The Other Side of the Wind
“It is the greatest home movie never seen.”
“One day, it may be freed. I hope not. The Other Side of the Wind should stay beyond reach.”
David Thomson
1.
MISE-EN-ABYME refers to the specular effect of a mirror reflecting a mirror. Applied to film or literature, mise-en-abyme suggests an endless circuit of self-reflection, consciousness that beholds itself reflecting on consciousness. Orson Welles is fond of this effect. Most famously, he films figures ensnared between mirrors, characters trapped in labyrinths of reflections. In The Lady from Shanghai, Welles’ film noir from 1948, Arthur Bannister, played by Everett Sloane, pursues Rita Hayworth (then Welles’ wife) though a carnival funhouse called the Mirror Maze. Banister, who teeters on a cane, confronts himself reflected within reflections that extend into infinity. The mirror maze, like the camera, is a light-trap, a kind of black-hole in which photons endlessly ricochet back and forth without possibility of escape.
2.
The Other Side of the Wind is a pretentious mess of a movie that is contained within a shrewd and critical commentary on that pretentious mess that is, itself, overly self-aware and pretentious in its commentary on the critique of the underlying film. And, so on ad infinitum. The entire hall of mirrors is like Bottom’s dream in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “It shall be called Bottom’s dream, because it hath no bottom to it...”
Is The Other Side of the Wind a pretentious, self-indulgent mess or is it a brilliant satire of a film that is a pretentious, self-indulgent mess? The answer, of course, is both of the above.
3,
1941 was the year in which two noteworthy directorial debuts occurred: Welles’ Citizen Kane and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. Welles casts his movie-sibling, John Huston as Jake Hannaford, the doomed director in The Other Side of the Wind. Huston is clearly a surrogate for Welles, but, also, plays a figure very much like himself. In effect, John Huston is playing a caricature of John Huston, a “mick” tough-guy with an interest in bullfighting and big game hunting who derides Hemingway’s “right hook” as being “overrated”. Welles is not content that Huston play a caricature of himself. Huston is also given Eugene O’Neill’s family history – that is, Jake Hannaford is the son of famous stage actors, renowned for their interpretations of Shakespeare who were brought low by booze and, presumably, women. (Welles’ own father, Richard Head Welles was an inventor – he held the patent on carbide lamps for use on bicycles and early automobiles, and had actually built and piloted a flying machine a few months after the Wright brothers’ experiments at Kitty Hawk; he died of alcoholism in 1930, a demise for which Welles claimed credit: “I have always thought I killed my father.”)
Hannaford is called “Skipper” by his acolyte, Brooksy, played by Peter Bogdanovich. “Skipper” was the nickname of Richard Lee, Welles’ favorite teacher when he was exiled to the noisome Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois after the death of his mother, a spiritualist, Sanskrit scholar, and opera singer. As always, Welles’ great subject is himself. And, as always, he obstructs his self-revelations with a multitude of distractions and disguises. Ultimately, Jake Hannaford is John Huston playing a parody of John Huston; Hannaford is a fictional film-maker whose father is the father of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill and whose nickname “Skipper” is the name of Welles’ mentor is Prep School. Afflicted with financing problems, Hannaford enacts the story of Welles’ life in Hollywood – he is a mythical figure in American film but a director who isn’t “bankable”; no one will finance his picture and the money is running-out: in four days, the studio intends to pull the plug. Furthermore, Hannaford is directing a picture intended to pander to the youth market: the picture looks like a prismatic version of Antonioni and, indeed, Welles seems to be parodying the Italian’s 1969 self-indulgent mess of a movie, Zabriskie Point, shot by the film maker in Death Valley and featuring acres of writhing nude actors and actresses. (Welles put up cast and crew in a mansion in the Phoenix suburb, Carefree, across the street from the mansion shown as a major set in Zabriskie Point – a scale model of the mansion is famously blown to pieces in super slow motion at the climax of Antonioni’s movie.) Does Hannaford know that his picture is garbage? Does it matter to him since the movie that he is making called “The Other Side of the Wind”, shot in the style of Antonioni on acid, is really some kind of acrid revenge on John Dale, the beautiful and androgynous movie star that Hannaford has rescued from suicide and created as an enfant terrible in Hollywood? John Dale, who purports to a rough upbringing, is really just a spoiled little rich boy with a private school pedigree – that is, another version of Orson Welles as a young man. (Welles remarked that he was the particular favorite of artistically inclined homosexuals who doted on the boy wonder when he was a child.) So Hannaford’s particularly vicious humiliation of John Dale (who was previously named “Oscar” – a two-syllable name beginning with an “O” like “Orson”) is some sort of revenge inflicted by the old and fat Orson Welles on the young and beautiful Orson Welles. Adding to the complexity of the film’s allusions is an obvious reference (in its frame story) to Godard’s Contempt, a film about a director, played by Fritz Lang, making a movie based on Homer’s Odyssey that stalls out on set and ends with a fatal car crash that kills the film’s American producer and its movie star (Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot respectively.) Hannaford is killed in the car crash in The Other Side of the Wind but the connection between the Godard and Welles picture is unmistakable.
Nora Joyce (nee Barnacle), when asked if Molly Bloom was based on her, said that Joyce’s fictional character was fatter. John Huston’s version of Orson Welles is leaner and, seemingly, more successful. Huston’s not Orson Welles, but he’s not not Orson Welles as well.
4.
SELF-DESTRUCTION is a motif that twists through Orson Welles’ work like a persistent scarlet thread. In Welles’ conception of the world, important men are too powerful to be destroyed by outside forces. Rather, they are ruined by the one power equal to them – that is, their own self-destructive tendencies. This theme can be identified in all of Welles major films.
Charles Foster Kane is ruined by the very arrogance and charm that led to his meteoric rise. Citizen Kane is the classic Shakespearian hero doomed by his own hubris. On the domestic level, the Amberson’s are destroyed by their own pride; the spoiled rich boy, George Amberson, obsessed with family integrity and honor ends up ruining the very family that he seeks to protect. Falstaff tutors Prince Hal and, in part, through this very process, succeeds in converting a wastrel to a noble prince who’s first royal act is to disavow the disreputable old man. Mr. Arkadin hires a private eye to learn whether a shameful secret lurking in his background can be discovered – and it turns out the disclosure of this truth destroys everyone. In The Immortal Story, a wealthy old man hires a sailor to make love to his unhappy wife with dire consequences. Jake Hannaford in The Other Side of the Wind does just about everything in his power to sabotage the film that he is making, including humiliating his leading man to the point that he abandons the project. Then, Hannaford plays the victim and claims that his enemies – and they are ubiquitous – have prevented him from finishing the film. In Welles’ imagination, those who are greatly gifted are doomed to self-sabotage.
5.
