Orson Welles Spring: The Lady from Shanghai

While in his interviews Welles claimed that The Stranger made him want to leave studio film-making, he did it one last time with The Lady From Shanghai, famously made at Columbia under its notoriously difficult mogul Harry Cohn. Columbia put out a lot of great, truly dark noir at the time, and Lady From Shanghai is best seen as Welles doing his own treatment of that drama. I am a noir lover and watching this film again I realized what an excellent example it is of the genre. It makes me wish Welles has tried other genres, like making a Western or sci-fi film because he takes the genre conventions but gives them a real spark on uniqueness. 

Like many noirs the plot is a maze, and maybe besides the point. If I can restate in generally, Welles plays an Irish sailor who gets tangled in a web of intrigue, adultery, and murder spun by a hotshot lawyer and his femme fatale wife, leading to dramatic deaths in the finale. Like the best noirs it deals with the cruelty of fate. The sailor gets drawn in by actually doing a good thing by rescuing the Rita Hayworth title character from an assault. After World War II, where some lived and some died and there did not seem to be any morality behind the hand of fate, narratives like this made a lot of sense. In our current moment, where the world also feels inexplicable, they resonate again. 

Notably, Welles' marriage to Hayworth was falling apart at the time. For this film he had her sheer her long wavy red hair, and then dyed it blonde. This enraged Cohn, who knew it would drive audiences away (which it did.) Knowing their own relationship difficulties gives this an extra edge, as does the unspoken pain that's always on the title character's face. She seems haunted and desperate and despite being a villain in the end, I never stopped sympathizing with her. Due to her stunning looks, it's easy to underrate Hayworth as an actor. This movie shows that she really had the chops, especially in tackling noir. 

I was also struck by the performance of Everett Sloan as her husband. He played the ebullient Mr Bernstein in Kane, here as the lawyer he is a menacing viper who makes every scene that he is in. Through this character and his corrupt partner Welles also makes several digs at the legal system, which is shown to be a tool of the wealthy and connected. This is a truly down and dirty noir, with little sympathy to go around, since even the sailor seems to be lacking a moral center. 

Of course, not all is well. As I mentioned, the plot is hard to follow even by the standards of the genre. The scenes in San Francisco's Chinatown are gorgeously shot, but also full of cheap Orientalism. Welles' character is Irish and despite his deep love for that country and the time he spent living there, Welles' brogue is notably deficient. The thing is, you forget that all at the end with the shootout scene in the funhouse, for my money the best cinematic montage in the entire noir genre. It's a moment when the sheer thrilling inventiveness of Kane is back and on full display. It's Welles last scene in a studio picture, and it's a helluva way to go out. 

According to Welles' story, he did this movie to quickly get money to pay off debts so his stage production of Around the World in 80 Days could proceed, and the source material was a random novel he saw while he was literally on the phone with Cohn to get financing. Had he had more time and better source material Welles may have filmed an even better noir, but I'll take this one. 

Orson Welles Spring: The Stranger

The Stranger made the most money of any Welles film, and it also happens to be his least favorite of this own works. Knowing him, this should hardly surprise us. A man who was so willfully committed to art against the odds would be bound to have mixed feelings about success, since it would imply that his work had not been sufficiently challenging. This film has the look, pacing, story, and even actors of a film noir, made during the apex of that genre. Of all of his films, The Stranger conforms most to genre convention. 

It tells the story of a small town in Connecticut with a secret: one of the teachers at the elite college prep school is in fact Franz Kindler (played by Welles), a Nazi intellectual who had escaped Germany after its fall. He is newly married to Mary Longstreet (played by Loretta Young), the daughter of a Supreme Court justice. Kindler is tracked down by Nazi-hunter Wilson, played in a typically spirited performance by the great Edward G Robinson. 

On a political level, it's easy to see why Welles was attracted to this project. He was and remained a full-throated anti-fascist and many of his films speak to that anti-fascism. Here that concern is literal and on the surface, probably too much. Kindler comes across as some kind of evil genius, a way of framing the Nazis that gives them a far more powerful image than they deserve. It's also striking that Kindler and the fascist threat is coming from outside, rather than inside. I can imagine the very WASPy town the film is set in was full of the type of people who had embraced the Klan in the 1920s, as well as the fascist-friendly elements of the opposition to FDR in the 1930s. The whole framing of Kindler as a benign-looking man who is actually indoctrinating the youth in extremist ideology takes the Red Scare framing of communists to such an extent that this may be the only legitimate "Brown Scare" film. 

With all of that said, there are still some very effective elements. The Stranger came out only a year after the end of World War II, and incorporates film footage from the liberation of the camps, evidently the first time this was done in a Hollywood film. The Holocaust was a raw wound at this moment, but one the wider culture did little to reckon with. Edward G Robinson's life experiences and identity give his portrayal of Wilson a power and passion that overcomes the limitations of the script. Robinson had emigrated from a Jewish community in Romania as a ten year old after his brothers were targeted in a pogrom. He was an outspoken critic of Nazi Germany well before Pearl Harbor, something that later caused him to suffer during the Red Scare. When Wilson confronts Kindler and his "just following orders" excuses, Robinson's righteous fury practically blasts through the screen. 

