By RAY KELLY
Orson Welles love of Shakespeare and Cervantes is well documented, but in a new article Matthew Asprey Gear explores another author whose works fascinated the filmmaker — Joseph Conrad.
In At Sea, In Port, Up the River: Orson Welles’s Conrad Adaptations for Bright Lights Film Journal., Gear notes that Welles directed Conrad’s Heart of Darkness twice for radio and several decades later narrated an abridged audiobook of The Secret Sharer. Welles also scripted three unproduced films based on Conrad works: Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness and Victory. (Screenplays of the latter two exist in Welles archives.)
Gear, author of the book At the End of the Street in the Shadow: Orson Welles, recently chatted with Wellesnet about his research into Welles and Conrad.
What prompted you to delve into Welles’ adaptations of Conrad?
For several years I’ve been visiting archives to research the unfilmed screenplays of Welles’s later years. I’ve already published studies of Sirhan Sirhan, The Other Man, The Dreamers, and The Big Brass Ring, and my exploration of the treatment Crazy Weather will appear in an upcoming Hemingway Review.
Welles’s 1973 screenplay based on Conrad’s Victory (which he titled Surinam), seemed like the next logical step for me. I went back to the source novel and then read through the succession of draft screenplays to make an almost forensic study of Welles’s process of adaptation. I think that process served as an intense form of critical reading. It was illuminating to witness how he slashed the story down to its essence — he ultimately decided to ignore the first few hundred pages of the book — and came up with an excellent script that feels like a dramatically complete story and could have been filmed on a low budget.
It is disappointing the movie was never made, because Victory really was a perfect story for Orson Welles. It is not only an exciting melodramatic thriller set on an exotic island, but it also echoes two of Welles’s favorite literary works — Treasure Island and The Tempest.
I presented my findings on Victory/Surinam at the Joseph Conrad Society conference in London in July 2019. For the published essay I decided to expand my scope to consider Welles’ 1930s Heart of Darkness adaptations and his wonderful audiobook of The Secret Sharer recorded in the last months of his life. It’s a Welles-Conrad trilogy that could have been a tetralogy had I been able to locate his early 1960s screenplay of Lord Jim.
I believe Welles’ interest in Conrad has been overlooked because we are talking about unrealized projects, wouldn’t you agree?
Yes. The commercially released films only give a partial (and sometimes corrupted) view of Welles’ ongoing engagement with a vast number of subjects and literary sources, and for a long time the public had to make do with what was readily accessible. All they ever encountered during Welles’ lifetime were a couple of radio versions of Heart of Darkness in the 1930s. But Welles was evidently a lifelong reader of Conrad, because he kept returning to the source material for nearly 50 years.
Which archives were most helpful?
The Welles papers at the University of Michigan are a treasure trove, and the same is true of the archive at the Museo Nazionale Del Cinema in Turin. The staff at each archive were very helpful.
What did you learn that surprised you most during your research?
I knew Conrad was important to Welles but I had never quite appreciated how extensively that particular sensibility flows through his work. Conrad was probably his most influential literary source after Shakespeare and Cervantes — although there is a lot of competition for that third place.
I’ve come to see the Conrad strain in Welles’ work as a river with many tributaries. Welles not only sought to adapt Conrad’s stories directly, but was also attracted to adapting the fiction of writers clearly indebted to Conrad’s influence — Isak Dinesen (The Dreamers), Graham Greene (The Honorary Consul), Eric Ambler (Journey into Fear), and Paul Theroux (Saint Jack). And Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, Mr. Arkadin and The Big Brass Ring have strong Conradian elements, too.
I agree with Orson when he said “I think I’m made for Conrad.” And while it is a shame he never managed to make a Conrad movie, we are fortunate to have the radio plays, scripts, and the audiobook. I just hope somebody finds a copy of the lost Lord Jim screenplay!
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At Sea, In Port, Up the River: Orson Welles’s Conrad Adaptations may be found online at brightlightsfilm.com/at-sea-in-port-up-the-river-orson-welless-conrad-adaptations/#.Xga2dKYaS7Y
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