After completing the shoot of The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles decamped to Brazil to make a semi-documentary called It’s all True. He left the editing of Ambersons to subordinates and refused to participate in that process. In effect, RKO, the studio that owned the picture, was forced to edit the film for release. Predictably, Welles denounced the outcome and claimed that his picture had been butchered. But, of course, he was complicit in the movie’s destruction and the episode created a shadow around Welles that followed him for the rest of his life. The project to which Welles sacrificed The Magnificent Ambersons also went awry and was never completed. Thus, the pattern was set: Welles abandoned projects or left them in the hands of studio executives so that he could pursue other work more interesting to him – but nothing was ever really finished and each project ended, more or less, in a pile of interesting, even brilliant, footage that had to be pieced together by others. This is the biography of It’s all True, finally edited into a version that could be screened forty years after the film was shot. Welles worked on The Other Side of the Wind between 1970 and 1975. He carried reels of raw footage around the world with him in a big valise and tinkered with editing the picture into a version that could be shown. I recall that, when Welles made the circuit of late night talk shows in the years before his death, he could reliably be counted-on to show a couple minutes of footage from the film that he always described as a rough-cut. No one had seen such velocity of editing, such overlapping dialogue, and such pictorially brilliant compositions. The footage was stunning and exhausting to watch, but it was just a tiny snippet of a film that Welles’ couldn’t complete. It took Welles’ death and 44 years to finally release a version of the film approximate to what its director intended.
6.
Weekend, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film is probably the picture most decisive in defining the movie sensibility in the late-sixties and early seventies. There’s no doubt that The Other Side of the Wind exists in a sort of dialogue with Godard’s picture. Welles, as an acknowledged master of the medium, could not continue making movies without engaging with Godard and, particularly, Weekend, the French director’s farewell, as it were, to narrative cinema. Weekend concludes Godard’s early phase, a series of 15 films quickly made between 1960 and 1967 – we have already noticed similarities existing between Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind (“TOSOTW”) and Godard’s Contempt, both films about the travails of making movies. After Weekend, Godard told his crew that they should find work in some other enterprise and, for the next decade, the director made pictures so steeped in far-Left politics that some people, at least, find them unbearable to watch.
Welles’ interest in Godard is well-documented. Two quotes epitomize the American film maker’s regard for an innovator in cinema that Welles’ undoubtedly regarded as a rival. “What’s most admirable about him,” Welles said, referring to Godard, “is his marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves – a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium – which when he’s at his best and most vigorous is very exciting.” Welles pretended to the same contempt – he described a movie studio as a toy, a boy’s train set to use his famous metaphor and claimed to have learned everything needed to direct motion pictures from watching John Ford’s Stagecoach a dozen times and spending a weekend discussing technology with his director of photography on Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland. In Welles’ account, he was able to master the “machinery of the movies” over a long weekend. The metaphor of movie studio as electric train set re-occurs in another statement that Welles made about Godard: “May we be accursed if we forget for one second that he (Godard) alone with Griffith –one in the silent days, one sound – managed to start up the little electric train in which Lumiere did not believe. All of us will always owe him everything.” This is a grandiose statement and, it seems, that Welles has forgotten that the subject of the sentence is Godard and not D.W. Griffith. Welles films, except TOSOTW, don’t owe much to Godard at all. Key to this latter declaration is the fact that Welles seems to be saying that cinema has produced only two great innovators – Griffith and Godard, implying, of course, that there is a third, the man making this declaration. Lumiere, the first man to make motion pictures in France, thought that the medium should be used only for representing reality and, therefore, “did not believe” in the medium that he had invented. Welles implies that great film-makers don’t merely represent reality but, rather, through close-up, montage, and other cinematic effects create a new reality. Someone has noticed that a slate shown to mark shots in TOSOTW is chalked “Bitzer” – Billy Bitzer was Griffith’s cameraman during the silent director’s great era.
7.
Godard prefaces Weekend with two titles: “a film stranded in the cosmos” and “a film found on a scrap-heap. A perceptive French reviewer styled Weekend as “fragments of an imaginary film.” Similarly, TOSOTW is fragmentary, although this arises, to some degree, from the chaotic conditions in which the movie was made. Nonetheless, the opening shot of a smashed sports car signifies that the movie is a sort of wreck, the kind of spectacle that we watch with horrified, if fascinated, attention. Wrecked cars are a crucial element in Weekend – indeed, one of the most famous scenes in world cinema is the extended tracking shot of a traffic jam that ends with the revelation of a gory crash, complete with mangled cars and bloody bodies lying on the side of the road. Throughout Weekend, the characters wander past wrecked cars, including some that are on fire. For Godard, the car-crash signifies the inevitable demise of the bourgeoisie; Welles uses the car crash both as an implied denouement and, also, to imply inevitable gruesome failure of the picture that Jake Hannaford is making. For both Welles and Godard, there is a narcissistic insistence that the failure to finish a film and a picture’s incoherence signify the end of the world. Weekend concludes with the heroine, if that’s what she can be called, eating a shank from her husband’s barbequed corpse. The closing credits in Godard’s picture are FIN / de Cont / e (“end of the story”) followed by a title that reads FIN / de / Cinema (“end of Cinema”). The windswept images of the abandoned set, the headless mannequin sprawling on the sand at the horizon, and the collapsing scaffolding illustrates the end of cinema. Only an ego as immense as Welles’, a monster of self-regard, would imagine the failure of his hero to complete a movie (a picture that seems ludicrously bad in any event) as signifying the “end of cinema” and, perhaps, even the end of the world. The haunting shot of dawn brightening the landscape and disclosing the endless procession of cars on the freeway, people rushing to work as the images projected on the screen are bleached into illegibility, has the same emotional force. The days of the drive-in picture show are over. People hasten to their jobs. The dream factory of the movies is defunct, abandoned, and its productions fading like a dream (or nightmare) in the cold light of dawn. Welles’ failure to complete his picture, mirrored in Jake Hannaford’s corresponding failure, signifies the “end of cinema” – an end, as well, to the masculine potency, the testosterone-laced aggression that powered a certain kind of film-making. In the same light, it’s hard not to sense Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show close to the surface of Welles’ film. The Last Picture Show, a film that uses the closing of a movie theater as a symbol for the decay of a small Texas town, was released in 1971 and made its director, hitherto a film critic, the toast of the town – a latter-day Orson Welles feted for his debut picture. (There is some bitter dialogue in the movie in which Hannaford sarcastically refers to Brooksy’s success with his first movie and all of the money that it made for the studio – money that is conspicuously lacking to finance Hannford’s swan song.) The image of the raw California dawn erasing the carefully wrought images in TOSOTW’s film within the film implies that the logic of film and the masculine prerogatives that produced classical Hollywood cinema has now reached its logical conclusion – after TOSOTW, there will be pictures made and shown but they will be much diminished.
8.