Living as we do now in an era where overt fascism is making a comeback, this scene electrified me. However, narratives like The Stranger's present the values of small-town America as an antidote to fascist ideology, when in fact they have been just as likely to be their incubator. In that respect, The Stranger is an optimistic film, seeing the victory against the Nazis in the war as establishing a new anti-fascist future. The hardest thing to endure in the current political situation for me has been the knowledge that fascism never died, and that its defeat this time around looks far from inevitable. 

I re-read the parts of Welles' interviews with Peter Bogdanovich compiled in The is Orson Welles related to The Stranger, and while he does not have a lot of affinity for the film, he is very much proud of its politics. Evidently he had contemplated dropping out of showbiz for politics full time, and supporting more radical causes like one world governmnet. His issue with the film really stemmed from it being a lone case of him being a studio gun for hire. Other people wrote and produced the film, and they had cut several scenes he had written and filmed for the beginning. In the aftermath he decided from now on to take acting jobs he was not enthusiastic about so that he could have the money to do the directing work he really wanted to do.

Orson Welles Spring: The Magnificent Ambersons

Welles' first film still stands as one of the cornerstones of world cinema. His second film, The Magnificent Ambersons, still stands as the most infamous example of studio meddling in a great director's work. I and many other film buffs keep hoping and praying that a complete cut somehow emerges somewhere. For now we are stuck with a film with 50 minutes cut off and a jarring, "happy" ending tacked onto it. 

Because the editing job defaced Ambersons so much, I had not really gotten much out of it on previous viewings, apart from the excellent acting performances and the moments of Welles' brilliance that still shined through. This time, something deeper clicked. Whereas I had seen the film as a family drama before, now I understood it as a social document. If Welles had made this film a mere three years later, after the war was over, the studio would not have butchered it and it would have been embraced by the public. 

At the end of the war, dark film visions made sense to Americans who experienced the death and destruction of a war that was far scarier than depicted in John Wayne movies. Films like The Lost Weekend and The Best Years of Our Lives won Oscars in 1945 and 1946 not despite but because of their dwelling on the dark side of American life. Ambersons is a similarly dark vision, but not one for the rah-rah days of 1942. On a basic level, this film is asking what kind of country we are defending in the first place, not a question people were asking back then, but soon would be. 

The film takes us to the turn of the century, but more than that, it imitates its rhythms. The rat-a-tat-tat of Kane's editing is gone, things have slowed down. The emotions and conflicts are more muted. Like Kane, the character of George is humbled but here he "gets his commupence" in ways that are truly sad to watch. Much of the drama of the film comes from these characters in a bygone, duty-bound world being anguished over not being able to have what their hearts cry out for. To add insult to injury, many of them also end up in penury, stripped of their old comforts.

Welles like Werner Herzog may be a master of a twentieth century art form, film, but his sensibilities lie in the literate, non-specialized world of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, the rise of the automobile is not presented here in a positive light. At the same time, Welles is also critical of the Victorian elite that resisted the massification of American society mostly out of their own self interest. His heart lies in a different time, but he is not a reactionary. 

I also have the say that the roughness of the edits made me emotional when I watched Ambersons this time because I felt like something great had been stolen from me. The early parts of the film work so well, then suddenly the main characters are in dire straits with no explanation, and by the time the viewer can recover from the whiplash, a poorly shot improbably happy ending seems to invalidate all the emotions the viewer has put into the film. It was especially painful after the fadeout to hear Welles' conclusion praising the book's author and the cast and proudly taking credit for something that I knew was not what he had intended. 

I found myself on the verge of tears at this humiliation, which puzzled me somewhat. Why was I getting so emotional? It hit me that I was probably reacting to current events. Musk's DOGE initiative is yet another example of wealthy powerful people destroying beautiful things in the name of money because they are incapable of creating good things, or are even interested in doing so. Welles will still make many more movies, but the path would be rocky forevermore. 

Orson Welles Spring: Citizen Kane

This scene really hit different this time

Orson Welles Spring kicks off with a film so monumental that it seems pretty silly for me to write a commentary on it. It's one of if not the most analyzed films of all time, and the stories behind its making have been turned into multiple films of their own (RKO 281 and Mank). Instead of writing any kind of general overview, I thought I would just offer a few notes for thought that might generate some thoughts of your own. 

When I was growing up I heard about Kane all the time as the film that had been anointed the "best movie ever." I had heard others my age who had sought it out on that basis, and left disappointed. Kane is one of my favorite movies, but to present it to someone on the terms of "best ever" is a bad idea. Luckily for me, I did not see it until my mid-20s, after I had already seen a lot of other films of that era. With that context in mind, Kane absolutely blew me away. It looks, feels, and MOVES like nothing else of its era in the "golden age" of Hollywood. It shows, frame after frame, just what cinema can do. It's hard for modern viewers who don't know old movies to get what's going on because the films they have been raised on live in a post-Kane world. 

