Journey Into Fear (Norman Foster, 1943)

Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in Journey Into Fear

Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, Orson Welles, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Eustace Wyatt, Frank Readick, Edgar Barrier, Jack Moss, Hans Conried. Screenplay: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, based on a novel by Eric Ambler. Cinematography: Karl Struss. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Mark-Lee Kirk. Film editing: Mark Robson. Music: Roy Webb.

While they were working on The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten used some spare time to rewrite a screenplay by Richard Collins and Ben Hecht for a property owned by RKO, Eric Ambler's spy novel Journey Into Fear. Welles would have directed, but he was still tied up on Ambersons, so he assigned the job to Norman Foster, though he still had time to play the secondary role of Col. Haki, and as producer to see to it that many of the actors he had worked with -- Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Everett Sloane, Ruth Warrick, and Agnes Moorehead -- played key roles. The result is a film whose complicated plot never quite resolves itself into clarity, but which abounds in Wellesian moments, such as the desperate struggle on the rainswept ledge of a hotel at the film's climax. Unfortunately, Welles's battle with RKO over the editing of Ambersons resulted in his firing, and the editing of Journey Into Fear was similarly taken out of his hands.

The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles, 2018)

Peter Bogdanovich and John Huston in The Other Side of the Wind

Jake Hannaford: John Huston
The Actress: Oja Kodar
Brooks Otterlake: Peter Bogdanovich
Julie Rich: Susan Strasberg
Billy Boyle: Norman Foster
John Dale: Robert Random
Zarah Valeska: Lilli Palmer
Pat Mullins: Edmond O'Brien
Maggie Noonan: Mercedes McCambridge
Zimmer: Cameron Mitchell
Matt Costello: Paul Stewart
Jack Simon: Gregory Sierra
The Baron: Tonio Selwart
Max David: Geoffrey Land
Themselves: Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, Stéphane Audran, George Jessel

Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Oja Kodar, Orson Welles
Cinematography: Gary Graver
Art direction: Polly Platt
Film editing: Bob Murawski, Orson Welles
Music: Michel Legrand

Inevitably (and intentionally), Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind is going to remind us of other films, including movies about making movies like Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963) and such garish post-Code counterculture movies as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Zabriskie Point *(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970). But what it doesn't remind me of very much are the movies made by Orson Welles. In his most troubled and inchoate films, like Mr. Arkadin (1955), Welles always gave us something to look and marvel at, even if it was only Michael Redgrave in a hairnet. The long-posthumously assembled Other Side doesn't give us much we haven't seen before, aside from a naked Oja Kodar wandering around the ruins of old Hollywood studio sets. Welles's intention is to spoof those counterculture movies while telling a story about how hard it is to make one. I think perhaps the chief problem lies in Welles's casting John Huston as the ill-fated Jake Hannaford, the aging and put-upon director, when he should of course have cast himself. Hannaford's young leading man, John Dale, has left the film in a huff, and what forward drive the narrative part of the film has consists of the director's response to that defection. Huston's predatory grin feels all wrong -- I never sense that his Hannaford has lost control of anything, except perhaps his libido. We need the vast imperturbable presence of Welles in the role, if only to make the point that this is the most personal, the most autobiographical of all his films. It's lamentable that it took almost half a century to bring The Other Side of the Wind to the screen, but the truth is, the story about why it took so long -- which Morgan Neville tells in his 2018 documentary, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead -- is more interesting than the film itself.

*Some of The Other Side of the Wind was shot in a house across the street from the Arizona house featured (and blown up, at least in miniature) in Antonioni's movie.

The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)

Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli in The Third Man

Holly Martins: Joseph Cotten
Anna Schmidt: Alida Valli
Harry Lime: Orson Welles
Maj. Calloway: Trevor Howard
Sgt. Paine: Bernard Lee
Porter: Paul Hörbiger
Kurtz: Ernst Deutsch
Popescu: Siegfried Breuer
Dr. Winkel: Erich Ponto
Cribbin: Wilfrid Hyde-White
Anna's Landlady: Hedwig Bleibtreu

Director: Carol Reed
Screenplay: Graham Greene
Cinematography: Robert Krasker
Art direction: Vincent Korda
Film editing: Oswald Hafenrichter
Music: Anton Karas

