THIS SPANISH EARTH (with Welles narration)

[mteal]

Thanks to Terry Wilson for alerting me to this on Facebook. You'll need to download the Veoh player in order to play the whole thing, but it's worth it. Welles' narration I think is more effective in conveying the humanity as well as the desperation of the struggle against Franco's fascist-supported forces, then Hemingway's more hard-boiled narration is. The film is almost always presented with the Hemingway narration. In fact, I've never seen Welles's narration available anywhere else.

http://www.veoh.com/collection/naranjas ... 56pBfNQnZG

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Mike: The edition with Orson Welles' narration is another real find on your part. I believe that Todd Baesen took me to a theater once where this SPANISH EARTH was playing, but naturally, most of a relatively few people who are aware of the film today know only the Hemingway version. In my teaching years, I showed that one a number of times, and a documentary on World War II often shown to high school history classes "quoted" Hemingway's prophetic observation in the film to the effect that if the Democracies did not stand up to Fascism in Spain, they would have to on a greater scale later on.

Welles' narration is more diffident, letting the film, the editing, and the music carry the message. He limits himself to clarifying matters, translating letters, or coming to conclusions about the actual events documented.

All in all, recalling the argument that Hemingway and Welles had about the narration and its delivery, remembering how the plot of For Whom the Bell Tolls turns on the destruction of a crucially located bridge, I rather give Hemingway the nod on this one.

But it's good to have Welles' voice, too, and the Veoh Player is worth downloading in itself.

Glenn

[mteal]

Thanks for the response, Glenn. I agree that Welles's narration seems less obtrusive, or at least less forceful, and so the images speak for themselves more. It's good to have both versions though, and both versions should be part of a single DVD set sometime.

Unfortunately I have only a superficial understanding of the Spanish Civil War, but it’s an event that apparently made a large impression on Welles, as he referenced it several times throughout his career. In LADY FROM SHANGHAI, Welles’s foolish knight-errant Michael O’Hara admits that he once killed a Franco spy while George Grisby (the Nelson Rockefeller parody) counters that he was a Franco supporter. MR. ARKADIN takes place mainly inside of Franco’s Spain, while THE BIG BRASS RING screenplay takes place in both Barcelona and Madrid, and seems to point out the similarities between the Spanish Civil War and Viet Nam (both are seen by many as proxy wars). Two episodes of the AROUND THE WORLD TV series take place in Spain, and the short French interview recently linked at the Facebook Wellesnet has Welles making the fascinating revelation that he saw one of Franco’s animated films! (It would be interesting to know under what circumstances he saw it. I’d be inclined to doubt that it was at a public screening.)

And then, of course, there is DON QUIXOTE, which also takes place in Franco’s Spain. Given that Welles made DQ, Around the World, Arkadin, all in the 1950’s, they make up what might be called Welles’s “Spanish period” (a‘la Picasso’s periods). According to Wiki, it was also around this time that opposition in the U.S. to Franco’s fascist dictatorship was being reevaluated and softened by the Eisenhower/Nixon administration in order to turn Spain into an anti-communist ally for the Cold War. Welles would have been right in the middle of all this, which is why his Quixote is such a huge loss, not only aesthetically, but perhaps politically as well. In the 1982 BBC interview, Welles says he wanted to turn the Quixote footage into an F FOR FAKE-like essay on the disappearing virtues of Spain a few years after the death of Franco. The failure of this film to come to fruition is another huge loss.

One can’t help but think the experience of narrating THIS SPANISH EARTH was seminal influence on all of these projects.

[Glenn Anders]

Mike: While it would take a book which no one has written yet to place Orson Welles and his works in the context of Spain and her modern history, you have done a pretty good job of it. Welles would have been about 20 when the Spanish Civil War began, and for many young men, both on the Right and on the Left, the war was a romantic lodestone. As you document, he was no exception. But instead of going to Spain to link with Ernest Hemingway and other writers he admired, or joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, as his touchstone, Robert Meltzer, had tried to do, Welles lent himself to various Popular Front artistic and political causes in the United States -- which is where SPANISH EARTH comes in. The war was the first opportunity the Western Democracies had to stand up to Nazi and Fascist forces, when Germany and Italy aided General Francisco Franco in his overthrow of Spain's first elected government. Britain, France and the United States hesitated to ally themselves with Joseph Stalin in opposition to the budding Axis, prompting thousands of individual men and women to flood into Spain, determined to fight with the Republicans against the Fascists.