Saturation defines the aesthetic of Welles’ last film. TOSOTW contains simply too much. There is too much dialogue too tightly overlapped, too many images crammed together, too much light and dark, too many characters and speaking parts; there are too many inside jokes, too many references to other films and film-makers, too much booze consumed and too much lurid sex. TOSOTW is saturated with meanings that are literal to the narrative or, otherwise, symbolic, allegorical, Freudian, Marxist or Shakespearian. Welles’ wants TOSOTW to be the last film in its tradition, the master picture that contains the keys to all other pictures, the movie that embraces the whole world. The sense of exhausting saturation that the film inspires arises in large part from the fact that all of this meaning is engraved on a tiny ribbon of ivory, work done with a “fine brush” and “a little bit of ivory – two inches wide...” (I am quoting Jane Austen’s famous account of her art.) TOSOTW feels saturated because the movie is so little, so hermetically sealed, so claustrophobically “inside” the decadent world of old Hollywood. There’s too much to fit within these confines and so the film breaks open the shell that encloses it.
9.
Is it worthwhile to catalogue the allusions that TOSOTW makes to actual figures in Hollywood and world cinema? This enterprise is interesting on the level of the Roman a clef – that is, a narrative that shows us characters obviously meant to represent (then) living people. The debonair and cynical studio executive, Max, represents Robert Evans, the Paramount producer (Rosemary’s Baby) who later, independently produced Chinatown and The Godfather pictures. (Max, as Evans appears in the film, is shown during his phase as a free-lance independent producer – he was indicted for cocaine trafficking in 1980 but, after being sidelined for a decade, made a come-back and continued to produce films until 2003; he lived until 2019.) Lilli Palmer (Zarah Valeska at whose ranch the party occurs) imitates Marlene Dietrich. Welles wanted Dietrich for the part but she was no longer making movies when the picture was shot. Palmer’s portrayal, including her impassive mask-like features, derives from Dietrich’s performance as the brothel-keeper and fortune-teller in Touch of Evil – it’s her character in that movie that comments on Welles’ weight: “You’re a mess, baby, too many candy bars; your future is all used up,” she says. John Dale (Bob Random) imitates James Dean, although he avoids the fatal car crash that killed his real-life prototype. (The picture plays with the notion that Dale like Dean will end up dead in the pancaked car.) The tortured relationship between Hannaford and Dale – partly paternalistic and partly sexual – reflects James Dean’s affair with Nicholas Ray during the making of Rebel without a Cause). Maggie Noonan (Mercedes McCambridge) is probably based on Thelma Schoonmaker, the English director Michael Powell’s wife and the editor of his last film’s; she now works for Martin Scorsese. Tonio Selwart who plays “The Baron,” Hannaford’s loyal screenwriter, is a portrait of John Houseman, Welles’ erstwhile business partner – although an enemy when TOSOTW was made. Some portraits are malicious: Susan Strasberg playing Juliette Riche, the film critic that Hannaford (or one of his goons) ultimately punches for casting aspersions on his masculinity, is said to represent Pauline Kael – Welles was angry at Kael for writing a book in which she claimed that Herman Mankiewicz probably wrote most of Citizen Kane. (Mankiewicz has been the subject of a recent Netflix picture Mank). The alcoholic Billy Boyle (Norman Foster), seems to be identified with Mickey Rooney – Rooney had been a child star and kicked his alcohol habit by eating candy. Welles doesn’t even bother to disguise Charles Higham (Charles Higgam) in the movie – the real Charles Higham damaged Welles by writing a book in 1970 asserting that the director had a “fear of completing” his films. On the basis of Higham’s theory, Welles was denied funding for TOSOTW and had to seek alternative sources of cash – with ultimately dire consequences. The role of this critic was important in early drafts of the screenplay but the character gradually shrinks in significance as production progressed. The aggressive hyper-macho upstart screenwriter Jack Simon who challenges Otterlake to a fistfight is supposedly parallel to the equally macho John Milius – as part of Milius’ fee for writing Magnum Force, the Clint Eastwood, picture, the screenwriter was paid in guns. There are many other parallels identified among minor characters but the film was produced over 48 years and but almost all of these figures, once storied in Hollywood legend are long dead and forgotten.
10,
The most important secondary role in the film is Brooksy Otterlake, the part played by Peter Bogdanovich. In this performance, Bogdanovich plays a parody version of himself. Bogdanovich had been an acolyte to Welles as a young film critic. Welles had lots of time on his hands in the late sixties and seventies – he couldn’t get work except shilling for Paul Masson wines and was perpetually between projects. As a result, Welles was readily available to young critics; lots of film students wrote their academic theses on Welles and enlivened these treatises with material with interviews with the master. (Joseph McBride, for instance, is a well-known film critic and the author of two highly regarded books on Welles – he appears in the film as the callow and inept Mr. Pister.) Bogdanovich, who was nothing if not brash, installed himself as a Welles’ chief disciple and seemed to have been inseparable from the director. Initially, Welles cast Bogdanovich in the film in the role of Charles Higham – that is, as the obnoxious critic fond of psycho-sexual interpretations of Hannaford’s work. At that time, the comedian and impressionist, Rich Little, was cast as Brooksy Otterlake. This original casting seems somehow related to the manic clutch of impressions that Bogdanovich, a gifted mimic himself supplies toward the end of the movie – he imitates, for instance, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. As the shooting schedule for TOSOTW became increasingly perverse and unpredictable Rich Little dropped out of the project – he is briefly visible as a party guest in a couple shots. Bogdanovich was, then, promoted to the more prominent role of Brooksy, a part that, in fact, parallels his real relationship with Welles. Dialogue between Hannaford and Brooksy was shot with Bogdanovich directing his words to Welles – the role of Hannaford hadn’t yet been filled. While filming Brooksy’s dialogue, Welles said to Bogdanovich: “Of course, you know this scene is about you and me.” In the time intervening between Welles shooting the first sequences in the film and the movie’s final, incomplete production almost five years later, Bogdanovich had become a major director in his own right. At the start of production, Bogdanovich was mostly known as a film critic and the author of a well-regarded series of books about Hollywood directors of the classic era (Hawks, John Ford, Fritz Lang, Alan Dwan and several others, including Welles – the subject of his first monograph in 1960). By 1974, Bogdanovich was a wealthy and powerful film-maker with a spectacular estate in Beverly Hills. (This change in fortunes is referenced rather ruefully in the film.) Some of the party footage, film acquired over four years at various parties at Welles home in France with other footage shot in Paramount studios and at other people’s homes – for instance, Lilli Palmer’s place in Malaga, Spain -- was made at Bogdanovich’s mansion. The part of Mavis Henchy imitates Bogdanovich’s wife at the time, Cybill Shepard.
Of course, almost all of the protagonists in the film are played by actors who are long dead. Tonio Selwart, a star of the Berlin stage during the Weimar Republic, lamented that he would never see his performance, which he called his “swan song,” on the screen. Selwart, who plays the John Houseman role (Hannaford’s screenwriter), went blind in 1996 and ruefully repeated his disappointment at not being able to see his performance. Selwart lived until 2002, finally dying at the age of 106, but never did get a chance to see (or hear) his part on screen. Only a few of the people in the movie were still alive when it was finally premiered in 2018 – Bogdanovich, of course, is still with us (he has a podcast on Turner Classic Movies having lived long enough to become “classic” in his own right: I’m Still Peter Bogdanovich is the name of the podcast). The disgraced TV executive, Les Moonves, who appears as one of the party guests is also still with us.
