Orson Welles: Progressive

[tony]

Discussion and reviews of Callow's opus 2 have gotten me thinking about Welles's politics: an overused word, in a way, for they were his deepest convictions about human society. This got me to thinking about the origins of his social and political beliefs, and I discovered there was a period called the "Progressive era" in the U.S.; here's a capsule history:

"America, 1880-1920

The early 20th century was an era of business expansion and progressive reform in the United States. The progressives, as they called themselves, worked to make American society a better and safer place in which to live. They tried to make big business more responsible through regulations of various kinds. They worked to clean up corrupt city governments, to improve working conditions in factories, and to better living conditions for those who lived in slum areas, a large number of whom were recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Many progressives were also concerned with the environment and conservation of resources. This generation of Americans also hoped to make the world a more democratic place. At home, this meant expanding the right to vote to women and a number of election reforms such as the recall, referendum, and direct election of Senators. Abroad, it meant trying to make the world safe for democracy. In 1917, the United States joined Great Britain and France--two democratic nations--in their war against autocratic Germany and Austria-Hungary. Soon after the Great War, the majority of Americans turned away from concern about foreign affairs, adopting an attitude of live and let live.

The 1920s, also known as the "roaring twenties" and as "the new era," were similar to the Progressive Era in that America continued its economic growth and prosperity. The incomes of working people increased along with those of middle class and wealthier Americans. The major growth industry was automobile manufacturing. Americans fell in love with the automobile, which radically changed their way of life. On the other hand, the 1920s saw the decline of many reform activities that had been so widespread after 1900."


The passage above is from what looks like a fasinating page with lots of interesting links from the Library of Congress:

http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/timeline/progress/progress.html

Of course, since Welles was born in 1915, his early childhhood would have been deeply affected by the tail end of this era; perhaps his sense of deep nostalgia was influenced by the change in society as America became more isolationist, less idealistic and more materialistic and hedonistic in the "Roaring" 20's. The reference in the above passage is also interesting in that it refers to the increased poularity of the automobile at that time, and one surely thinks of the Ambersons:

"Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd conducted a major study of American society during the 1920s. In 1929, they published their research in a book titled Middletown. "Middletown" was the name used to disguise Muncie, Indiana, the actual place where they conducted their research. One of their findings was that the automobile had transformed the lives of people living in Middletown and, by extension, virtually everywhere else in the United States.
More specifically, the Lynds found that the automobile had such effects as the following: (1) family budgets had changed dramatically; (2) ministers complained that people drove their cars rather than going to church; (3) parents were concerned that their boys and girls were spending too much time together "motoring"; and (4) the car had revolutionized the way people spent their free time."

In addition, Wikepedia also has an interesting page which lists important Progessive Era leaders and intellectuals, among them Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, Clarence Darrow, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and W.E.B. Dubois:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era


If we see Welles as a social "Progressive", then we can perhaps understand some of the difficulties he faced in his professional career as the products of his being fashionably or unfashionably liberal throughout his adult life; for example, as Robert Stam has pointed out in his article "Orson Welles, Brazil, and the Power of Blackness", the trouble Welles had with focussing on "non-whites" in It's All True was a large part of the unravelling of that project. The recent rumours that Catherine Benamou has finally decided to publish her long-awaited opus on "It's All True" bodes well for the continuing study of Welles's politics and their influence on his career, as Benamou is both an expert on Latin America, and perhaps the greatest authority on his time in Brazil.

[Glenn Anders]

Yes, tony, yes!

Thank you for the useful outline and links.

You might want to add what I think would be the crucial link to Welles: The Greatest Progressive of them All, Senator Senator Robert M. "Fighting Bob" La Follette, Sr. of Wisconsin. He served in Congress from 1885 to 1891, as Governor of the Wisconsin from 1901 to 1906, and as United States Senator from 1906 until his death in 1925. His ideas were hugely influential because the Progressive Party was at times regarded as the progressive wing of the Republican Party, the one that did not want to turn the country entirely over to the early corporatists. La Follette's campaigns and programs bringing "the robber barons" into some kind of regulation, reining n the greed of the corporations, and attempting to give working people some chance in life were often also supported by the Socialist Party, and FDR acknowledged the influence of his ideas in forming the New Deal at the time of the Great Depression.

His son, Robert M. "Young Bob" La Follette, Jr., succeeded him in office, and he was seen as a champion of Labor until the breakup of the Progressive Party at the end of World War II. When the remains of that Party rejoined the Republican Party in 1946, he was pushed aside in his bid for re-election by . . . Joseph M. McCarthy.