It's my contention that the mark of a great film is the density of its texture, its ability to let you find something new or different, or simply to remember a forgotten moment, each time you watch it. I have to admit that I wasn't much looking forward to rewatching The Third Man, but I felt obliged since I hadn't seen it for some time and I do have it on my list of great movies. I knew what was coming: the great doorway revelation, the ferris wheel conversation, the chase through the sewers, and Anna walking toward and past Holly along an allée of pollarded trees. But Carol Reed's film is full of so many incidentals that bring even familiar scenes to life. For example, when Anna is picked up by the international police -- a force made up of members of each of Vienna's occupying forces -- she's allowed to pack a bag. It's the Frenchman who reminds her that she has forgotten her lipstick. Touches like this, or Anna's landlady protesting in German that needs no subtitles to get its point across, are essential to the film's greatness. I had forgotten the demon child who fingers Holly as a murderer after the porter's death. I hadn't realized how Robert Krasker's expressionistically tilted camera in much of the film is counterpointed by his concluding shot, the long, foursquare, devastatingly symmetrical take of Anna's walk along the allée. To be sure, there are things that don't quite make sense: Why is a man selling balloons at night in the deserted Vienna streets? And the light that reveals Harry Lime in the doorway comes from no plausible source. But these are moments for quibblers, not for those who luxuriate in cinematic poetry.

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles, 1965)

Orson Welles and Alan Webb in Chimes at Midnight

Falstaff: Orson Welles
Prince Hal: Keith Baxter
King Henry IV: John Gielgud
Poins: Tony Beckley
Mistress Quickly: Margaret Rutherford
Doll Tearsheet: Jeanne Moreau
Hotspur: Norman Rodway
Kate Percy: Marina Vlady
Shallow: Alan Webb
Silence: Walter Chiari
Pistol: Michael Aldridge
Bardolph: Patrick Bedford
Page: Beatrice Welles
Narrator: Ralph Richardson

Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Orson Welles
Based on plays by William Shakespeare and the chronicles of Raphael Holinshed
Cinematography: Edmond Richard
Production design: Mariano Erdoiza
Music: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino
Film editing: Elena Jaumandreu, Frederick Muller, Peter Parasheles
Costume design: Orson Welles

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

Falstaff wasn't the role Orson Welles was born to play, it was the role he grew -- and grew -- into. He knew he wasn't the great actor he wanted to be: There are countless stories of Welles ducking out of rehearsing scenes in which he appeared, using stand-ins to avoid performing opposite actors he respected. According to Simon Callow's Orson Welles: One-Man Band, Jeanne Moreau recalled that she waited several days to play one of their scenes together in Chimes at Midnight, and when she asked Welles why he said that he had lost his makeup kit: "I can't do any scenes till it's found," he claimed. "We'll start with the reverse shots of you, the close-ups," a technique he often used in which someone else would feed his lines to the other actor, so that Welles could later do his side of the dialogue by himself. When Moreau found the makeup kit on the set, an assistant urged her not to tell Welles: "He has stage-fright. He hid it himself." It's likely, however, that once you've seen Chimes at Midnight, Welles's Falstaff is the image of Shakespeare's character that will always stick in your mind. Other actors have played him as reckless, destructive, self-deluding, foolish, slovenly, and even at heart malicious -- justifications for all of these interpretations and more are present in the text. Welles plays him as just one step ahead of everyone else, so that Prince Hal's final repudiation comes to Falstaff not as a surprise or a crushing blow, but rather as a fulfillment of something he has always suspected might happen. The close-up of Falstaff's face after Hal's dismissal reveals not so much shock or disappointment as a kind of hurt mixed with "I thought this might happen" and even a little pride at having played a role in Hal's evolution toward kingship. It's a tour de force of silent film acting on Welles's part: For once he's not relying on the familiar resonances of his voice. The film itself was a famous commercial disaster, abetted by hostile critics such as the always unreliable Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who scared away many potential distributors. It was caught up in a squabble over rights that kept it from being shown theatrically in Welles's lifetime, and it came into its own after it was restored for video release, which is still the only way most of us have seen it. It's probably the most successful interpretation of Shakespeare for the screen because Welles was not bound by slavish devotion to the source: He picked and chose lines and scenes from at least three Shakespeare plays (Henry IV Parts I and II and Henry V) and arranged them in ways that suited the screen more than the stage. The Battle of Shrewsbury scene is a masterpiece of planning and editing, still endlessly imitated. But the film is also full of grand performances, including Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly, whose account of Falstaff's death is both funny and heartbreaking, and Keith Baxter as a lively but rather sinister Hal. Welles also showcases John Gielgud better than any filmmaker ever did, allowing him to deliver Henry IV's "uneasy lies the head" monologue in his richly poetic manner, even though the performance is somewhat at odds with the more naturalistic ones of the film's other actors. (It's telling, perhaps, that both Welles and Baxter briefly parody Gielgud's delivery when they come to their mock father-son scene.)

