By TONY WILLIAMS
During the running of a newsreel covering the major events in the life of Charles Foster Kane following the Gothic prologue featuring his death, a title card appears on the screen. “I am, have been, and will be only one thing – an American.” Citizen Kane (1941) interrogates the contradictions and self-denial involving this term throughout the course of its narrative with witnesses supplying different perspectives on the life of this enigmatic character.
By contrast, Danny Wu’s remarkable film, American: An Odyssey to 1947, provides its very unique perspective on this term applied to Orson Welles (1915-1985) which leaves no doubt in the audience’s mind as to how this ambivalent and often reductive term (usually defined as unthinking patriotism) applies to its subject of study. The subtitle provides a pertinent historical context usually ignored or marginalized in mainstream studies of this director’s work. It is “an odyssey to 1947” bracketed by graphic reconstructed images similar to the gothic prologue and epilogue of his most well-known work. One graphic image appears unusual: a bloodstained uniform and then a scene of an African-American seated in an apartment back to camera echoing the “Rosebud” enigma of an earlier film. This supposedly irrelevant image will be explained towards the end of the film leaving no feeling of ambiguity as to what it exactly means. Yet the opening construction contains elements of irony as seen in the use of an Andrews Sisters song, a trio who often performed to American servicemen in World War II in a cause ostensibly defined as a battle for Democracy as opposed to Fascism. When I ran a clip of them singing to enlisted men decades ago in the old Swansea Technical College, I noticed inter-cut audience shots showing white servicemen, then completely segregated African-Americans, all supposedly united in a justified cause against Fascism and Racism. Even then, I sensed a contradiction, something that Danny Wu makes explicit many decades later in his fine documentary examination.
Like James Joyce, another artist will undergo exile. But, unlike Odysseus, he will later return to an America that will never truly recognize him and returned to his honored status. Odysseus returns disguised but eventually becomes victorious in Homer’s Epic. Orson Welles will later undergo a very different return, one indelibly influenced by that cultural and historical odyssey leading to the dark days of HUAC and reactionary Americanism that quashed the emergence of those potentially promising artistic movements of the New Deal of which the director formed a crucial component. 1947 is commonly recognized as both the last great year of Hollywood achievements such as Crossfire (1947), that I frequently run as an introductory study in my film classes, but also the beginning of the end for that type of socially committed film. Such is the key significance of Danny Wu’s film, one still awaiting a distributor as I write this review.
The cultural context of a particular period responsible for the artistic formation of a creative talent is not usually present in documentaries, most of which are either sensationalistic, limited in the choices made for coverage, or just plain inaccurate. American contains none of these negative elements. Instead, it presents a carefully selected and relevant series of segments containing interviews with people who either knew Welles, knew of him, or understood his culturally significant work with respect and sincerity, all of whom complement each other rather than represent the contradictory nature of the “evidence” presented in Citizen Kane. In one sense, they represent a different image of the director contained in another title in that newsreel sequence, “1895 to 1940. All of these years he covered. Many of these years he was.” In one way or another, those interviewed represent the “American” context that the film covers up to 1947, one more American in terms of its fidelity to the Democratic norms of the American Constitution involving the equality of all human beings irrespective or race and gender, and the importance of artistic creativity that the official version has frequently denied.
Interviews occur with figures such as Welles’s biographer Simon Callow, Todd Tarbox (grandson of Roger Hill, headmaster of the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, that offered the young Welles opportunities for creative development offsetting his problematic family background), Richard France who has authored two indispensable studies on Welles’ innovative work in theater, Welles scholar James Naremore, historians Mark Stoler, Taylor Coffman, Gray Brechin, Harlan Lebo, and Catherine Benamou who provide valuable perspectives on both artist and historical background. Yet there are others who did not share in this creative context but who, in very important ways, were the victims of an America Welles both belonged to and fought against.
The documentary charts the trajectory of Welles’s early life and cultural bildungsroman that is known to most of us but it chooses to focus on significant elements of historical context up to 1947, both known and unknown. William Randolph Hearst occupies the stage, very much like Rupert Murdoch today, choosing FDR as Democratic nominee in favor of a more conservative candidate and then turns against him when the implications of the New Deal become evident. A culture war is launched against the theatrical work of the WPA that also included the first mainstream theatrical version of Macbeth performed by an African-American cast, a war that will accelerate into the post-war period when a witch hunt organized by the FBI and HUAC begins leading to Welles’s exile from America to escape blacklisting and possible incarceration had the paranoiac aims of the Red Scare been realized by J. Edgar Hoover and future presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey (1911-1978).( I remember seeing a newsreel clip when this “liberal” blithely commented that subversives should be placed in concentration camps during the late ’40s)
American reveals not only Welles as a real American true to the ideals of the American Constitution wishing to extend freedom to everybody but also as someone whose American films reflected the dark side of an American history the director fought against. Two people Welles never met are featured in this: Japanese activist Satsuki Ina whose mother was incarcerated in the concentration camps instituted by FDR against loyal Japanese-Americans and Howard Kakita who was born in the USA, visited Japan with his parents in the immediate pre-war era and witnessed the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing before eventually returning to his parents who were also the victims of FDR’s racist policy.
It is not certain whether Welles actually met Isaac Woodard (1919-1992) but Danny Wu interviews two people very close to his infamous case: great niece and author Laura Williams and his nephew Robert Young. Woodard was permanently blinded by South Carolina police on February 12, 1946, while still wearing his uniform hours after being discharged from service. Ordinarily, this case would have been forgotten but the NAACP brought it to Welles’s attention and he publicized the case on radio in the manner of a crusading journalist Charles Foster Kane never realized. His radio broadcasts that began on July 1946 led to the case coming to court but the verdict was the usual travesty of Jim Crow-related Southern justice. These very poignant interviews with two people close to Woodard, along with the powerful testimony of two Japanese-Americans, represent both the power of socially justified emotion and a key to what motivated Welles during his initial period in America. The incident lit the flames of the future Civil Rights movement. But Welles’ career in radio ended there and he became a marked man in the dark days of reaction.
Certainly his anti-racism, solidarity with all humanity that appears in his Mercury Theatre radio broadcasts, and sincere humanity, provides a needed spotlight on his personality and films during this period that counter the slander he endured for most of his life. Catherine Benamou again emphasizes the importance of the It’s All True project initially envisaged as a “nice little tourist film” according to the Good Neighbor policy of the State department. Welles emphasized the multi-racial element of the Brazilian carnival and its musical components that affronted the racist sentiments of RKO executives. Ironically, the one FBI Welles file I have under the Freedom of Information Act reveals that the Bureau was more concerned with the director’s association with African Americans in the early ’40s than anything else. This also made him a “marked man” for corporate Hollywood that would soon succumb to the post-war undemocratic sentiments of HUAC. Welles became regarded as “subversive” because he and his works wished for a better America than the one existing at that time, still awaiting realization as recent events have clearly demonstrated. Frustrated at the reaction he was receiving, as Todd Tarbox states, Welles accepted an offer to appear in an Italian film and left a hostile America.
Much more could have been depicted but Wu wisely choose an appropriate running time and selected evidence carefully. He has produced an important work that both deserves distribution and future screenings in any respectable film class devoted to the director. His work forms an ideal complement to other studies of Welles that will appear in the future such as the following. https://vimeo.com/593716199 providing those very relevant cultural and historical perspectives that enable to really appreciate and understand his work.
(Tony Williams is an independent film critic, author and longtime supporter of Wellesnet.)
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