A sickly child, never very well, the younger La Follette took his own life with a firearm on September 9, 1953. Many said, at the time, that the testimony of a former aide before Senator McCarthy's sub-committee, claiming that La Follette had employed Communists on his staff, weighed on his decision to kill himself.

Given Welles' Wisconsin background, the liberal politics of at least his mother, the events of the time, the death of the older La Follete at the time of the death of Welles' mother, the Depression, the New Deal, the WPA Theater (which would have had Progressive Party support), the rise of fascism we've discussed, the faltering of the Progressive Party by 1946, the coming of the McCarthy (the Junior Senator from Wisconsin), the notion that Welles might have challenged him for "Young Bob" La Follett's seat, the rise of McCarthyism in the 1950's (as reports were falling into J. Edgar Hoover's "confidential dossier" on Welles) and the suicide of "Young Bob" LaFollette, make your case pretty strongly for including the influence of Progressive Movement here.

Thank you, tony, for your new contribution to our study of the shaping of Welles' life and work.

Now, if we could make some more direct connections between some of these factors specific events in Welles' work and life . . . .

Glenn

[tony]

Glenn:

Thanks for your kind words. It seems to me that Welles had 2 periods of being in social/political fashion, so to speak, and that was the end of the Roosevelt/New Deal era and the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon administrations. When America became more imperial after WW2 ,the witch-hunts began and there was a new era of social and political conservatism, Welles just left. When the 60s cultural revolution happened, he was in vogue again: at the time of the revival of the enviromental movement and the womens' movement, the anti-war movement and the gay-rights movement, Welles had a rennaisance of his own: he produced the Trial, The Immortal Story, The Deep, The Merchant of Venice, The Other Side of the Wind (whose main character was gay) and F For Fake, in what was perhaps his most productive 10 years snce the 37-47 period. One might also observe that the second Sight and Sound poll had named Kane as the best picture ever in 1962, ushering in Welles's rennaissance. However, as the idealism of the 60s decayed in the late 70s into nihilism and materialism, Welles's ability to obtain financing deteriorated also. And when Reagan and Thatcher ushered in the conservative 80s, it seems Welles was out of fashion again, so that when he tried to get a male star to act in his radical political thriller with a gay character, The Big Brass Ring, every major American actor was too afraid. If Welles could have lived into the slightly more liberal 90s of Clinton, perhaps he would have been in fashion again.

Here's a quote from the Ken Tynan Playboy interview from 1966, wherein Welles uses both the trems "progessive" and "liberal":

"I've always been an independent radical, but with wide streaks of emotional and cultural old-fashionedness...Although I'm what is called a progressive, it isn't out of dislike for the past. I don't reject our yesterdays. I wish that parts of our dead past were more alive...in general, I still belong to the liberal leftist world as it exists in the west. I vote that way and stand with those people."

[Glenn Anders]

What you say, tony, is true, but Welles true period of influence, partly from his, dare we say, genius, and partly out of his celibrity and sensational accomplishments in half a dozen fields, came in that 1937-1947 period which you mention. The later years may have given him some oportunity to be a wise grey-beard, and make a few more movies on the cheap (like the torn-up MR. ARKADIN, the beloved CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT or the deeply pessimistic THE TRIAL), and to become a late night TV curiosity, but he was never the force he had been previously. He increasingly became known as a has-been in Hollywood (almost always revered but seldom supported), and remembered by advertising interests as the Man from Cresta Blanca -- "C-r-e-s-t-a B-l-a-n-c-a: CRESTA BLANCA!" Later, just that fat drunk talking for Gallo, then the nadir of California wines.

The people Welles was up against had learned to co-opt and marginalize almost any force moderating their drive for power.

Years ago, I was involved, in an active up-front way, with the Civil Rights Movement, Unionism, social justice activities, work with the Democratic Party, mostly on the local level, but a couple of times, modestly, on a state and national level. What I finally learned is what Banks and Corporations have "always known" , what the Republican Right has learned from them -- if unlimited power and capital wait long enough, movements collapse, people move up in class (or fall through the cracks), sell out, become destitute, or die off.

[I'm about to fit into one or more of those categories myself, not one of the happier ones.]

The Family Farm almost always, eventually, comes up for sale . . . and becomes a suburban housing development. [Or even more lucrative, a condominium complex -- the bank and the corporate real estate developers, in essence, and in a metaphorical sense, lease the dwellings but retain ownership of the property. In 99 years or less . . . .]