As you suggest, Welles may have been conflicted about the Spanish Civil War. Remember, as just a lad, he had spent a summer learning to be a bullfighter; he often said that time was a magical one he never forgot. In subsequent years he rued his aspirations to be a matador failed come to fruition, and when an old man, he told Antonio Ordonez, a close friend of Hemingway, that he would like his ashes interred in the famous bullfighter's garden at Ronda. Beatrice Welles actually took Welles' ashes there. [Larry French and Todd Baesen have looked into the well where the ashes were scattered.] My point is that Welles was always lamenting lost "Golden Ages," and the Spain of Don Quixote was one of those. It was an Age which he might have imagined he took a small part in when a young torero, an Age which ironically he stood against politically but longed for in a cultural sense as the furnace of the Civil War raged between 1935 and 1939.

Possibly that explains, Mike, why Welles spent so much time in Fascist Spain after World War II. He still admired the culture which Aristocratic Spain had produced, the remnants of which Franco was dedicated to preserving. If that be true, it is one more paradox in a man of many paradoxes.

Glenn

[mteal]

Yes, I forgot that Welles chose Spain as his final resting place, which speaks volumes about it’s influence on him. The last bit of narration for the English-language DON QUIXOTE says “This film was made by a man whose ashes are scattered across the Spanish countryside. His name was Orson Welles.” I haven’t seen Jess Franco’s Spanish-language version of DQ (which was completed before the English version), but the original 1992 Variety review of it indicates that these final words were spoken by Welles himself (in Spanish). Can anyone that owns the Spanish DVD confirm that?

You’re quite right about Welles’s life and career being filled with inscrutable paradoxes. He was definitely torn between his humanistic and aristocratic impulses. That Catalonia recently voted to ban bullfighting suggests they might also have done so in the 30’s if Franco’s military coup had not succeeded. I wonder what Hemingway and Welles would have thought of that. In addition to maintaining and playing up bullfighting as a national institution, Franco is also credited with preserving the authority and status of the Catholic church in Spain, with the help of the mysterious Opus Dei (one of the villains of THE DAVINCI CODE). Franco’s suppression of women’s rights for the sake of tradition was almost Khomenei-like and an unfortunate part of the “anti-modern” culture that he brought about by force.

Speaking of Islamic power figures, that idyllic summer in Spain that you mentioned was supplemented by a trip to Morocco as well, where Welles claims to have stayed at the palace of a Muslim chieftain. This calls to mind what a Gordian knot of religious and ethnic influences that whole region has always been (there was a strong Jewish presence in both countries as well). In fact, just as some modern scholars have suggested that Shakespeare was a closeted Catholic, others have suggested that Cervantes may have actually been a closeted Jew or Muslim and that Quixote was conceived as a Morisco (Moor-like). This would tie Quixote in with Othello. We’ll probably never know, but there’s little doubt that that rich, cultural stew, and the many ethnic/religious “masks” worn by many to escape persecution, was probably a large part of the fascination of Welles for both Spain and Morocco, even during the time when that multi-cultural quality had been all but stamped out by Franco.

[Glenn Anders]

Good work, Mike.

I'd forgotten about his visit to Morocco -- Spanish Morocco.

Glenn

[mteal]

Here's an interesting article about China's desire to make internationally appealing pictures that has some interesting info about the Franco regime's relationship with Hollywood producer Samuel Bronston. Orson Welles did the uncredited narration for Bronston's KING OF KINGS in 1961.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/ar ... ?piece=558

Here are the Franco excerpts:

In the early 1950s, the Franco regime sought an exit from a period of international political isolation. A key part of its effort involved trying to use movies at home and abroad to tout the glories of Spanish culture and justify the regime’s tenure. The Spanish Ministry of Information and Tourism (MIT) was put in charge of motion picture production and domestic distribution. It approved scripts, doled out funds and sometimes commissioned projects. Things did not go so well. With few exceptions, MIT’s films were unpopular at home and box office duds overseas. Spain in the early postwar years was provincial and more than a little xenophobic; the Franco regime was intolerant of cultural or political assertiveness by ethnic minorities like the Basques and Catalans. This was not a promising environment for producing exportable movies.