Othello (Orson Welles, 1951)

Orson Welles and Suzanne Cloutier in Othello

I watched Orson Welles's film version of Shakespeare's Othello twice last night. The first time was a recording on my DVR of the recent showing on Turner Classic Movies of the 1992 restoration supervised by Welles's daughter Beatrice. The images are crisp and beautiful but the soundtrack is muddy and sometimes unintelligible -- a grave fault when the speeches and dialogue are Shakespeare's. So I decided to check out Othello on Filmstruck's Criterion Channel. It appears to be based on the 1952 European release* that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Though the images are less sharp than those on the TCM restored version, the sound is superior, so I sat through the film again. I don't think it's the masterpiece that Welles's admirers call it, but it's certainly one of the few filmed versions of Shakespeare that succeed in turning what's essentially theater into cinema. The story of the three-year making of Welles's Othello has been often told: the long hiatuses when Welles ran out of money and had to take on acting work in other films to finance his own, the fight scenes that began filming in Morocco and ended in Italy, the striking improvisations like filming the attack on Cassio (Michael Laurence) and the murder of Roderigo (Robert Coote) by Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir) in a Turkish bath because the costumes had been held up by the supplier after the bills for them weren't paid, and so on. It's true, too, that the film is full of distracting continuity gaffes: Welles's makeup darkens and lightens within a single scene; MacLiammóir's beard seems to wander about his face; in the scene in which Othello confronts Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) about the handkerchief, he sometimes holds her hand with his right hand, while in the reverse shot it's his left hand. And so on. Would Welles's Othello be greater if he had had all the money and support in the world? I'm not sure that the hunger of Welles's imagination could ever have been satisfied. Moreover, he seemed to relish the role of wounded genius, to enjoy showing off what he could do in the face of adversity. We could ask for a more skillful actress than Cloutier (dubbed by Gudrun Ure, who had played Desdemona opposite Welles on stage), for a film that paid as much attention to Shakespeare's verse as it does to the spectacular settings in Italy and Morocco, for subtler and more original interpretations of the characters. But what we have is Welles at his most creative, always looking for and finding the most expressive way to bring a scene to life, and perhaps that's precious enough. Welles's Othello is no more Shakespeare's Othello than Verdi's is, yet all are touched with some kind of genius.

*In the 1952 version, Welles spoke the credits in a voiceover, but the on-screen credits that were added at the request of American distributors are retained in the 1992 restoration.

The Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947)

Like most of Orson Welles's Hollywood work, The Lady From Shanghai is the product of clashing wills: Welles's and the studio's -- in this case, Columbia under its infamous boss Harry Cohn. And as usual, the clash shows, sometimes in Welles's brilliance, such as the celebrated shootout in a hall of mirrors at the film's end, and sometimes in his indifference to the material: Is there any real excuse for the farcical courtroom scene that so violates any sense of consistency in the film's tone? Welles miscast himself as the protagonist, Michael O'Hara, a two-fisted Irish seaman, complete with an accent that he must have picked up in his youthful days in the Dublin theater. His soon-to-be ex-wife, Rita Hayworth, was forced upon him by Cohn, whom he angered by having her cut her hair and dye it blond. Her Elsa Bannister is the epitome of the treacherous film noir femme fatale, but it's hard to say whether the screenplay -- mostly by Welles -- or Hayworth's limited acting ability prevents the character from coming into focus. The real casting coup of the film is Everett Sloane as as Elsa's crippled husband, Arthur, and Glenn Anders as his partner, George Grisby. I use the word "partner" intentionally, because the film dodges around the Production Code in its hints that Bannister and Grisby are more than just law-firm partners, evoking the stereotypical catty and mutually destructive gay couple. Welles insisted on filming on location, which means we get some fascinating glimpses of late-1940s Acapulco and San Francisco, shot by Charles Lawton Jr. and the uncredited Rudolph Maté and Joseph Walker. In short, the movie is a mess, but sometimes a glorious mess.

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942)