Exiled to Europe or marked a prima dona in Hollywood, his films unreleased or destroyed (sometimes with his own help), his physical, financial and professional resources increasingly evanescent, the American political dictum I learned must have been a bitter one for Welles: The young liberal moves to the right in America, as does a fearful and increasingly greedy electorate. Easy pickings for commercial clap-trap and dreams of Empire, as anyone not employed or part of the mega-machine begins to see the clear results of today.

But Welles never gave up, never gave in, never stopped working for the good of all the peoples of the World (most deeply, in the best interests of his fellow Americans), not just for the good of a narrow class, either here or around the World.

That must have been one lifelong legacy Welles inherited ('vot[ing] that way, and stand[ing] with those people'), by growing up in the cross-party lines philosophy of the Progressive Movement, which was at its height when he was coming of age and at his most protean. Welles was some kind of man.

When shall come such another?

Glenn

[tony]

Glenn:

I disagree slightly with you about Welles's cultural impact in the 60s, 70s and 80s: I think he came very close to being a real force again, and if a few breaks had gone his way, he might have been an even greater force. Imagine if The Other Side of the Wind had come out and had re-established him in the pantheon of great directors "actively working", along with Scorcese and Coppola? And then if he had finally finished Don Quixote, The Dreamers, The Big Brass Ring, The Cradle Will Rock (with it's Popular Front socialism) and a black and white Lear, I think he might well have been a far greater force. Yet, at the same time, it seems as though the cards were stacked against him, as you (and I) have observed, with some general tendencies in American society, and the studio sytem, as Clinton Heylin has written about.

But just so we don't get totally pessimistic, I remind myself of something that Chomsky talks about in a recent DVD (the one that I linked too called "Imperial Grand Strategy"): he observes that the invasion of Iraq is the first war that America has been involved in that was demonstrated against BEFORE it happened, and that this has never been the case before; he mentions that Kennedy ordered the bombing of Vietnam in 1962, and nobody even noticed. And also that the American public, at large, didn't turn against the Vietnam war until years later. As well, he observes that the social/cultural revolution in the west since the late 60s and 70s has forever changed the society, as we have and the enviromental movement as well as more rights for women, gays, the mentally and physically challenged, "visible minorites", and it looks to soon be illegal immigrants as well.

So Glenn: don't be too negative, as I truly believe had a few breaks gone gone his way, Welles would have been more of a cultural force in the 70s and 80s (and 90s?) than he was in the 30s and 40s. And look at him today: is he not the director with the greatest amount of books being written about him, every year? And Kane has continued to be voted the best picture ever made in the sight and Sound poll, as it has consistently since 1962. In fact, hasn't Welles continued to be a Socratic-like gnat, one which can never be slapped away, and one which keeps disturbing in important ways?

Or perhaps this view is a product of my being born later than you and not experiencing the 40s first-hand: I only remember the Kennedy era, and the feeling of intense optimism and idealism following in the 60s and early 70s, a feeling I imagine has much in common with the both the Progressive era of 1890-1917, as well as the New Deal of the 30s and 40s.

Tony :;):

[Glenn Anders]

Tony: I did live through both eras, and they were very different.

In the 1930's, America was optimistic, at her best, fighting to regain her balance, to return to an ethos that was both championing deeply American ideas in a melting pot sense, yet still drawn to Euro-centric art in its cultural values. In the contrary, the corporate structure was advancing into the Pacific toward the fabled markets of China, as it had wanted to for over fifty years. Outer Space was not seriously on many Americans' radar when Welles did his "The War of the Worlds," but he was still in the main stream, and he could accommodate the Far East as we can hear in a work like the Campbell Playhouse production of Pearl Buck's "The Patriot."

Pearl Harbor turned the entire American nation's attention toward the Far East, as never before, while Welles was moving physically and emotionally into South America and, later, still farther into Europe. The end of the War, in my opinion, presented a new, very different cultural and political landscape for someone like Welles who wanted to maintain a central position in the thinking of Americans. As we have outlined above, the return of the Progressive Party in its shambles to the Republican Party, the end of the La Follette Dynasty, the rise of McCarthy, the coming of the Hollywood Black List were all indications that an era of free debate, and the sharing of ideas on how to actually solve issues, was over for figures like Orson Welles.

THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI perhaps represented an attempt to straddle the two cultural and political worlds. It is a curious title because, except for the suggestion that Elsa (Rita Hayworth) is a White Russian, possibly Eurasian, the action deals with the Far East only in the bizarre, almost unconnected sequence, where Michael (Welles) hides among the audience at a Chinese traditional folk theater in San Francisco.

