Welles and THE CHETNIKS - WWII propaganda show

[mteal]

Welles and The Chetniks

Here's another one of those strange and mysterious ironies that seems to be scattered throughout Orson Welles's career: In 1943, at the height of WWII, Welles and Vincent Price starred in a 15-minute radio program for Treasury Star Parade called THE CHETNIKS. The program was designed to extoll the virtues and bravery of the Serbian Nationalists who were fighting Adolph Hitler's forces and the Nazi's puppet regime in Croatia (called "The Ustasha"). Welles, in his favored Slavic accent which he would later use for MR. ARKADIN, plays Dushan, the leader of one of the Chetnik units, made up of men who have given up their identities to become nameless, anti-fascist crusaders. The program certainly makes the Chetniks look like heroes, and was probably commisioned by the U.S. State Dept. to drum up support for their cause. The irony is that, shortly after the U.S. and Britain formed an alliance with Stalin for the final campaign against Hitler, the Chetniks were suddenly denounced as Nazi collaborators, and Allied support shifted instead to Tito's pro-communist "Partisans". Then, after the war was over, and the Iron Curtain had descended across Europe, Tito became one of the most powerful dictators in the Communist world, an ambiguous ally/rival to Stalin. Under Tito's regime, the various ethnic and religious groups that made up Yugoslavia (including Croats, Bosnians, Albanians and Serbs) were held together in relative balance and stability, but the Chetniks were ruthlessly suppressed and, in many cases, executed.

By the 1960's, Welles' involvement with Oja Kodar caused him to spend much time working in Communist Yugoslavia, including making THE DEEP there, and appearing (another irony) as a villianous pro-Nazi Chetnik leader in Tito's elaborate propaganda film THE BATTLE OF NERETVA, opposite Yul Brynner, who played a heroic Partisan leader. In yet another irony, Welles and Brynner both died on the same day, Oct. 10th, 1985, which was approximately halfway between the death of the anti-Chetnik Tito in 1980, and the rise to power of the pro-Chetnik Slobodan Milosevic. Under Milosevic's leadership, rejuvenated Chetnik forces tried to maintain the Yugoslavian state by force while Croatia and Slovenia both broke away with NATO help and formed independent republics of their own. Milosevic's Chetnik forces were then accused of ethnic cleansing and other atrocities against Croats, Muslims in Bosnia, and even other Serbs. One of the most highly regarded anti-Chetnik propaganda films of the time was Oja Kodar's 1993 VRIJEME ZA... (which translates as A TIME FOR...), which was said to have been a great morale booster during the darkest days of the Croatian resistance movement (Does anyone have any info about how to obtain a copy of this film?)

Milosevic's death in prison yesterday is considered a victory for the Chetniks and other Serbian nationalists, since his war-crimes trial will end without a conviction, even after five years and an estimated $200 million dollars. His followers can now try to paint him as a martyr. At least, a return to power of the fascist "Ustasha" is said to be an impossibility in a free Croatia. Anyway, Welles's CHETNIKS radio program is a fascinating relic that exposes the tortured and complex moral ambiguity of war and war-time alliances.

BTW, if anyone wants to make any additions or corrections to my far-from-expert account of Yugoslavian history, feel free.

[Glenn Anders]

Draja Mihailovich was a Royalist General, who early in World War II, after the fall of Yugolsavia to the Italians and the Germans, found favor with the exiled King in London, and the Chetnik guerillas he organized became the first organized resistance. Mihailovich was hailed as a great hero, and a number of propaganda films, journalistic reports and radio programs were produced in the West. The British SOE performed clandestine supply operations to the Chetniks along the Dalmatian coast.

