Katina Paxinou's Scene in The Trial

[Jeff Wilson]

A tidbit from the This is Orson Welles tapes, left out of the book, as Welles and Bogdanovich discuss Katina Paxinou and Welles gets to why her scene in The Trial was deleted:

OW: And we must say that [that Paxinou was excellent in Mr Arkadin] because she acts a big scene in The Trial, which I cut out four hours before its first performance. And of course, the picture came down to Greece and she went with the King and Queen and everybody to see it, and no Katina.

PB: Why?

OW: Because she was terrible.

PB: Not for the book.

OW. No. That part of it -- because it didn't work in the picture, we'll say. She arrived, and said "No, I don't need that -- I won't learn all those..." And they said, "Have you learned your lines?" Because she had a tremendous thing. She was the master of the computer -- the female master of the computer. And it was the best scene. And she said "I don't need that -- Orson will change all that." And I couldn't. It had to be as written and she didn't and wouldn't learn it. Kept flubbing and hamming it up to cover that she was unsure. Terrible performance.

PB: People always wondered why she was not in it when she was billed even.

OW: Some idiots -- I don't know why they didn't take her name off. Imagine in Greece!

PB: She probably never forgave you.

OW: Of course not.

PB: And she was really great in Arkadin.

OW: Yes, great. But what I didn't realize in Arkadin was that I did it line by line -- short cuts. And this -- she had to play a big six-minute scene.

PB: In other words, she didn't have a good memory for lines?

OW: Or the capacity to sustain it without -- she felt that she was on the stage and she began to compensate for it all -- she just couldn't stop hamming.

PB: How come you waited till four hours before?

OW: I kept hoping that somehow I could make it better by...

PB: Cutting and so on?

OW: Yes. And there wasn't much to cut...I hoped that it would get better, that it would age in the wood or something. Because it was my favorite scene in the script.

[Le Chiffre]

Thanks Jeff, interesting. Paxinou is even in bits of the film's original trailer!

These unedited and unused excerpts that you've provided, and others that I've seen (and heard - remember the hour-long audio excerpt from the French Ambersons DVD where he describes Delores Costello as "an old-bag showgirl"?) show pretty clearly that the TIOW book that was published in the 1990s was not entirely the real Welles, but rather Welles crossbred with Bogdanovich's idealized version of who and what he thought Welles should be.

[Jeff Wilson]

Well, Bogdanovich says in his intro to the finished book that Welles played a major role in constructing the text, and Welles' drafts of the book in the archive show this - they're heavily rewritten and re-arranged by Welles. Even in the transcripts, any number of times he tells Bogdanovich to frame something a certain way in the book, or only discuss something on PB's end, in order to frame perception of Welles, usually, it seems to me, to prevent Welles from looking like an egomaniac or other negative connotation. Welles was understandably very sensitive to how people might perceive him in the discussions. This is Orson Welles is hardly fraudulent, but it is a very constructed text, to be sure.

The Ambersons stuff you mention (and which is hilarious) is one good example of stuff left out in order to presumably not offend Costello and Russell Metty, both of whom were still alive when the tapes were made (Paxinou was also alive at the time of taping, incidentally), but it does indicate that the material used in the finished work presumably came from those original drafts rather than having been done later on, as material like that would probably have been included after interested parties had died. One thing I was surprised they left out was the discussion by Welles of how he kept changing the aperture in Lady From Shanghai, until the picture is basically in widescreen at the end. Bogdanovich relates this in the DVD commentary, but it was something that should have gone in the book, I thought.

[tonyw]

Jeff, For those of us who can not get to the archives your contribution is very much appreciated. I've also found some differences in the audio-cassette version such as Welles mentioning that Tim Holt was working as an insurance salesman at the time. As the article in THE BLACKWELL COMPANION TO HITCHCOCK mentions, differences existed between the published Hitchcock/Truffaut interview and what was actually said at the time. Fortunately, we can now access the whole material on the internet in that instance.
what you are doing is very much appreciated.

[Le Chiffre]

One thing I was surprised they left out was the discussion by Welles of how he kept changing the aperture in Lady From Shanghai, until the picture is basically in widescreen at the end. Bogdanovich relates this in the DVD commentary, but it was something that should have gone in the book, I thought.

Yes, the aspect ratio in the funhouse scene seems to change frequently, sometimes widescreen, sometimes almost square. I remember Lang's "M" being almost square, so I thought, Welles having admitted that Shanghai was influenced by Caligari, it might be a tribute to that. But Wiki says the 1.19 "Movietone ratio" was only used from 1926 to 1932, the years of the transition from silent to sound.

I've also found some differences in the audio-cassette version such as Welles mentioning that Tim Holt was working as an insurance salesman at the time.

Yes Tony, the audio tapes contain little extra snatches of small talk that are often interesting to listen to. I'd like to hear the complete tapes sometime. But then, that might involve presenting a side of Orson that some don't want to hear.

[JasonH]

Yes Tony, the audio tapes contain little extra snatches of small talk that are often interesting to listen to. I'd like to hear the complete tapes sometime.

If they even still exist. Per Rosenbaum's "Preface to the Editor's Notes," a few tapes were already missing by the time he was invited to edit the book. Bogdanovich turned over what he had to Oja in 1987, which was about 25 hours worth of recordings, "representing more than five sixths of the original material" (though the available transcripts presumably included the conversations in the lost recordings). I believe Rosenbaum was also responsible for curating the 3 1/2 hours of audio released as a companion to the book.

In the same write-up, Rosenbaum indicated that he was a proponent of including more of the "irreverent" comments in the book, but deferred to Bogdanovich's insistence that politeness reign. As I mentioned in the Henry Jaglom thread, this book is practically an inverse situation of My Lunches with Orson.

Sorry for bumping the decade-old thread, but Welles's painfully frank appraisal of Paxinou's performance in THE TRIAL is noteworthy, especially considering that in FILMING THE TRIAL, he publicly gives the rather different (or at least, bowdlerized) explanation for the scene's deletion: that it was "rather a drag in the picture." Paxinou certainly seems animated in the scene, but with the sound lost it's hard to have an opinion on whether she went too hammy.

The scattered excerpts from the unedited transcripts that I've seen on this board are tantalizing. I believe at some point somebody here quoted from an exchange where Welles spoke candidly about his strained working relationship with Stanley Cortez on AMBERSONS. That sort of testimony obviously has historical interest in excess of its juicy qualities, and the great majority of what was excluded from the book would have been for space reasons rather than spiciness. From my selfish standpoint, it seems the archived transcripts have been made public enough that the padlock ought to be removed.