[In considering THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI's schema of combining these two worlds in a sinister sense, I'm somehow reminded of a curious theory (best formulated in Tim Findley's magnificent novel, Famous Last Words) that the adventuress Wallace Warfield Simpson was a minor espionage agent working for the Japanese, who was recruited by Nazi secret services in Shanghai to seduce, debauch, and bring the back to his Germanic roots, the British Prince of Wales, the prospective future Edward VIII (after their marriage known as the Duke and Duchess of Winsor, very sympathetic to Hitler's surprisingly royalist modernism). It is the kind of exotic, speculative intrigue which might have appealed to Welles as a subtext for THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI.]

The process of America shifting its interests from Europe (and the Western Hemisphere, of course) to the the Middle East, Central Asia and the Pacific Basin picked up momentum in the late 1960's and 1970's, as Welles was moving in the opposite direction.

Much as today, a majority of Americans would have supported the crazy war in Vietnam right until the moment the helicopters took the embassy staff off the roof in Saigon, had they been promised a decisive conclusion on a date certain. Living in Europe most of those years, Welles could not have embodied the same influence he had provided in the progressive 1930's and 1940's.

An example of a not too dissimilar figure is on the scene today: Gore Vidal. In novels, essays, plays, movies and political commentary, he has been talking realistically, cogently, and accurately about American Society -- its political and cultural history -- for fifty years. At times, he would have been, and was, a natural ally of Welles. Yet for all of his similar Wellesian ability to nail issue after American issue, he has been a distant figure, self-exiled, again as Welles was, to Europe most of his later life.

[Vidal is now 80, not in good health, but about to publish the second volume of his memoirs, and a new book on the current Administration, entitled, American Empire. I saw him interviewed this afternoon, and among many wise epigrams, he gave the interviewer this one: "We are not At War, Congress has not declared War as required by its responsibilities under the Constitution. To talk about 'the war on terror' is like talking about "the war on dandruff'!" Welles would have relished that obvious but unrecognized truth.]

In projecting Welles' popuarity in the 1930's and 1940's into the 1960's and 1970's, I'm afraid we are stirring around in one of the most popular Post-War genres of fiction: The "What If" novel.

Glenn

[Le Chiffre]

I saw that Vidal bit on CSPAN too, too bad it wasn't longer. You're right Glenn, he doesn't look in very good health now (neither does Chomsky last time I saw him), but his wit is as sharp and provocative as ever. Perhaps inspired by Welles' F FOR FAKE, Vidal has made a couple of essay films himself, on the subjects of Venice and the American Presidency. He didn't direct them, but he's the writer and host, and he's always maintained that the writer is the true auteur of a film. I'm happy to have both films in my collection. To me he's probably the closest thing to an Orson Welles in the literary world.

[Tashman]

Mteal suggests a page from Vidal that is actually Welles-related:

"Since there are few reliable accounts of the classic talking movies, Pauline Kael's book on the making of Citizen Kane is a valuable document. In considerable detail she establishes the primacy in that enterprise of the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. The story of how Orson Welles saw to it that Mankiewicz became, officially, the noncreator of his own film is grimly fascinating and highly typical of the way so many director-hustlers acquire for themselves the writer's creation." [from "Who Makes the Movies?"]

[Glenn Anders]

Tashman, mteal, your comments form an ironic brotherhood.

I have on VHS Vidal's hypnotically entertaining and informative essay trilogy about Venice.

As for that wounding passage on the primacy of the screenwriter (in this case, he thinks Mankiewicz), I think that Vidal is largely correct, and in a sense, Welles might have agreed. Few directors have ever made a great film from a bad script. [Possibly, that is where the notion of auteurism came from.] I disagree in the specific example of CITIZEN KANE, which began with a great script, and was improved upon by a great director.

But no one ever said that Vidal's pen was less sharp than his tongue.

Glenn

[tony]

My guess is you guys probably know this, but Vidal wrote a wonderful essay called "Remembering Orson Welles" for the NY Review of Books back in 1989 which has been reprinted in Estrin's " Interviews" book. It's interesting that Mailer, Vidal And Welles all tried, or came close to trying, to get into politics, but it was Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood who actually made it.

Hmmmmmmm...... ???

[Tashman]

Tony: "Remembering Orson Welles" is a nice review of The Big Brass Ring. Still, even with a few self-revisionist concessions to the magic and mastery (in images) of his subject, Vidal's fluid appreciation is nonetheless dulled by his old vague prejudices. That the purest incarnation of Orson Welles (or however he phrased it) is found in his film scripts is a peculiar note of tribute. And the private recollections, while deftly sketching Welles the raconteur and casual companion, seemed to dwell on a handful of bitchy moments the only recommendation of which is that they were observed first-hand.