But though the Chetniks did help the Allies, rescuing our downed or escaped airmen, they had another agenda, to ethnically cleanse Bosnia and Western Serbia of Croats and Muslims (much as the Serbs did after the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990's). What the British, Americans and other Western Allies did not understand was the complexity of long standing tribal and ethnic feuds (Croats, Bosnians, Serbians), political and religious differences (Royalists, Fascists, Communists, Catholics, Muslims, Orthodox Christians). By 1943, Josef Broz (Marshall Tito) had raised the Partisans, which had Stalin's favor. The Ustashi, a old secret society, probably infiltrated both sides, but were identified with the Croatians. [They helped smuggle Nazis to Rome after the War, harbored them there, and provided passage for many to South America; see the subtext of Welles THE STRANGER.]Soon the two groups were fighting each other. The Chetniks sometimes cooperated with the Nazis and Italian Fascists to carry out their homegrown feuds. A decision, fraught with discension, was made to withdraw Allied support for Mihailovich and throw it to Tito's Partisans.

Mihailovic was tried and executed by Belgrade after the War, but a secret order, signed by President Harry S. Truman, the only one of its kind, gave him a posthumous Order of Merit from the United States for rescuing 500 airmen. The award was not delivered to Mihailovic's daughter until the early 1990's, about the time Oja Kodar wrote and directed VRIJEME ZA... (1993), with photography by Gary Graver.

I can neither understand your explanation of what happened during and after the War to the Chetniks, nor what VRIJEME ZA is really all about. We can note that Oja Kodar is a Croat, and that Serbia and Croatia had a civil war in the 1990's. There were a couple of civil wars, and it is still not sorted out. The cat's breakfast of Communist, Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox and Fascist factions and their claims are hard for an outsider to understand. I assume that Miss Kodar favored the Croats.

[If you are puzzled, look at what is happening in Iraq, and perhaps soon in Syria and Iran. You are in on the ground floor.]

It would take a true, impartial expert on Balkan History to define all the threads of this story, perhaps even accurately interpret the nuances of VRIMEME ZA's plot. They are hard to come by!

Glenn

[mteal]

Yes, you're right about that. I found very little about VRIJEME ZA... online except for a couple brief plot explanations, one by the NY Times:

PLOT DESCRIPTION
This is a film of some historical interest, as it was a patriotic film made for Croatians during the time of their conflicts with Serbia/Yugoslavia in the early '90s. It was so important to the war effort and the morale of the Croatian people that special screenings were arranged in underground shelter which were well-attended even while bombing was going on. Marja (Nada Gacesic-Livakovic) and her teenaged son Darko (Zvonimir Novosel) are forced to flee their home village when the Serbian Cetniks come in, and they settle into life in a town. Marja even finds a job at the hospital, and Darko embarks on his first romance with a girl who has been orphaned by the war. One evening Marja comes home to find that Darko is missing: he has joined the Croat resistance. Later, in a moving scene, she receives his body and travels with it by cart over the countryside to a burial spot. One further note of interest is that this film was directed by Oja Kodar, who was famed director Orson Welles' last companion and a colleage in his filmmaking efforts. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Thanks for the info and clarifications, Glenn. You're right that outsiders like us can make only fumbling attempts to piece together some kind of understanding of what is going on in that part of the world. That's why it would be interesting to see VRIJEME ZA... and get Oja Kodar's perspective on it, even if it's a 13-year-old film. One suspects that Welles's own perspective, had he lived that long, would have been in tune with Oja's.

It's probably worth mentioning another Yugoslavian propaganda film that Welles made in 1972, SUTJESKA. Here's a brief excerpt from an article on Croatian cinema:

"Many lucrative international co-productions (Karl May Westerns or partisan films, above all "Sutjeska", 1972 with Richard Burton as Tito and Orson Welles in a supporting role) served to promote tourism as well as the ideological doctrines of the state. These times are long gone

Has anyone here ever seen any of these films?

[Glenn Anders]

Mteal: You have me. I have not seen SUTJESKA (1973), in which Richard Burton is said to play Marshall Tito, and was directed by the great Russian, Sergei Bondarchuk, who also wrote part of the screenplay with Wolf Mankowitz [?], a collaborator in the screen play for Welles' 1972 TREASURE ISLAND, about the same time. I do not find Welles listed in the cast, however, though I may have overlooked it. Welles did play a Chetnik senator in the earlier Bitka na Neretvi (1969), a similar kind of patriotic Yugoslavian war film, which starred Bondarchuk and Yul Brynner.