11.
Hemingway’s ghost haunts TOSOTW. The date of the party that comprises most of the the film, July 2, 1970 (Hannaford’s birthday) is the anniversary of Hemingway’s suicide. Welles brooded over this film for many years and every detail has some significance. Despite the picture’s patina of improvisation, TOSOTW is scripted and, in fact, deviation from the script was rarely authorized. Welles’ labor on the film began as early 1958 when the director visited Peter Viertel, a novelist and, sometimes, scriptwriter. (Viertel was married to Deborah Kerr.) Viertel had just published a novel that was a thinly disguised account of John Huston’s exploits in Africa while filming The African Queen. (Viertel’s book, Black Heart, White Hunter was made into a highly regarded film by another famously macho director, Clint Eastwood.) While discussing that novel, Welles said that he had conceived a film about an older writer, afflicted with writer’s block. The protagonist of this proposed film had written famously about bullfighting and the movie was to chronicle his obsessive love for a handsome young (and doomed) toreador. Clearly, Welles had Hemingway in mind.
Welles had been friends with Hemingway, but, as always with the director, there was a tincture of disdain and distrust in the relationship. In 1937, Welles was hired to provide the voice-over for a documentary about the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Earth (made by the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens). With John Dos Passo, Hemingway had written the script for the film’s narration. In the recording studio, Welles changed some of Hemingway’s lines – as a famous radio star (at that time) and man of the theater, Welles had no hesitation in “correcting” Hemingway’s text. Hemingway was present and outraged. He said something to the effect that Welles was pronouncing the word “infantry” like a “cocksucker swallowing.” Welles responded to this aspersion by adopting a fey pose and lisping: “Oh Mr. Hemingway you are so big and so strong.” Hemingway picked up a chair and threw it at Welles. Welles responded in kind and the men ended up wrestling on the floor while (as Welles told the story) images of real soldiers fighting and dying were projected on the screen overhead. After this ineffectual tussle, the two made up, shared a bottle of whiskey, and became fast friends. But when The Spanish Earth was released, it’s Hemingway’s voice on the soundtrack.
Welles said that TOSOTW was initially about death, specifically the kind of “death cult” that exists in bullfighting. In early efforts to raise funds for the film, Welles promoted the picture as a sort of gay matador movie.
12.
Welles’ girlfriend, Oja Kodar was a Croatian model and actress that the director met while filming The Trial in Zagreb. At that time, the young woman was named Olga Palinska. Welles’ renamed her Oja Kodar – “Kodar” is a Croatian word that means “gift from God.” Kodar was much younger than Welles – in fact, she was three years younger than the director’s oldest daughter (who appeared with Welles in ads for Jim Beam Scotch decrying the concept of a “generation gap” when it comes to fine distilled spirits.) Welles had been married to Rita Hayworth and had a celebrated affair with Dolores del Rio, but, apparently, Oja Kodar exercised a particularly powerful influence on the film-maker. With Welles, she is credited for writing the screenplay for the TOSOTW and seems to have even directed some scenes in the film.
Welles was married at the time of his relationship with Kodar, an affair that lasted until the director’s death in 1985. Welles divided his time between his Italian wife, Paola Mori (with whom he had a teenage daughter) and Oja Kodar, maintaining in effect two separate households. Half the year he lived with Paola Mori in homes that he owned in Las Vegas and Sedona, Arizona. The rest of the year, he spent with Oja Kodar in Los Angeles, Paris, and Spain (all places where Welles had other homes). Welles complicated family life, with its divided responsibilities, was to have dire effects on the completion of TOSOTW after his death. Both Paola Mori and Oja Kodar claimed ownership of the unfinished film and there were years of litigation on this subject, ending only when Paola died (in 1986). The death of Welles’ wife seemed to clarify some aspects of the film’s contested ownership. But Beatrice, Welles’ daughter with Paola, detested Oja Kodar and spent the next 20 years in litigation with her over rights to the film. But this dispute shrank into insignificance when compared with another factor resulting in film’s footage remaining locked in a safe in Paris for the better part of forty years. (The raw footage had been in Tehran but was held in escrow as it were in Paris.)Welles was promiscuous in raising funds for his films, all of which were independently produced after the debacle with The Magnificent Ambersons. As seed money for TOSOTW, Welles mortgaged one of his houses and put $750,000 of his own cash into the film. When this money ran out, he made a deal with a man named Bousheri, the brother-in-law of Iran’s last (the 2nd) Shah, Reza Pahlavi. Bousheri put up money for the film, probably misappropriated from Iran’s fisc. Of course, things didn’t end well for the Shah who was deposed in February of 1979. His successor to power in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was incensed that government money (as he claimed) was tied up in an American movie project. More litigation ensued with the result that about 96 hours of unedited footage from the production were sealed away, first in Tehran and, then, in a bank vault in Paris, essentially held hostage until the parties to the dispute could work out who owned the picture. There were many claimants since Welles had sold options and percentages in the film to several investors. But superimposed over these disputes were the lingering claim that a percentage of the profits in the film was actually owned by the Revolutionary Government of Iran, a curious situation in light of the picture’s decadent and heavily sexually inflected content. And there was, of course, the battle between Beatrice Welles and Oja Kodar that had to be worked-out before the movie could be posthumously completed.
13.
The story of TOSOTW travails is exceedingly complex, involves multiple bankruptcies, lawsuits in international courts, and intricate testamentary disputes. Books have been written about the tortured course leading to the film’s final cut in 2018 and its ultimate release. The best of them is Josh Karp’s Orson Welles’ Last Movie: the Making of The Other Side of the Wind, a very funny 2015 book. It suffices to say that the route to release of the movie leads through many deaths. Disputes were resolved over decades as competing contestants for the film simply died, passing their interests to heirs and next of kin who were less invested in the picture and, therefore, more willing to settle with the other claimants on TOSOTW.
14.
Sex couldn’t be represented effectively on film – at least, this was Welles’ credo before shooting TOSOTW. Welles proclaimed that “there’s only one thing in movies I hate as much as (an actor praying on film) and that’s sex. You just can’t get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.” Welles’ objection seems to have been that sex scenes in movies were simulated and, therefore, unconvincing. Welles clung to these views even when he was plotting TOSOTW. He had a serious quarrel with his protegee over the lurid sexual content in Boganovich’s The Last Picture Show. But Welles seems to have been convinced that the new permissiveness in the sixties had changed the rules of the game and felt that he had to adapt. And, so, in a way characteristic of the man, he didn’t proceed incrementally but, in effect, dived without hesitation in the deep end of the pool. It has been said that the sexual content of TOSOTW isn’t a few degrees more than in Welles earlier films – instead, it is “exponentially” more frank and garish. In the notorious scene in which the Red, Red Indian (Welles’ mistress) straddles John Dale in the front seat of a car speeding through a rainstorm, the director contributed to the action by using his considerable mass to rock the car up and down, thereby simulating its motion through the tempest.