But still the Franco regime tried. Perhaps the greatest cinematic disappointment for the dictatorship was the failure of Alba de America (1951), a big-budget epic made under government sponsorship that lionized Columbus’s New World exploits. The movie was handsomely mounted, but the script was full of heavy-handed references to the grandeur of Spain and its inspired leadership. Despite the MIT’s high hopes for success in America, Hollywood distributors viewed Alba de America as box-office poison and refused to release it.

Starting in the mid-1950s, however, independent American producers started coming to Spain, looking to make grand-scale movies while keeping their production costs down. The Franco regime was initially suspicious. (Hollywood was full of Jews and communists, of course.) Conservative elements were greatly concerned about the cultural pollution that outsiders would bring to Spain. Still, the regime was desperate to improve its international image, as well as desperate for dollars, so it decided it was worth the risk.

The gamble immediately began to pay off in terms of influence, and literally as well. American movie producers were spending millions of dollars in Spain, while American and European tourists began to visit in droves the Spanish sites they had seen on the silver screen. And Spain’s image was gradually being refurbished from a sleepy backwater and fascist police state into a modern, even glamorous country of solid Hollywood fare.

The key figure in establishing “Hollywood in Madrid” was Samuel Bronston. A relatively minor figure on the Hollywood scene when he arrived in Spain in 1958 to film John Paul Jones (1959), Bronston had used his preternatural selling skills to gain the financial backing of a deep-pocketed partner, Pierre du Pont III. Like the U.S. producers who preceded him, Bronston initially assumed that he would make one film in Spain and then move on. But he soon recognized that the Franco regime, if handled correctly, could be a very congenial host for a permanent Hollywood studio, and his partnership with du Pont gave him the means to keep a constant pipeline of films in production.

Between 1958 and 1964, the Estudios Samuel Bronston in Madrid turned out a series of ultra-lavish, highly publicized motion pictures featuring top international movie stars like Charlton Heston, Sophia Loren, David Niven and John Wayne. Bronston’s studio trained a generation of highly skilled Spanish film technicians and became the driving force in turning Spain into one of the top international movie production venues of the 1960s. The Franco regime loved Bronston, showering him with medals, citations and lots of financial support, most of it covert. The greatest of Bronston’s epics, in both critical and box office terms, was El Cid (1961). The film starred Charlton Heston, then the world’s most popular male actor, as the knight who began the Christian re-conquest of Spain from the Moors in the 11th century. El Cid was one of 1962’s top-earning movies, and it made Time Magazine’s “10 Best Films” list for the year.

An American producer had accomplished what Spanish producers couldn’t: He took a quintessentially Spanish subject that would have seemed arcane to non-Spaniards and made it attractive to American and international audiences. And he did it under the regime’s perpetual scrutiny. Bronston, like every other American producer who worked in Franco’s Spain, made all of his movies under the supervision of the Franco dictatorship, whose officials vetted scripts before allowing filming to begin. Spanish government ministers and censors not only flagged objectionable material; they often made non-negotiable demands for script changes. American producers in Spain generally complied without protest, because the alternative was to shut down production. Even left-wing lions like Stanley Kramer, best known for liberal “message” films like On the Beach and Judgment at Nuremberg, toed the dictatorship’s line, reshaping the script for The Pride and the Passion, for example, when the Franco regime objected to some passages. Such Hollywood classics as Lawrence of Arabia, Patton and Doctor Zhivago ran this gauntlet. (The producers of Doctor Zhivago had to get a special dispensation from the fervently anti-communist government to film actors singing the Socialist Internationale.)

The ruthlessly instrumental Samuel Bronston characteristically outdid his industry colleagues by hiring a Spanish government propaganda official to help with script-writing on several of his films, including El Cid, where he helped fine-tune the script elements that subtly equated Francisco Franco and Rodrigo de Bivar. But while Bronston always sought to please the Franco regime, his first concern was international profitability. He wanted a hit film as big as Ben Hur, and he and his studio, unlike his Spanish hosts, had the tools and experience to try to make one.

As it became obvious to the Franco regime that Hollywood-produced films about Spain, or films simply made in Spain, had a cachet and credibility with overseas audiences that domestically made movies didn’t, the dictatorship eventually codified its policy of welcoming international film producers as “Operación Propaganda Exterior.” The top-secret plan demanded that films

"a foreigner produces in Spain, about any facet of the national life, present to the foreign public a character of objectivity and dispassion that is not always conceded to nationals. . . . Co-production means . . . for the most part the guarantee of a world-wide distribution of the film, leaving the public unaware of the actual origin, obviating all possible suspicion of propaganda."