[tony]

Tashman:
Gee, I'll have to read it again; I haven't read it since the book came out, and I remember it being quite good. ???

[Tashman]

Could be too I just hold a grudge in this case since I opted for quoting the other (dismal) essay.

[Le Chiffre]

I agree with you Tashman, that Vidal gives some prominence to Welles's bitchy side in REMEMBERING ORSON WELLES- for example, when Vidal recounts how Welles would accept an invitation to his parties, then after inquiring about the guest list, would find an excuse not to come. One gets the feeling Vidal was still irked by that.

And there's little question that Pauline Kael was wrong about Welles stealing writing credit on CITIZEN KANE (and Vidal's quoting of it reveals a bit of his own bitchy side), but many use that as an excuse to dismiss the entire RAISING KANE essay, which is otherwise excellent (a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater). I haven't read Vidal's WHO MAKES THE MOVIES essay in awhile, but the basic gist of it struck me as correct: in the sound era, writers are underrated, directors are overrated, especially action directors by foreign critics, who for obvious reasons, don't understand all of the nuances of good English-language writing.

Kael: "It's easy to see why Europeans, who couldn't follow the slang and the jokes and didn't understand the whole satirical frame of reference, should prefer our action films and Westerns. But it's a bad joke on our good jokes that film enthusiasts here often take their cues on the American movie past from Europe, and so they ignore the tradition of comic irreverence and become connoisseurs of the 'visuals' and 'mises en scene' of action pictures, which are usually too silly even to be called reactionary. They're sub-reactionary - the antique melodramas of silent days with noise added - a mass art better suited, one might think, to Fascism, or even Fuedalism, then to democracy."

Welles said himself that most directors were overrated, and that 'actors were the great unsung heroes in this vast amount of literature about film that's piling up.' I don't know of any Wellesian quotes about writers per se, but the fact that he directed only his own scripts after KANE is a pretty clear indication of how important he felt the writing process was to the auteurship of a film. Like Glenn, I also think Welles would have agreed with Vidal.

[Tashman]

Mteal: Appreciate the reply. One bilious instance of Vidal's that stayed in my memory was his report of Welles confiding that he no longer went on lecture engagements because his weight was too much to be accomodated by the modest transportation he'd receive. To which Vidal tells us a weight-related humiliation of Welles's that he knew at the time but didn't let on about to Orson. As if we're to say "What magnanimity!" saving it as he did for the NY Review of Books.

For reasons not at all related to Welles, I've never been a devotee of Kael (ditto Vidal, come to think of it). As such, outside your excerpt I've no idea what she says in the KANE book except as it's been restated by her critics, notably Bogdanovich and Sarris. Since I believe the former when he told us that "there is nothing to show that Kael interviewed anyone of real importance associated with the actual making of the film," I'm not sure how her essay could be otherwise fine, as you say, except for the small detail, or "bitter fact" as Bogdanovich has it, of Kael's polemic angle. (And which critics does she mean? Which action films? Vidal at least comes with cases in hand, even if he's not got much more on the ball.)

Anyway, today's climate seems well removed (and probably in several worse directions) from the critical skirmishes that gave any significance to the purposeful thrusts of Vidal and Kael. There was a very real overreach within continental auteur criticism--the zealousness of the Gallic mind in the throes of a philosophy--that was obviously open to attack. But countering general elements of sophistry with commensurate sophistries as a corrective, that really is a case of throwing the baby (of auteurism) out with the bathwater. This is not simply a small adjustment of emphasis. As Vidal's retort to Nicholas Ray, that volleyball of auteur arguments, puts it: "If it is not all in the script, there is no film to make."

He elaborates what he means by "all" when he projects, using his own brand of quasi-mystical terms, the "What If" of James Agee as a metteur en scene: "Agee might have been the first American cinema auteur: a writer who wrote screenplays in such a way that, like the score of a symphony, they needed nothing more than a conductor's interpretation,... an interpretation he could have provided himself"; which is presumably what Vidal has in mind several years later, with respect to "The Big Brass Ring", when he says that the essential Welles is to be found in his script pages. The conjunction of purposes implicit here should be plain enough. And the whole of Vidal's essay, nearly every historical contention, is founded on exactly such gross terms as these. His professional confusion in elevating what might one day be "worth seeing" is by his own stroke nullified (as it had been all along, and in advance, by Nicholas Ray) in the disclosure that, once written, it need not be "seen" at all. Surprise surprise.