Welles’ standards on pornography were flexible. His cameraman on TSOSTW, Gary Graver, was only infrequently paid by Welles. He supplemented his income by moonlighting as a cameraman on pornographic movies. (Ultimately, Graver is credited with 135 adult films.) In fact, as pay checks from Welles became increasingly infrequent, Graver actually directed (under the name Robert McCallum) many hard-core porno flicks, most notably 3AM, a picture starring Georgina Spelvin (famous for The Devil in Miss Jones). When Welles needed, Graver on short notice, 3AM was being edited. Welles said that he would help Graver finish the picture so that the photographer could turn his attention to TOSOTW and personally edited a hard-core lesbian shower scene for the picture. (People who have seen the film say that the shower scene is spectacularly edited and, in fact, looks like an Orson Welles production.) Graver was Welles’ whipping boy on the set of TOSOTW – when something went wrong Welles berated Graver in titanic and lengthy harangues. Graver endured this abuse for the privilege of working with the director. Most of the time, he was unpaid. However, after shooting a party scene set in Hannaford’s den, Graver was compensated by Welles with the director’s Oscar awarded for Citizen Kane. The object was on the set as a prop and, when the shoot was finished at that location, Welles gave him the Oscar and said that he had earned it for his work on the picture.
15.
In 1970, Welles worked on TOSOTW using “guerilla film” techniques. MGM’s renowned backlot was in ruinous condition and parcels of the acres of decaying sets were being sold off on a monthly basis. But student film-makers could still rent the backlot if they were willing to pay $200 a day. Welles had Gary Graver secure a student permit for shooting on the lot and used the location for several weeks on the basis of the $200 a day fee. (Welles had to sneak in to the location hidden in the back of a panel truck.) The first images filmed were from the movie within the movie. These shots made atmospheric use of the decaying wreckage on the MGM lot. Other sequences were filmed at the nearby construction site for the hotel and skycraper complex now called Century City. Welles used mirrors and created forced (false) perspectives to give the impression of John Dale and the Red, Red Indian wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape. Shooting on one particularly windy day, Welles was impressed with the dailies and liked the effect of gale-force winds. So he gathered some industrial fans and used them in later shots at the construction site. All of this work was done without permit and in a clandestine fashion. Bob Random (John Dale) recalls shooting a sex scene with Kodar on a dirt road in the Santa Monica mountains just off Mulholland. Kodar and Random were naked when a helicopter appeared overhead and, then, a cop car. Welles didn’t have a permit for the shoot and the operation had to be suspended.
16.
At this early stage, Hannaford hadn’t yet been cast (and there was suspicion that Welles would play that part.) Welles instructed his actors to address their lines concerning Hannaford to him. He would “stand in” for the absent protagonist. By this point in his career, Welles was a master of using editing to create continuity that didn’t otherwise exist. Indeed, Welles’ distinctive late-style editing (which has been enormously influential in the industry) was devised to conceal the fact that the director’s movies were often filmed in completely discontinuous shots, sometimes separated by a continent. Welles made his late pictures on shoestring budgets and had to make due with actors that he cast when they were available to him between other and far better paid jobs. (For instance, the intricate crane and dolly shots in Citizen Kane were well beyond Welles’ budget when he made TOSOTW.) It was common for him to begin filming a sequence in Hollywood, run out of money, and, then, complete the shots comprising the scene, a year or more later, sometimes in Switzerland or Spain. Welles late editing style, although artistically valid in its own right, was designed to conceal enormous gaps in continuity and budgetary short-falls. (A famous example is Welles shooting a scene in a steam room in Othello – the actors are all naked because the costumes required for filming the episode hadn’t arrived and couldn’t be financed.) Welles directing style was often devious and involved subterfuges that would be probably deemed unethical today. Welles wanted a scene with two up and coming directors vehemently disagreeing about the nature of cinema. He knew that one of his protegees, Henry Jaglom, had been hired to appear in a Mazursky film, but, then, jilted as it were by the director. Jaglom claimed that he had been seriously damaged by Mazursky reneging on the alleged contract, although all agreements were apparently verbal only. Without telling Jaglom the nature of the scene in which he was to appear in TOSOTW, Welles asked him to come to the location (at that time, Welles house in LA) to improvise the scene. Of course, the scene involved a debate between actual film directors played by Mazursky and Jaglom.. Mazursky also was unaware that he was going to filmed in close quarters with Jaglom. Welles put the two men together, gave them a bottle of brandy, and filmed their strained conversation until both of them were too drunk and tired to proceed. Welles told Jaglom that he was an excellent improvisor. He said that he had tried to get Dennis Hopper to improvise (Hopper was then flying high, in more ways than one, in the wake of Easy Rider) but been completely unsuccessful. But, of course, Hopper was stoned out of his mind when the footage with him was shot.
17.
After filming most of the scenes between Bob Random (John Dale) and Oja Kodar, Welles shot footage for the party scene but without Hannaford. Then, he ran out of money and the production ended. Random, who had been a fixture on TV (particularly Gunsmoke), was paid $2000 for his work. Random wanted to impress Welles with his proficiency riding motorcycle and so he used his entire fee to purchase the ‘cycle shown in the movie. (Random was obviously a ‘method actor’.) When the shooting in 1970 was concluded, Welles told Random that he had done a good job and that he didn’t need to contact the director with regard to additional footage required to complete the movie. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you,” Welles said. But Welles never called. Random dialed Welles’ number once, got the director, who said that he was busy and hung up. Welles didn’t talk to Random again until 1975 when the actor crashed a party attended by Welles. Welles hugged him and said that TOSOTW would be finished shortly. Random believes that if the Welles’ movie had been released, he would have had a successful career in feature films. But the movie wasn’t released and Random returned to working in television until he retired in the 1980's and moved to British Columbia (he is Canadian by birth) where he now lives.
18.
In 1971, Welles rented a modernist mansion built into the rocks in Carefree, Arizona, a wealthy exurb to Phoenix about 30 miles from downtown. The mansion was owned by the Slingman’s, a wealthy New Jersey family and had been built as a winter vacation retreat. Welles worked on shooting the nocturnal party scenes at that place. Ultimately, this also turned out to be unsustainable. Neighbors didn’t trust movie-makers – after all, Antonioni had used a mansion down the block for Zabriskie Point and incurred the wrath of the locals. Welles worked in what seemed to be a secretive manner with curtains drawn and shot exteriors with brilliant lights in the middle of the night. The neighbors were convinced that a porno film was being produced in the neighborhood and, finally, some of them came to the location to protest. (Welles had them filmed thinking that he could use the footage in his final cut of the movie.) The police were called and, again, Welles was ousted from the location. He and his crew absconded from town owing a local motel $2500 in unpaid charges. Grand larceny criminal charges were filed but a partial payment was made and the criminal complaint was dropped. Welles, then, went to Malaga, Spain where he shot the sequences featuring Lilli Palmer at her home.
19.
