Uncredited Welles

[Flint]

Throatsprockets-
I brought up "Nightmare" & "Poltergeist" merely as (what I thought) would be indisputable examples of someone not credited as director being clearly regarded as the "author" of the film. If you consider Selnick the primary creative force behind "Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas" that's fine. I can't argue that point with you as I'm too baffled to know where to begin. However, since you DO agree with me concerning "Poltergeist" then you DO agree that there are situations where someone other than the director could be considered the author of the film. That's the whole point I was trying to make. Moving on:

I am not advocting any particular film that involved Welles (not as director) that I think should be considered his. I simply pose the question. Several people have weighed in with particular films they think could possibly be debated and have listed their arguments in support.

Concerning your question:
"If Welles wrote a script and designed some sets and then someone else made it without him it'd be a Welles movie, but if a producer wrote the script and designed the sets but Welles personally supervised every element of the movie through shooting and postproduction then it'd be the producer's movie?"

You'll have to ask in regards to a specific film, since the answer could be yes or no to both parts of the question. "Jouney into Fear" would fit the criteria of the former. In this SPECIFIC instance, I think a strong argument could be made for "yes, this is a Welles film" since an overwhelming percentage of the creative decisions were made by him.
To answer the second question: I would say that if Welles was hired as a director on a film conceived by a producer with the power & creative force of someone like Speilberg and agreed to an arrangement (like Hooper on "Poltergeist") whereby he essentially fullfilled the preconceived plans of said producer, then yes, I would consider the film the producer's. However, this is completely academic. Without an actual film to point to, one can't really say. It's entirely possible, that despite the dictates of the producer, that with someone of Welle's capacity as a brilliant director, that the entire ambiance & tone of the film would have been reshaped through the lens of his talent and come out completely Wellesian.

It all boils down to the final product. Does "Poltergiest" FEEL like a Tobe Hooper film or a Speilberg film? Does "Journey" FEEL like a Welles or Foster film? And as with all subjective questions its likely to vary from person to person.

One final point: This question is certainly not binary. More often then not the third possiblity holds true: the film is the result of several creative people working in concert. Only I think when you are dealing with exceptional creative types like Welles, Kubrick, Allen, Hitchcock, etc do you even find the question relevent.


I am very much in agreenment with your final statement:

"As far as I'm concerned clever camera angles and technical skil that Welles may have brought to other director's movies when he took over/helped out/whatever are all very well, but unless it's constructed in a Wellesian way and is about Wellesesque ideas, it just ain't Welles. You can draw a clear connecting line through everything from Kane to Fake, and movies like Black Magic and even The Third Man won't appear anywhere on that line, though movies as vastly different as The Trial and Chimes At Midnight will."

Well put.


-Flint

[mteal]

Flint,
Welles reveals that he produced JANE EYRE in THIS IS ORSON WELLES. Another thing that suggests Welles was the true auteur of the film is the fact that Jane Eyre is generally considered one of the best of the Campbell Playhouse radio shows, and that Welles reportedly ruined the original acetate of the program by playing it over and over in preparation for the film.

Blunted,
I think you're right that the ending of JANE EYRE feels a little abrupt. Of course, they cut out an entire section of the novel, where Jane - having just left Rochester - gets rescued from starvation by a puritanical missionary who tries to make her his wife. Concerning the screenplay of Jane, I believe Houseman and Aldous Huxley prepared a screenplay for Selznick, but then Welles reworked it to make it conform more to his artistic style and persona.

[colwood]

While this is slightly OT, according to amazon.fr, Journey into Fear is making its debut on DVD in France on February 3.

The cover's subtitle seems to translate to "a film of and with Orson Welles."

[throatsprockets]

Flint -

Good call on the "feel" of a movie. I don't consider either Selick or Burton to be the primary creative force behind the movie; it feels like both of them to me, but I also think that Danny Elfman's songs (and his voice - he sings Jack Skellington) are just as important. It says "Tim Burton's" above the title, but I reckon it's a true collaborative effort. You might say that Selick and Elfman were faithful to Burton's original story, rather than that any of them were the auteur.

Kinda like - to go with the Poltergeist angle - the Spielbeg-produced movie Gremlins feels a lot like a Spielberg-directed movie in many ways, but the whole "murderous Looney Tunes on acid" feel comes from the actual director, Joe Dante.

I also think it's not just hugely talented filmmakers that make unique and distinctive movies. You'd never mistake an Ed Wood movie as being made by anyone else, for example.

