate, £16.99, pp. 384, ISBN 1841955868 ✆ £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 In January 1942 Orson Welles finished filming The Magnificent Ambersons, his follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941). When he flew to Rio the next month to begin work on a new project (which would soon be scuppered by the RKO studio), he left behind a rough cut of a picture about the decline of a genteel 19th-century family and the coming of a new world. The ending was meant to be devastating. The Amberson mansion has become a retirement home, encroached upon by tarmac and traffic. ‘Everything is over,’ Welles explained some years later, ‘everything is buried under the parking lots and the cars.’ Only this is not the end of the film as we have it. RKO executives had The Magnificent Ambersons re-edited, excising a full third of its 132-minute running time and adding scenes shot against Welles’s wishes. At 88 minutes it is wonderful but it is a ruin. We may suspect that, as it was intended, The Magnificent Ambersons would have surpassed Citizen Kane, but we shall never see that version and so know for sure.
Welles would not again have the full support of a Hollywood studio. After being shut out for a fifth time, this time from Touch of Evil (1958), he gave up on the system, looking to Europe for finance and hospitality. Clinton Heylin rebuts the argument that Welles’s misfortunes had to do with deep-seated flaws in his own character, notably some sort of unconscious will to fail. True, he was disinclined to play the corporate game (or merely inept at it), but various moguls and accountants were happy to make life as difficult as possible for him. And yet, even with executives ranged against him, Welles was so talented that it still seems absurd that he should have fared so badly. Why then did he? Reading this book I was repeatedly struck by a sense of the seriousness of Welles’s artistic intellect. His themes were grave, pessimistic and classically European: transience, decay and an accompanying moral corruption. Heylin quotes an excellent description of Welles’s work by his friend Maurice Bessy — ‘the sumptuous, hallucinogenic and baroque recreation of a world in the process of disintegration’.
Welles had arrived in Los Angeles in 1939 hoping to film Heart of Darkness. The project never came off, but the fascination with Conrad’s rotten and despairing Kurtz is unmistakable in the figures of Kane, Harry Lime in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), Quinlan in Touch of Evil and a clutch of Shakespearian tyrants — Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952), Falstaff (1966) and Lear (on stage in 1956). It is a wonder that Welles had even 19 years on the fringes of Hollywood; his preoccupations were simply too exacting and subversive ever to find a home in the commercial ‘dream factory’. He admitted as much to fellow director Peter Bogdanovich during a discussion of The Trial (1962), Welles’s experimental version of Kafka:
You are supposed to have a very unpleasant time ... Here I go and make [a] movie that I want people to see and not like. [But] that’s the paradox at the heart of all my work.
Welles was always going to fail in Hollywood, no matter how hard he tried to make concessions to the money men. But, as Heylin proves, try he did, for the most part in good faith, only to see his work maimed by other hands.
Despite the System significantly enhances our knowledge of Welles but it is a troublesome book. It has no proper scholarly apparatus (footnotes are in Heylin’s view ‘a tiresome practice’) and there are too many vulgar jibes at other writers (the ‘idea that Welles’s multi-layered way of making films might be anathema to the Hollywood system never patters across the man’s wrinkled cranium’). Especially regrettable is the fact that although Heylin takes some knowledge of Welles’s films for granted he has very little to say as to why even the mutilated ones continue to inspire reverence — and thus why, for many film-lovers, the loss of Welles’s Ambersons is so bitter.
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