Huston flew to Phoenix from Ireland in the early Spring of 1974. Somehow Welles and his crew had finagled the Slingman family into leasing their home in Carefree again to the production company. Things were in disarray. Welles found that Rich Little, the comedian and impressionist, couldn’t act and, although accounts vary as to whether he was fired or stomped off the set in a rage, and had left the production. This meant that Welles had to re-cast the role of Brooksy Otterlake that had been assigned to Little. Welles persuaded Bogdanovich, on whom the part had been modeled in any event, to take the role. Bodganovich adored Welles but the older man’s bullying and bitterness over the young director’s newly achieved fame and fortune ultimately destroyed their friendship. (This was a serious loss to Welles. Bogdanovich knew everything there was to know about movie history and, when Welles needed a surrogate to attack his critics, the young man could be counted on to take up the cudgels for him. Bogdanovich wrote an essay that systematically destroyed Charles Higham’s book on Welles in which it was asserted that the famous director had a psychological complex that kept him from completing his films. Bogdanovich also wrote a savage refutation of Pauline Kael’s book Raising Kane in which it was asserted that Herman Mankiewicz was mostly responsible for the success of Welles’ signature movie.) Many of party scenes in which Little had featured couldn’t be used and were re-shot.
Into this chaos came John Huston, himself no guarantor of a serene or pacific movie workplace. One of Huston’s marriages was collapsing and the old director was morose and sad, “the world’s loneliest man,” someone remarked. Huston was also drinking heavily. The whole thing almost collapsed at the very outset. Welles set up a car with cameras to film the scene near the opening of the movie in which Hannaford drives from the movie set to Valeska’s ranch. The scene is intricate and involves actors clinging to the car as it speeds down the highway while exchanging brittle and elegantly high-strung aphorisms. Huston took the wheel and promptly drove the car over the curb, smashing into several guard rails. Welles thought this was an aberration and ordered that the crew continue filming the scene. Huston, then, roared down the highway, zigzagging in and out of his lane. When it was time to turn onto the freeway, Huston made a left, driving onto the freeway from an off-ramp. This meant that he was driving against the traffic on the freeway. In a blare of honking horns, Huston jumped the median, skidding into a U-turn that nearly crashed a half dozen cars in the oncoming freeway lanes. Welles said that this was enough and stopped filming.
Huston explained that more than thirty years earlier he had reached the conclusion that he had to decide between “the bottle or driving.” Huston said: “I picked the bottle” and advised that he had not been behind the wheel since making that decision and had forgotten how to drive a car. The leased car was damaged and Welles said that he would have to do another wine commercial to pay for it.
Welles had paid Huston $75,000 for two weeks work. By all accounts, Huston was professional and delivered his lines effectively. However, he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to say and the set was littered with cue cards on which Huston’s dialogue was scribbled.
20.
Stolichnaya vodka was Huston’s beverage of choice. He began each day with an “eye-opener” of Irish whiskey. Then, he sipped vodka all day. By six o’clock, Huston was typically too drunk to remain on the set. Welles had him chauffeured to the motel where he was staying. Welles and the rest of his crew worked twenty hour days. Welles, in fact, seemed to work overnight without sleeping. (He spent his time alone revising the dialogue which was constantly being changed.) A lot of the cast and crew drank heavily. Edmond O’Brien reported to the location each morning staggering drunk, but when the camera was operating his old Hollywood instincts were triggered and he performed his part professionally. When the shoot was over, the crew discovered that O’Brien was living in complete squalor – his motel room was full of banana peels, decaying fruit, and even packages of rotting hamburger. O’Brien was not only drunk but suffering from dementia and he ended up in the VA hospital psych-ward in a strait-jacket a few months later.
21.
No one knew what the movie was really about. Welles shot everything out of order, based on when money and actors were available. Somehow, he was able to keep the outline of the picture in his mind although there were days in which he confessed that he had no idea what he was doing. Since there was no money to hire more than a few professional actors at a time, people were cast in the film with no experience as actors at all. The little girl, Mavis, was a high school girl working at a café in Carefree. Welles like the way that she looked, particularly in that she seemed similar in appearance to Cybill Shepherd, Bogdanovich’s wife. Welles persuaded the girl’s mother to let her join the shoot. She was hardworking and did her best but couldn’t read her lines properly. Huston and Welles were afraid to bully her and so they pleaded with her to study her part. (Huston got down on his knees to beg her to do better.) Unlike everyone else, she had no idea who Welles or Huston were and didn’t seem much impressed with them. Like Huston and Susan Strasberg, who also couldn’t remember her lines (probably because she was intimidated by Welles), she had to work from cue cards. Someone on the crew told her that she was fortunate to have such a big role as the “love interest” for Hannaford. She said that this was weird because Huston “seemed kind of old.”
Several times, local folks came up to Welles and asked him for autographs. They were disappointed when he signed his name. People thought that he was Burl Ives.
22.
Editing was Welles’ particular forte. Many critics think that Welles was best editor in film history. Welles recognized that cinema was different from theater and painting and art-photography in that the director could control exactly what the viewer saw and when. Cinema, in Welles’ view, was editing – this was essence of the art form. When camerawork was completed, Welles had 100 hours of footage. Money had run out and there were no funds to complete the movie. The Iranians were tapped-out and no one else was interested in investing in the picture. So Welles set about cutting the movie in his spare time between other projects – he appeared frequently on TV and in other people’s movies and made commercials. He was a staple on late night talk shows. I recall seeing fragments of TOSOTW on the Dick Cavett Show, sometime in the late seventies. Whatever TOSOTW was, it looked like nothing else in existence at that time – the cutting was MTV-fast (there was no MTV then) and the lighting was ultra-high contrast and the dialogue was a flurry of overlapping aphorisms all theatrically delivered by a bizarre cast.
Welles technique in cutting the film was to arrange all takes in the approximate chronological order required by the narrative and, then, systematically remove material that he thought inferior until he had achieved a final cut. This was a time-consuming way to cut a movie. Welles was still editing the picture when he died in 1985. According to some accounts he had about 30 percent of the picture complete; some report that the movie was 40 percent edited. Fortunately, he left detailed notes as to his intentions with respect to the rest of the footage and, so, the film version of TOSOTW released in 2018, forty-eight years after Welles began work on the picture is thought to accurately reflect the director’s intentions. Joseph McBride, who plays Mr. Pister, the callow cineaste, was one of the consultants on the project, financed through Netflix, to reconstruct the movie.
23.
F is for fake was Welles’ last completed project. The film is an essay about lying and art forgery. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment, also magnificently edited. But the picture was never commercially shown in this country and made no money. Welles made the picture while working on TOSOTW and it was released in 1973. Welles’ appeared in The Muppet Movie and did voice-overs as well as his Paul Masson wine commercials (“We will sell no wine before it’s time”).
Welles was found dead, slumped over his typewriter in his modest Los Angeles home in October 1985. Like Jake Hannaford, he was seventy when he died.
24.