The note about "promoting tourism," in that period, reminds me of a little picture set in the ancient Venetian League City of Dubrovnik (Croatia), THE GAMBLERS (1970), which starred Don Gordon (a Wellsian kind of actor), Suzy Kendall, Faith Domergue, and Stuart Margolin. An inconsequential, amusing melodrama, it has stayed with me over the years. Having stood in Dubrovnik and on the Dalmatian coast as a result, I can testify why they would have wanted to make pictures there to promote tourism. Gorgeous, and only now being developed (and probably ruined), after the old enemies tried unsuccessfully to blow hell out of it in the recent civil wars.

Many familiar chickens in that henhouse during the early 1970's!

Glenn

[mteal]

I never knew that Croatia was part of the Venetian League, that's interesting. Sounds like another potential tangent to me (some other time). From what little I can find online about SUTJESKA (aka THE FIFTH OFFENSIVE), I gather it's a kind of sequel to THE BATTLE OF NERETVA, since the title refers to a later battle in the war (which makes me wonder if Welles simply makes a cameo as the same character). Here's another bit from an online writeup of another Croatian fim fest:

Croatia has reasons to both welcome and fear co-productions. On the positive side, co-productions were once very lucrative business for Croatia. Western money poured into Yugoslavia through the once-respected Jadranfilm production company, with international producers taking advantage of good technical facilities at significantly lower costs. The international dialogue that occurred through such co-productions was fruitful in the creative sense as well as the financial one: it enabled Yugoslav actors to work with international directors and Western actors to bring their reputation to Yugoslav films (most famously Richard Burton playing the role of Tito and Orson Welles in Stipe Deli's Sutjeska/The Fifth Offensive, 1973).
War changed all that. Contacts were lost, and in the 1990s other formerly closed countries opened up to international production companies.

The danger with international co-productions is that, while directors may be sensitive to their own environment and the minutiae of behavioural details of the people within it, frequently they are insensitive to what makes people tick in other parts of the world and have no ear for the subtleties of how they speak there. Indeed, Eurimages co-productions have been criticised for producing exactly this kind of bland international hotchpotch, portraying a cross-cultural no man's land that doesn't correspond to any real time or place or how people acted in it.

The early 70's was also the time that Welles was narrating the Shah of Iran docu and getting financing from the Shah's brother-in-law for TOSOTW. I suppose it was all a case of Welles cherry picking wherever the crop was. Iran may have wanted to use him to get into the international film production act itself (to promote tourism?). In any event, that crop wound up yielding pretty bitter fruit for our man.

I should also mention the new documentary THE OTHER SIDE OF WELLES, which deals with Welles's relationship to Yugoslavia. It was shown at the Locarno fest last year, and some good info has been posted on it in other Wellesnet threads. Are we gonna be able to see that one stateside any time soon?

[Harvey Chartrand]

Welles may have shot his scenes as Sir Winston Churchill for SUTJESKA but these probably ended up on the cutting room floor.
Welles may also have done a cameo in the Rumanian epic MICHAEL THE BRAVE (1970), the story of a 17th century king Mihai Viteazul.

[Glenn Anders]

Harvey and mteal: We might also mention that in the early 1960's, Welles planned to shoot THE TRIAL, in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. The sets were built, and he actually did some filming there in 1962, when one of those customary and unfortunate snafus related to money caused him to decamp for the Gare d'Orsay in Paris, where he completed the film.

Here is a little essay I wrote on Welles' coming to the Gare d'Orsay, which later was reincarnated as the wonderful repository of French Impressionistic Art, the Musee d'Orsay:

http://www.epinions.com/trvl-review-6ED-FD73269-38B9C6E7-prod4

My apologies, perhaps, to fans of Dubrovnik all over the World. I should not have suggested that Dubrovnik was a willing member of the Venetian League. From around 600 A.D, when it was an island possession founded on the edge of the Byzantine Empire, the city was traded back and forth every few years to Dalmatia, to the Greeks, to the Turks, to the Romans, to the Venetians, etc. Dubrovnik, by then joined to the mainland, was part of the Venetian League from 1000 A.D. to 1018 A.D. That's what I meant to say.