Despite what I said earlier, I'm keen to know about any movies which Welles had a hand in directing, 'cause I've seen just about everything I know about and I'm hoping beyond hope that I can still regain - even for a second - the frission of seeing Kane or Ambersons or The Trial or Chimes or Fake for the first time.

[Flint]

Throatsprockets-
I very much agree with your point about Ed Wood. I guess I'd have to ammend my original statement to say that (for me) authorship of a film belongs to the person whose creative stamp is so clear & unique (whether brilliant or no) that the movie feels like it was all done by that singular person despite the collabarative reality of film production.

As for your second point about discovering new Welles, definitely check out "One Man Band" if you haven't seen it. There's significant clips from his (as yet) unfinished films including "Other Side of the Wind" and "Merchant of Venice" that even in their brevity totally blew me away.

-Flint.

[Glenn Anders]

Dear Flint: Just watching a few sequences from John Huston's IN THIS OUR LIFE. I've never seen it. Based on the 1941 Pulitzer Prize novel by Ellen Glasgow, a contemporary of Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons). Both writers were still alive when Huston and Welles were making their films.

IN THIS OUR LIFE is more melodramatic than . . . AMBERSONS, but the theme of a family in decline, and a spoiled offspring (in this case a daughter), is similar. The screenplay is by Howard Koch, Welles' "War of the Worlds" writer, who would soon be working on CASABLANCA.

Huston's style is very Wellsian, in the scenes I watched, like nothing he ever did again. The film was not successful financially, but it plays well today, and its ratings are on the way up.

Definitely Category 4.

Glenn

[Sir Bygber Brown]

Hi there.

Am just watching Treasure Island (and am quite pleased with Welles' performance - its not at all among his worst. I expected an absolute shocker after reading Joseph McBride on the subject!). Was also pleased with the nice size of his role. Too often (i hear) he resented doing these projects to finance his independent directorial work, and so wanted to spend as little time on set as possible. But here there's pleanty of Welles to go around. Probably the longest time on-screen in another man's picture. There are also pleanty of close-ups, which are rare for Welles. I think he was shy of the fact that he didn't feel the part like a method actor, and knew that this shows in the eyes, so he shied (spelling?) away from closeups. But that's just a theory.

Anyway, when they're good, they're my favourite bits. I think i just love watching his face. About half way thru Treasure Island when he knifes a guy there's a brilliant scene he plays in reasonably close quarters. His closeup when he says the line about the halo near the end of Touch of Evil is probably my favourite closeup from what i've seen. I also love the closeups in F for Fake, and in the readings and monologues we see throughout One Man Band. It was all in his face. The entire character could be seen in either his voice or his face alone. And i think Hank Quinlan is the most perfect union of face, voice and body in his entire acting corpus.

But anyway - the subject at hand...

I know this subject irks Orson admirers, b.c it seems ridiculous that Orson could secretly be masterminding other men's movies when they wouldn't pay him to make his own - but i did notice certain low angles in Treasure Island (only in shots where Orson is on-camera, of course) - specifically, when he is talking to the boy on the boat, and in the background you see the entire mast of the boat - which struck me as Wellesian. I didn't notice any particular crane-shots, and certainly nothing of the visual beauty of any movie where Welles was completely in charge. But what made me curious (despite Orson's not admitting to Bogdanovich that he made any small suggestions to the director on Treasure), is that the mise-en-scene of most shots where Welles was not visible on screen seemed virtually incompetent, or maybe just very dull, compared to when he is visible.

I know this is probably a long shot - but maybe its interesting to discuss (unless you guys already have!) ?

[mteal]

TREASURE ISLAND could probably be considered another fringe-area Welles film, although it's not that good, and IMO Welles is terrible as Long John Silver. I think he probably did direct parts of it, because the original plan was for Welles to make Treasure Island and then use some of the sets to make CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT as well. As Peter Conrad points out in his rambling but often brilliant new book on Welles, the relationship between Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver is similar in some ways to the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff, so the idea of doing the two stories in tandem in order to illuminate those similarities may have been intriguing to Welles (He had already done a similar thing in the 50's by staging productions of KING LEAR and MOBY DICK). Welles did make Chimes but didn't bother finishing Treasure Island, although I'm fairly convinced that some Welles-shot footage did get used when the project was finished a few years later by others.