Necrology:
Norman Foster (“Billy Boy” in the film) died in 1976. Claude Chabrol who appears among the directors assembled at Hannaford’s party (playing himself) died in 1980. George Jessel (who plays himself) died in 1981. Dan Tobin who plays the English and Theater teacher, Doctor Burroughs (middle name Pease) from John Dale’s private school, died in 1982. Edmund O’Brien lingered in the VA and nursing homes until 1985. Welles died in 1985 as well. John Huston outlived Welles by about two years – he died in August 1987. (Huston directed his last picture The Dead from a wheelchair, using oxygen because he was unable breathe more than 20 minutes unaided.) Paul Stewart who plays Costello, Hannaford’s hatchet man, died in 1986. Paola Mori, Welles wife, was killed in a car crash in Las Vegas in 1986. Lilli Palmer (Zarah Valeska) died in Austria also in 1986. Cameron Mitchell (the make-up man “Zimmer”) died in 1994. Susan Strasberg (the Kael role, Juliette Riche) died in 1999. Tonio Selwart (the Baron) died in 2002. Gary Graver, the long suffering director of photography, died in 2006 – he had founded a non-profit and spent the last twenty years of his life advocating for the release of the film. Curtis Harrington, who plays himself, died in 2007. Dennis Hopper acting a very stoned version of himself died in 2010. Gregory Sierra who plays the belligerent director modeled on John Milius died in 2011. Both the film director, Paul Mazursky and Mercedes McCambridge (“the best voice in radio” Welles called her), who plays the film editor, Maggie Noonan, died in the year 2014.
Bob Random is still alive as is Rich Little (who still performs his impressions occasionally). Peter Bogdanovich survives, although he had to declare bankruptcy twice. (Billy Wilder said that Hollywood is normally a cut-throat place but that “sometimes, the town rises to the occasion and comes together such as when everyone wanted to see Peter Bogdanovich get his comeuppance.”) Oja Kodar is still alive as is her old nemesis, Beatrice Welles. Beatrice Welles is prominent in Sedona, Arizona where she has lived for most of her life. It’s not clear to me where Kodar lives.
25.
Light in various forms is the formal subject of TOSOTW. The film luxuriates in different species of light. An Impressionist painting may show us a beach along a river and impressively dressed bourgeoisie strolling in a park on its banks, but the real subject of the image is the light that bathes the scene. Similarly, Welles saturates his film with a mordant commentary on the state of cinematic art, acting, sexual politics and creativity, but the movie’s real concern is with the way light reveals its subjects. Light is entrapped in the mortuary images of still photographs. Cinema sculpts light and harnesses it to motion. Projectors cast images but also irradiate the darkness through which their colored beams sweep. The “box,” as it is called, collects and traps light. The film begins in the exhausted light of late afternoon, a flat greyish-yellow luminosity that seems dusty and half-petrified. In the film within the film, bright technicolor images reveal themselves to be densely patterned with reflections, moire-pattern shadows, images in tinted windows seen as if in a glass darkly. (Technicolor, which presupposes, a blazing clarity of light, becomes increasingly, ambiguous, reflections and counter-reflections complicating images until they are close to being illegible.) Scenes shot with psychedelic patterns feature light sprayed through colored gels and lenses. On the road to Zarah Valeska’s ranch, the cars and buses encounter the long shadows and fading light of the gloaming. At the party, light is used expressionistically as a Raumgestaltung– that is, a space-defining element. Figures appear in pools of artificial light. When the power fails, a symbol for Hannaford’s decline, people are rim-lit, the edges of hair and profile caught in fragmentary beams of radiance. The swimming pool casts cool, shimmering reflections on walls and rocks next to it. Hannaford can no longer keep the power running; his personal charisma is now leaking out all over the dark desert sands. Rooms are lit by the flicker of a projector or by lanterns and candles. Matches flare against the darkness. A film maker’s role to use the light to stave off darkness; this sort of creativity is Promethean, but the power has failed. As the Baron says: “No machine can run without wasting more energy than it produces.” Metaphorically, the Baron means that the machine of Hannaford’s creativity destroys more than it creates – in this case, the infernal device eats up people. Hannaford burns human beings to make light.
Hannaford is said to shine in the darkness. He emits luminosity. His sycophants and cronies shine in the light reflected from him. On their own, Hannaford’s “Mafia” – as it is called in the movie – are faint, scarcely luminous at all. They are merely glow-worms. (Welles’ mania for making patterns is revealed in the chorus of “Glow, little glow worm, glimmer” sung by the drunks late in the film – earlier these people have been characterized as faint glow-worms next to Hannaford’s radiance and, before the film ends, this metaphor will be embodied in the inebriates singing this song.) Hannaford is compared to God, the primordial light-bringer.
As the night wears on, people scan the horizon for traces of the dawn. The light of dawn is somehow spectral, dispirited, listless. As the sun rises over the freeway crowded with cars, the light dilutes the images cast on the drive-in screen and the false radiance of cinema fades into the real light of morning.
26,
A Surfeit of meanings congests the film. TOSOTW is imponderably intricate. However, most of its thematic material is stitched together in a complex pattern that seems unexpectedly coherent. Although TOSOTW is full of all sorts of stuff, it also has patterns that unify this material. Curiously, many of the film’s thematic structures don’t reveal themselves on first viewing. Someone watching the picture for the first time will, probably, be unaware of most of the film’s thematic scaffolding – these aspects of the picture can only be seen on a third or fourth viewing. In this respect Welles’ movie is prescient of the age of digital content. A film by Godard, for instance, like Weekend, also an exceedingly complicated and profound work, simply can not be appreciated on first viewing. Godard seems to be making his movies for study by repeated viewings, something that became practical only after video and DVD became prevalent. Similarly, Welles’ movie seems to anticipate that viewers will watch it several times in order to decipher some of the things it is about.
In form, the picture holds together because, for all of its painstaking and detailed embroidery, TOSOTW’s plot is very simple and mythic: the doom of great man, a sort of king, played out with Aristotelian exactitude across the span of a single day and night – the picture observes classical unities of time and space: everything happens in a 12 hour period in two locations, a film set and Zarah Valeska’s ranch in the desert. This mythic plot harkens back to Citizen Kane, a picture that like TOSOTW begins with the death of its protagonist, then, proceeding in chronicle (diachronic) fashion to show us how the hero died and the meaning of his life (and death). Since the plot is simple, even archetypal in form, Welles can afford to decorate the surface of the movie with an exhausting filigree of detail. The movie recalls those old Norse dragon figureheads, the surface of the serpent writhing with tiny entwined beasts and monsters all clawing and biting at one another. Jake Hannaford’s portrait similarly writhes with an intricately wrought surface of crooks, scoundrels, sycophants, and betrayers (the film is full of Judas figures) all fantastically detailed and presented in incisive, sardonic portraits.
Some of the film’s concerns are remarkably relevant to the film industry today. The picture depicts powerful men preying on women, primarily, it seems, as a distraction from their own conflicted sexuality. Much in the movie seems to prefigure the demise of industry titans like Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves (who appears in the film), and Scott Rudin. These men were given license to abuse not because they were creative in their own right, but because they were able to generate large amounts of money for the investors in their business enterprises. Creative geniuses are afforded wide latitude to offend and insult, but the money-men are worse – their depredations are based on brute economic advantage. This is one of themes that Welles explores in the movie and an element of the film that makes it prophetic.