Watching it again last night, I was struck by its inventiveness. Practically every shot grabbed my attention. The chopped up timeline combined with the masterful editing kept me far away from scrolling on my phone. It's easy to see why Kane became such a totem among cineastes, since it shows just what can be done with the medium. Things were getting there in the late silent era, where the camera achieved freedom. The advent of sound put the camera within new limits, but Kane found ways to overcome them. 

This time around I watched Kane thinking about the current political situation, and the political nature of the film really came home to me. When I first saw it in the early 2000s I didn't really think about this much, focusing far more on Kane as a person rather than as a political figure or symbol. Because this is a film long praised for its film-making accomplishments, we have tend to miss its message and the historical context it emerged from. 

Kane came out in 1941, in the midst of World War II and at a time when disenchantment with capitalism had reached its highest point in the Western world. Welles himself was on the left and had done work for New Deal theater programs. His famous stage adaptation of Julius Caesar made it into an allegory for the rise of modern fascism. In America the was the age of the Popular Front, the broad anti-fascist coalition that mainstreamed leftist radicalism more than it ever had been. Looking at Kane with fresh eyes, Welles is telling the story of America before the New Deal. Charles Foster Kane is a robber baron raised by a bank, the type of man who when challenged about what people will think of him crows that they will think what he tells them to think. 

Kane is the exemplar of American capitalism after the Gilded Age, and thus is shown rather intentionally as a figure from the past, adrift in the present. Welles was prone to his own arrogance, and he seems to be telling the audience "Aren't you glad that these people don't have ultimate power any more?" It feels like a victory lap for the New Deal and Popular Front, but the aftermath of the film's release showed that the forces of capital were far stronger than suspected. Welles put a thumb in the eye of the mega-wealthy and they retaliated against him. Hearst almost had the film destroyed (shades of Zaslav!) and Welles would never again be able to make a Hollywood film with the financing and freedom he had on Kane. I still admire the man for using his one shot at glory to show how completely craven and dysfunctional the wealthy can be. 

On this last point I feel the film is far more relevant than when I first saw it about 24 years ago. Modern America is dominated by Kane manques (see what I did there?) like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and of course, Musk. Yes there were rich people with massive fortunes back in 2001, but unlike Kane they were not overtly political figures with pretensions of using their wealth to mold public opinion. As the film vividly illustrates, wealth is a corrosive thing that warps the souls of those who possess it. We are now witnessing an attempted revolution from above so sweeping that Charles Foster Kane could not conceive of it. As scary as the moment is, I can find comfort in Welles' film. As much power as these wealthy people seek, they will never be happy, and they too will have to die someday, just like the rest of us. 

Watching Kane again last night with that in mind, the final scene hit differently. There was the usual shudder at watching so many of his possessions being burned after his death, including the childhood sled that represented an alternate life where he would not have been rich and maybe have become a decent human being. I usually feel a heavy sadness in that moment, and a clear warning about how to live my own life, but this time a smile came to my face. In the final shot, watching the smoke of all he had accumulated go through the chimney I muttered to myself with spite, "good." 

Introducing Orson Welles Spring

For fourteen years I posted regularly in this spot, but have let things go to seed while I've been concentrating on my Substack, where I am writing less and with more intention. I have been missing writing here for Notes From the Ironbound, however. In recent years I've loved doing my album-by-album retrospectives of legacy artists' back catalogs. I wanted to do another, but my potential picks just aren't inspiring me. 

Last year I happened to watch all of David Lynch's films, the first time I had ever really done that with a legacy film-maker. It was such an enriching experience, and I began to think I should do a blog series about a director rather than a musician. I listen to the Blank Check Podcast, so I also knew I would have to go with someone they had not covered yet. 

As the country has descended into its current state I have clung to comforting things to watch to distract myself and try to get rested enough to sleep at night. Late at night I often fire up an old interview with Orson Welles, it's my own version of ASMR. I was watching one from the early 80s where he said he was more interested in politics than film, and that suddenly unlocked something for me. Welles' films are indeed political, and his politics were formed in the crucible of the interwar years, a time that feels uncomfortably like our own. 

Welles' did not just critique capitalism in his films, he lived the consequences of that critique. He only got to make one Hollywood movie without interference, his first. He spent much of his career working independently, begging for money and scraping together productions under difficult circumstances. He is the patron saint of artists who insist on creating against difficult odds. His is a spirit that we need today, both in our culture and our politics. At a time when mainstream culture seems almost opposed to the entire concept of artistry, I think viewing his films will be an inspiring endeavor. 

Soon I will post about Citizen Kane, that one shining moment where his artistry had the full backing of a major Hollywood studio.