[mteal]

Jonathon Rosenbaum reprinted some of his writing on Joris Ivens recently, including a highly laudatory review of his last film A TALE OF THE WIND, which is available on DVD as part of a collection (PAL format only):

Joris Ivens’s Labor-Intensive Industrials
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=6230

Wind from the East (A TALE OF THE WIND)
http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=24591

Joris Ivens Collection on DVD:

http://www.amazon.com/Collection-parallèle-Indonesia-Valpara%C3%ADso-Rotterdam-Europoort/dp/B0026796P0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1298641895&sr=8-1

[Glenn Anders]

Thanks, Mike: Samuel Bronstein was a name I often came across over the years, and because I'm not familiar with the work of Joris Ivens, Rosenbaum's articles are of interest.

Glenn

[mteal]

Glenn, I hope the Ha-Ra Club isn't as dead as this place is.

I'm not familiar with Ivens' films either. That 5-dvd set I linked is too pricey for me. I don't have an all-region player anyway. But Rosenbaum's review of A TALE OF THE WIND has piqued my curiosity. From his description, it sounds like the film may have some of the same playful spirit as F FOR FAKE. I especially like the shot of Ivens stepping out of the Melies moon. I'm hoping the film becomes available soon via some kind of download.

[mteal]

Here's an interesting writeup on the different versions of THE SPANISH EARTH I came across online:

"Compiling a filmography of the films of Joris Ivens will not be an easy job. Just a list with film titles will not suffice, for many of his films have been made in different versions or have been distributed with minor or major cuts, thanks to censorship and distributors themselves, but sometimes also thanks to Joris Ivens himself. The different versions of The Spanish Earth will illustrate this.

The known version of this film is with Ernest Hemingway's commentary, spoken by Hemingway himself. This was the version that came in distribution in 1937. The first public screening was on 13 July that year in the Philharmonic Auditorium of Los Angeles. But initially the commentary, written by Hemingway, was to be spoken by Orson Welles, who was proposed by Archibald MacLeish, one of the founding members of Contemporary Historians. Hemingway had written an extensive commentary, which was already importantly cut down by Joris Ivens before Orson Welles received it. Welles too thought that the commentary was in some places redundant, and some minor changes were made before he recorded it.

The recordings and the sound editing by Helen van Dongen were finished in June 1937, and a few private screenings were organized in Hollywood and Los Angeles to hear the first reactions to the film. Some collaborators of Contemporary Historians, like Lillian Hellman, Herman Shumlin and Dorothy Parker, thought that the voice of Orson Welles was too smooth in relation to the powerful images. It was decided that Hemingway should speak his own commentary, for he had the direct experience of the front line. According to the critiques this sounded much more sincere than Welles voice, but in fact there is not that much difference. On 8 July, Ivens, Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn were invited to the White House to show the film to President Roosevelt and his wife. They used the Welles-version for this screening, maybe because the sound editing of the Hemingway-version, which premiered only five days later, wasn't finished yet.

Thanks to censorship throughout the world there are still other version, e.g. in the East German version the scene with Gustav Regler was cut out, because Regler, an anti-fascist writer, had rejected communism. But the major mutilation of the film has been made in France by Jean Renoir in 1938. The film became 10 minutes shorter and the all too explicit critique on Nazi Germany was cut out in order not 'to offend the neighbours'.
Also in other countries cuts were made, but it is probably clear that one title of a film can hide many versions of the same film, thanks to changes made in post-production, in distriubution and/or in censorship."

[Glenn Anders]

My direct experience with SPANISH EARTH comes mainly from two sources: excerpts of Hemingway's narrated version in a documentary about events leading up the World War II in Europe, which I often showed to my high school classes; and Orson Welles' narrated edition, shown several years ago at the San Francisco Film Festival. I must say, perhaps unfairly because the Hemingway clips were no doubt cherry-picked, that I prefer Hemingway's narration and delivery. He seems passionate, precise, and sounding the alarm. Welles, on the other hand, is laid back, using a "demo's da facts" approach; a more quiet, less intrusive method, letting the images tell most of the story by themselves.

It's rather a shame that these two insightful giants of democracy, fighting in the same cause against Fascism, should have gotten into a messy squabble which tended to take the public's eye off what was really at stake.

Thank you for providing the commentary, Mike.

Glenn