A look at the map will suggest that this process continues down to the present day, with the border of Croatia gerrymandered in thin line of coast south on the Adriatic to encompass Dubrovnik. As I say, to look at the city, thankfully restored, now will show you why the Croatians wanted it, and why the Serbs, in the recent Yugslavian civil war, shelled its white marbled buildings and red roofs from naval vessels at sea and, I believe, bombed it from the air.

No wonder Welles was drawn to Croatia, for its natural settings, the grim architecture of Zagreb, its coastal beauties, and that other Croatian beauty, the human one, Oja Kodar.

Glenn

[mteal]

OW 1964 interview on THE TRIAL (excerpt):

WHELDON: Why did you shoot so much of the film in Yugoslavia?

WELLES: It seems to me that the story we're dealing with is said to take place "anywhere". But of course there is no "anywhere." When people say that this story can happen anywhere, you must know what part of the globe it really began in. Now Kafka is central European and so to find a middle Europe, some place that had inherited something of the Austro-Hungarian empire to which Kafka reacted, I went to Zagreb. I couldn't go to Czechoslovakia because his books aren't even printed there. His writing is still banished there.

WHELDON: Would you have gone to Czechoslovakia, were you able?

WELLES: Yes, I never stopped thinking that we were in Czechoslovakia. As in all of Kafka, it's supposed to be Czechoslovakia. The last shot was in Zagreb, which has old streets that look very much like Prague. But you see, capturing that flavor of a modern European city, yet with it's roots in the Austro-Hungarian empire wasn't the only reason why we shot in Yugoslavia. The other reason was that we had a big industrial fair to shoot in. We used enormous buildings, much bigger than any film studio. There was one scene in the film where we needed to fit fifteen hundred desks into a single building space and there was no film studio in France or Britain that could hold fifteen hundred desks. The big industrial fair grounds that we found in Zagreb made that possible. So we had both that rather sleazy modern, which is a part of the style of the film, and these curious decayed roots that ran right down into the dark heart of the 19th century.

Welles may have shot his scenes as Sir Winston Churchill for SUTJESKA but these probably ended up on the cutting room floor.

How could they cut Welles as Winston Churchill?! Sounds like another grail of lost Welles cinema. BTW, Kusterica's 1995 UNDERGROUND is said to have a scene on a film set that supposedly satirizes such partisan war epics as SUTJESKA.

[mteal]

Rented THE BATTLE OF NERETVA from a local military library (the 105-minute version). It's kind of a bore, and Welles is in it for about 5 minutes at most. The narration does make the interesting point that the victories of Tito's partisans did force Hitler to keep fighting on two fronts, which made the Allied invasion of Normandy much less difficult then it would have been otherwise.

In fairness to Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog, his blog does contain some very good articles, including one of Sterling Hayden which I've excerpted:

As it did with many men, Hayden's wartime experience changed his life in unforeseen ways. As a wartime gun-runner, he formed many friendships with the people of Yugoslavia and became sympathetic to the form of Communism they embraced. He attended some meetings after returning home, which flagged him for the special attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Hayden was was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee for investigation and, to his everlasting shame, he cooperated -- naming names. Here his life, as he knew it, begins to disintegrate.

After giving his testimony, Hayden found it impossible to forgive himself, just as many of his colleagues in the film business found it impossible to forgive him.

[Harvey Chartrand]

Yes, Tim Lucas is an excellent writer and blogger and a staunch supporter of Orson Welles.
I doubt that Mr. Lucas has warm feelings for Wellesnet, though. Not after the recent inimical correspondence.

[Jeff Wilson]

Enough with the Lucas stuff. Confine it to the already existing thread about Him.

Edited to add: That is directed at Harvey, not Mike, as his post related to the thread.



Edited By Jeff Wilson on 1143658560