Sexual predation in the film industry works on the basis of defining some people as less than human, that is, as merely expendable. But film, in general, has largely regarded its actors as disposable, properties not people. TOSOTW shows us an entertainment industry that runs on the destruction of human capital. Hitchcock said that he regarded actors “as mere cattle” to be herded around to hit their marks on film sets. Hitchcock’s derogatory view of his actors translates in TOSOTW into the emblem of a dozen John Dale mannequins, made as paper-mache props, and, apparently, motivated by one of the last scenes in the film within the film in which the effigy of Dale is beheaded by the titular wind. (In terms of the film’s plot, the mannequins are now superfluous – like the actor –because the shot of the decapitated doll has been completed and is, now, in the can; therefore, the superfluous effigies can be destroyed.) The leading lady in the film within the film is treated with similar disrespect – she’s bullied and peremptorily ordered around. But there’s a subterranean sense in which the actress may be the god or goddess that motivates the whole world that the film shows us. The pretty “cattle” used to make the moving images are mindless and without voice: notice that neither the Red, Red Indian nor John Dale has any lines either in the movie or the movie within the movie; they are entirely silent. Hitchcock’s derogation of actors as mere props is evident in the ribald scene is which a cock is literally hitched – Dale gets his junk tangled up in the Red Red Indian’s necklaces and she has to cut him free, brandishing a castrating knife for that purpose. (It’s the Indian’s castration of Dale, prefigured repeatedly in the movie, that humiliates the actor to the point that he storms off the set. People on-screen suggest that this will mean the end of the film within the film. But those worrying about the viability of the movie don’t appreciate the director’s cunning – Welles can make a movie without a leading man; he will just cut the film around that absence and disguise it by editing. After all this is how the entire TOSOTW was made, characters separated by years and continents spliced into a continuity that suggests that they are all present in the same place.)
But Welles isn’t content with this savage critique of the film industry’s attitude toward women and its disposable on-screen talent. (The film, by the way, is full of over-the-hill actors who have been put out to pasture by the studios – we see Lilli Palmer, Norman Foster, Edmund O’Brien and others, some of them part of Welles’ stock repertory company but now unable to find work in Hollywood, too old for the magic box.) Welles expands his analysis into a consideration of what we would now call “othering” – that is, we can discard people as irrelevant or without significant rights because they are “other” to us, alien and unfamiliar. This theme is expressed in the fact that the naked actress is “other” by virtue of the fact that she is defined as an Indian – like Elizabeth Warren, she’s called “Pocahontas” and, even, “Minnehaha”. The party set, in the Arizona desert, is full of Native-American artifacts – a big picture of Chief Joseph appears prominently displayed in the background of several scenes. Hannaford presents the Red Red Indian, his leading lady, with a human bone, ostensibly a skeletal relic of a murdered Indian, one of the 90,000 killed by Whites in California, on which someone has inscribed a tasteless joke. The bone is a symbol of the Red Red Indian’s “otherness”, her being set aside from the chatty partygoers – American Indians are usually portrayed in the media as stoic and laconic: they don’t talk but act. And that is the case in TOSOTW. The bone reminds us that John Dale’s “boner” was inadequate and this, in turn, reflects the film’s motif as to the return of the repressed: the Red Red Indian will have her revenge (she emasculates John Dale) and, similarly, Hannaford’s concealed homosexuality, something that he delights in detecting in others, will emerge before the nightmarish party is over.
Indians have always represented a nocturnal side to the American psyche, something savage and barbaric but, also, greatly to be desired; Huck and Jim dissatisfied by the comforts of civilization vow to “light out for the territories” at the end of Huckleberry Finn, the “territories” here referring to the Indian territories that are the exact opposite of Aunt Polly’s Hannibal, Missouri. It’s the difference between the free West and the slave State of Missouri. (I note that this is a theme in American literature that reflects the anxieties of the White writers who exploit these ideas.) The Red Red Indian is the antagonist to John Dale and will ultimately reveal his weakness – she castrates him. The Indian is not without power in this film, although the anxious men seek to deny her authority. Note, however, that in TOSOTW the Red Red Indian controls the gaze. In the very first scene in the film within the film, the Indian is in a steam bath full of writhing, sexualized female flesh. Observe that we see the naked women through her eyes. This pattern is repeated in the scene in the toilet at the psychedelic strip club – the Indian represents our point-of-view and her gaze structures what we see in that location. (The female gaze is explicitly referenced in the image of the sullen, pouting little girl who covers her eyes with some kind of transparent muslin.) Much theoretical ink has been spilled on the question of the “male versus female gaze” in cinema. My point is that Welles’ makes this subject thematic to his film before the concept became fashionable in feminist circles.
Indeed, the Indian may be god. Hannaford suggests that god is female, perhaps, embodied in the fickle, wayward wind. (Borges famously said that Citizen Kane was a labyrinth without a center; the other side of the wind, similarly, is no thing, a place that is nowhere.) Probably, the film posits two gods – one of them male (the director with his camera phallus) and the other female, the blowing wind that comes from nowhere. (In Freudian terms, the female’s lack of a phallus inspires castration anxiety in men; someone must have snipped it off of her – thus, the film’s pervasive imagery of castration.) The female force of the wind reveals that male sexuality is a hoax, a fiction – men talk a good game but they can’t perform. Male sexuality is ultimately a doll in the hands of women or, in other terms suggested by the movie, merely a scarecrow like the effigy of the leading man. Hannaford plays god in the sex scene in which John Dale’s penis gets tangled in the Red Red Indian’s necklace – “someone is watching,” he ominously declares, the voice of the divine Super-Ego that makes men limp. He intones his directions on the soundtrack, sending John Dale packing, although the camera, as eye in the sky, keeps rolling to capture the fiasco. But it’s the wind that prevails in the end. The Red Red Indian rips apart the balloon-like phallus and the wind scatters the artifacts of male presumptuousness across the desolate landscape.
Men are little creatures in the film’s imagery. Drunken Mexican midgets in big cowboy hats ejaculate fireworks into the sky that fizzle as they droop to the ground.
26.
Orson Welles was trouble, appearing many times before he was five in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly on the stage of Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Trouble is the love-child of Madame Butterfly and Pinkerton in the opera. The little boy appears in the opera’s spectacular final scene. In that role, he sits quietly beside his Japanese mother as she laments that Pinkerton has not returned as promised to her “in the Spring when the robins make their nests.” Instead, Pinkerton has come back to Nagasaki, where the story takes place, with an American wife. Humiliated and shunned by her own people, Butterfly sings an astonishing aria and, then, pulling a knife from her kimono, commits suicide. Nightly for a month or so, little Orson, cast as Trouble, appeared in the opera’s final scene, sat motionlessly while the orchestra soared through Puccini’s Liebestod and, then, gazed at the woman sitting beside her as she stabbed herself in the heart with a big shiny blade. I’ve always wondered what this experience, this “Rosebud” as it were, meant to little Orson Welles and how it affected him throughout the rest of his life.
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