“I try to be a Christian. I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.” – Orson Welles to Merv Griffin, April 1982
By RAY KELLY
With Passover and Holy Week upon us, it seems an appropriate time to survey the religious, or faith-based, motion pictures associated with Orson Welles as an actor, writer or director.
During the production of Citizen Kane, Welles contemplated a film for RKO Pictures depicting the life of Jesus Christ. The unrealized project would be set in the American West of the 1890s, he later told Peter Bogdanovich. Welles, art director Perry Ferguson, and cinematographer Gregg Toland scouted locations in Baja California and Mexico.
In an August 30, 1940 letter to various church leaders – preserved at the Lily Library and first reported in The Revealer – Welles detailed his planned religious film:
“I am planning a motion picture of the life of Christ, and I take the liberty of asking you for advice. It is because I am strongly aware of my problem in handling this tremendous theme that I take the privilege of addressing you. I wish to do nothing which could incur the displeasure of any Christian church. In fact, I am convinced that a film which created controversy would not have the special validity I wish to achieve… I would like to take the camera into a real pastoral American setting — to tell the story with simple American folk, not with actors.
My intention would be to present the story with no interpretation — with dialogue only as it occurs in the scriptures — not as any sort of stunt, or even as a paraphrase. The actual face of Christ would never be represented and the personality of Christ would remain, by the nature of the storytelling, unstated. The idea is only in the preliminary stages. You are the first to hear of it. I would greatly appreciate some indication of your attitude.”
The feedback Welles received from several prominent Christian leaders was decidedly mixed. E.J. Millington of the Northern Baptist Convention stated, “the production of such a picture as you speak of would require a delicacy of taste and a depth of understanding which are not ordinarily associated with the motion picture industry and its actors… Your suggestion, therefor, is distinctly unwelcome to me and I should be very happy if the idea were allowed to die before it is full born.”
Presbyterian church leader William Barrow Pugh was far more enthusiastic, writing “It would seem to me that if any one could do what you set forth in your letter, it would be yourself.”
The Catholic Hour radio host Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen was more cautious in tone, questioning the American 19th century setting and the film’s style in a lengthy response. However, he told Welles that the only way the movie would “incur the displeasure of the Church is by presenting Christ in any other way than what He is, namely, the Son of God.”
Welles responded to the future archbishop on October 3, 1940. He wrote, in part, “I hasten to assure you that I have never conceived of this project in other terms than as a perpetuation of Christ as true God and true Man. From the artist’s point of view (from mine, at least, speaking as an artist) there is no purpose in attempting the story of Christ unless Christ is presented as God, and unless his miracles are as an intrinsic a part of the story as they are in the Bible… A miracle was no less miraculous in Galilee than it is in Texas.”
He closed by expressing a desire to continue their conversation on the project.
Welles penned his screenplay with dialogue taken from the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, but the RKO project never materialized. He revisited the concept ias an independent filmmaker in the 1950s and wrote a second unfilmed screenplay to be shot in Egypt.
He would never direct a big scale religious movie. Instead, Welles would lampoon Hollywood’s love of biblical epics in his 1950 stage play The Unthinking Lobster, though he was associated with several motion pictures with biblical or religious overtones throughout his career.
Among Welles’ most notable cinematic contributions were:
• Portraying Father Mapple in 1956’s Moby Dick, where he delivered a moving sermon under the direction of John Huston.
• Starring as King Saul of Judah and ancient Israel in the Italian film David and Goliath (1960).
• Narrating the reverential King of Kings, which starred Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus in 1961.
• Delivering a memorable performance as Cardinal Wolsey in 1966’s Academy Award winner, A Man for All Seasons.
• Serving as an uncredited narrator and screenwriter for Huston’s 1966 Old Testament epic The Bible: In the Beginning…
• Directing, writing and starring in the home video Two Wise Old Men: Socrates and Noah. In the 1970 production, Welles quoted from his unfilmed script Two By Two.
• Returning to narration for the five-hour The New Media Bible: Book of Genesis in 1979.
• Lending his doomsday voice to two apocalyptic films – The Late Great Planet Earth (1978) and The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (1981).
It is difficult to ascertain Welles’ view on faith and the existence of God based on his choice of acting jobs. In public, he sometimes gave contradictory statements about religion, once saying “I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.”
To be sure, God is mentioned in director Welles’ ouvere: Repentant Nazi Konrad Meineke has a “message from the all-highest” in The Stranger; Michael O’Hara asks the conniving Elsa Bannister “Haven’t you heard ever of something better to follow?” in The Lady from Shanghai; and F for Fake contains a reflection on Chartres Cathedral, which Welles describes as “a celebration to God’s glory and to the dignity of man.”
Asked by Playboy interviewer Kenneth Tynan in 1967 whether he had a religious upbringing, Welles responded, “Quite the contrary. My mother was born a Catholic but then became a student of Oriental religions, in which she later lost interest. She taught me to read the Bible as a wonderful piece of literature. My father was a total agnostic, and Dr. (Maurice) Bernstein – the guardian who looked after me when my parents died – always made fun of the Bible stories. That shocked me as a child. I have a natural sense of veneration for what Man has aspired to beyond himself, in East or West.”
When Tynan pressed on whether he believed in God, Welles said, “My feelings on that subject are a constant interior dialog that I haven’t sufficiently resolved to be sure that I have anything worth communicating to people I don’t know. I may not be a believer, but I’m certainly religious. In a strange way, I even accept the divinity of Christ. The accumulation of faith creates its own veracity. It does this in a sort of Jungian sense, because it’s been made true in a way that’s almost as real as life. ”
“If you ask me whether the rabbi who was crucified was God, the answer is no. But the great, irresistible thing about the Judaeo-Christian idea is that man — no matter what his ancestry, no matter how close he is to any murderous ape — really is unique. If we are capable of unselfishly loving one another, we are absolutely alone, as a species, on this planet. There isn’t another animal that remotely resembles us. The notion of Christ’s divinity is a way of saying that. That’s why the myth is true. In the highest tragic sense, it dramatizes the idea that man is divine.”
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