[Glenn Anders]

Dear Sir Bygber and mteal: You are quite right about TREASURE ISLAND. I might note that Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island had been a childhood favorite of Welles, and that he never entirely abandoned the loves of that time. His mentor, "Skipper" Hill, encouraged him to bring out editions of Shakespeare and to encourage reading classics among the young. About a third of the Mercury Theater's stage audiences were students and teachers, rare in that day. When Welles brought the Mercury to Radio, partly to finance further stage productions of Shakespeare (one was to be Five Kings, the basis of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT), his first choice was an adaptation of Treasure Island. At the last minute, he switched to another surefire favorite, Dracula, but "Treasure Island" was the second Mercury Theater on the Air production, and one of the best.

It is fitting then that Welles should make a deal, according to evil David Thomson, with the original Spanish producer, Emiliano Piedra, to put up money in order to write, direct and star in TREASURE ISLAND, in 1964, while secretly shooting CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT. As Thomson would have it, the only real set built for CHIMES . . . was The Admiral Benbow Inn, which doubled as Mistress Quickly's tavern. By the time, CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT was complete, Piedra had caught on. He is listed as a producer of the latter film. TREASURE . . . languished until it fell into the always fatal hands of Harry Alan Towers, who had it completed under the guidance of John Hough, in 1971.

So it seems that TREASURE ISLAND is definitely a Category 3 Welles' project.

[Might note that Charlton Heston, a figure mentioned occasionally in these pages, turned in one of his last good performance as Long John Silver in a TV production of TREASURE ISLAND (1990), directed by his son, Fraser Heston.]

I might as well throw in LAST EXIT (1962) as a possible Category 2, definitely Category 3. Also John Huston's THE BIBLE (1966).

Glenn

[Sir Bygber Brown]

That's exciting about Treasure - i quite agree that as a whole it doesn't stack up next to a category 1 project. But i was surprised at how watchable it was. Considering the info you give, i also noted some scenes near the beginning of interest which Welles was not in, but which looked like Wellesian compositions. In addition, though it may be a product of the similarities of the source novels, the childhood sequence remind me of the childhood sequence in Jane Eyre.

This could also be a product of Welles' script.

[Citizen K]

Just to divert a bit from The Treasure Island conversation, but remaining on topic: I recently noticed that in Max von Sydow's autobiography (called "Flea Circus", I don't know whether it's been translated into English) he discusses John Huston's film The Kremlin Letter. As you all know, Orson Welles has a supporting part in it. Anyway, von Sydow recalls that Welles took over directing the scenes he was in, had wonderful ideas and changed dialogue, all this while Huston sat back in his chair, amused. von Sydow also writes that Huston was, at least at this point of his career, very relaxed about his direction, letting actors have their way and rarely having a solid idea about how to begin working on a scene.

[Glenn Anders]

Dear Sir Bygber: If Thomson is correct in his observation that the Admiral Benbow Inn and Mistress Quickly's place were the same set, intended for a dual purpose, it makes sense that the handling of the Jack Hawkin's early scenes would have been done there, perhaps by Welles himself.

And very interesting, Citizen K, about THE KREMLIN LETTER. It is a Huston film that I have always thought underrated. At the time, the amorality of American spy-craft pooh-poohed, and the suggestion that a high CIA official could be in cahoots with his opposite number in Moscow, was seen as sheerest fantasy, but now we know, that James Jesus Angleton, Chief of CIA Counter-Intelligence, very much feared that the latter arrangement existed somewhere within The Company. I rather think that there may have been some covert attacks on the film for political reasons.

It was Huston's style, from quite early on in his career, to let actors find their roles, and to depend upon "happy accidents." In the four or so collaborations they had in John Huston directorial projects, most successfully on MOBY DICK, Huston trusted Welles more than he would have most actors.

I would like to get hold of Von Sydow's autobiography.

Thanks for the tip.

Glenn

[Citizen K]

Dear Sir Bygber,

The von Sydow book is actually in form of interviews, not unlike the famous Truffaut/Hitchcock book, that is why it is credited to von Sydow and interviewer Elisabeth Sörenson. I read a Finnish translation of the book, the original is obviously in Swedish and it may not have been translated into English.

Here is a little summary I found on the original Swedish version of the book:

Sydow, Max von / Sörenson, Elisabeth: MAX VON SYDOW BERÄTTAR. Stockholm: Brombergs, 1989. 335 pages, with photos.

[Sir Bygber Brown]

I don't think i mentioned, but another thing which struck me as fairly good in Treasure Island was the first swordplay scene. It reminded me of the skillful way Welles draws you into the battle in Falstaff, making it look like more is happening than actually is.