So much has been written about the mishandling and mutilation of Orson Welles's second feature film that it's hard to see the Magnificent Ambersons that we have without pining for the one we lost. What we have is a fine family melodrama with a truncated and sentimental happy ending and an undeveloped and poorly integrated commentary on the effects of industrialization on turn-of-the-20th-century America. We also have some of the best examples of Welles's genius at integrating performances, production design, and cinematography -- all of which Welles supervised to the point of micromanagement. The interior of the Amberson mansion is one of the great sets in Hollywood film: It earned an Oscar nomination for Albert S. D'Agostino, A. Roland Fields, and Darrell Silvera, though the credited set designer, Mark-Lee Kirk, should have been included. Welles used the set as a grand stage, exploiting the three levels of the central staircase memorably with the help of Stanley Cortez's deep-focus camerawork. Welles later told Peter Bogdanovich that Frank Lloyd Wright, who was Anne Baxter's grandfather, visited the set and hated it: It was precisely the kind of domestic architecture that he had spent his career trying to eliminate, which, as Welles said, was "the whole point" of the design. As for the performances, Agnes Moorehead received a supporting actress nomination, the first of four in her career, for playing the spinster aunt, Fanny Minafer. She's superb, especially in the "kitchen scene," a single long take in which her nephew, George (Tim Holt), scarfs down strawberry shortcake as she worms out of him the information that Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten) has renewed his courting of George's widowed mother, Isabel (Dolores Costello), which is especially painful for Fanny, who had hopes of attracting Eugene herself. Holt, an underrated actor, holds his own here and elsewhere -- he is, after all, the central character, the spoiled child whose selfishness ruins the chances for happiness of so many of the film's characters. We can mourn the loss of Welles's cinematic flourishes that were apparently cut from the film, but to my mind the chief loss is the effective integration of the theme initiated when Eugene, who has made his fortune developing the automobile, admits that the industrial progress it represents "may be a step backward in civilization" and that automobiles are "going to alter war and they're going to alter peace." Welles was speaking from his own life, as Patrick McGilligan observes in his book Young Orson. Welles's father, Dick Welles, had been involved in developing automobile headlights -- the very thing in which Fanny invests and loses her inheritance -- and was the proud driver of the first automobile on the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, Welles's home town. The Magnificent Ambersons would have been much richer if Welles had been able to make the statement about the automobile that he later told Bogdanovich was central to his concept of the film.

Macbeth (Orson Welles, 1948)

Welles may have taken the old theatrical superstition of referring to the play not by its title but as "the Scottish play" a little too seriously. The decision to have actors deliver Shakespeare's lines with a Scottish accent was met with derision by critics, and Republic Pictures, the poverty-row studio that released the film, eventually had it redubbed without the accents after the initial release flopped. The original soundtrack has been restored, however, and it's hard to see what set the critics' teeth on edge: For the most part, the occasional flavoring of the dialogue with Scottish vowel sounds and diphthongs is unobtrusive. The one exception, to my ear, is Roddy McDowall as Malcolm, who carries the accent a bit too far -- though that may be because McDowall's conception of the character is something of a callow noodge, especially in the scene in which he's trying to persuade Macduff (Dan O'Herlihy) to cease grieving for his murdered family and take action. I must have seen the old redubbed and cut version at one point, because I remember the film as rather glum and murky, when in fact, although it's not wholly successful, it's filled with Wellesian visual touches and some very solid performances. Welles makes remarkable use of the celtic cross as a visual motif, for example, having the troops advancing on Dunsinane carry impossibly long staffs surmounted with the cross, a touch that dazzles the eye. His own performance is somewhat uneven -- Welles was seldom the strongest actor in his productions -- and he fails to provide Macbeth with the character arc that makes the character a tragic figure, moving from mere ambition to blind bloodthirstiness. Jeanette Nolan is a good Lady Macbeth and O'Herlihy a suitably strong adversary for Macbeth. As usual, Welles drew many performers from his Mercury Theater company, including Erskine Sanford as a dignified Duncan, something of an about-face from his broadly comic performance as the flustered newspaper editor Herbert Carter, huffing and puffing when he's ousted by the paper's new owner, Charles Foster Kane, in Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941). The low budget for the film shows, especially in the sets -- Dunsinane seems to be more cave than castle, its walls made out of Plasticine -- cobbled together on the Republic soundstage by art director Fred A. Ritter. And although Welles's keen eye served him well, as Alfred Hitchcock's would later when he shot Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), John L. Russell was never a distinguished cinematographer. Still, this is a fairly distinguished effort at putting Shakespeare on film.

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Things I don't like about Citizen Kane:

• The "News on the March" montage. It's an efficient way of cluing the audience in to what it's about to see, but is it necessary? And was it necessary to make it a parody of "The March of Time" newsreel, down to the use of the Timespeak so deftly lampooned by Wolcott Gibbs ("Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind")? 
• Susan Alexander Kane. Not only did Welles leave himself open to charges that he was caricaturing William Randolph Hearst's relationship with his mistress, Marion Davies, but he unwittingly damaged Davies's lasting reputation as a skillful comic actress. We still read today that Susan Alexander (whose minor talent Kane exploits cruelly) is to be identified as Welles's portrait of Davies, when in fact Welles admired Davies's work. But beyond that, Susan (Dorothy Comingore) is an underwritten and inconsistent character -- at one point a sweet and trusting object of Kane's affections and later in the film a vituperative, illiterate shrew and still later a drunk. What was it in her that Kane (Orson Welles) initially saw? From the moment she first lunges at the high notes in "Una voce poco fa," it's clear to anyone, unless Kane is supposed to have a tin ear, that she has no future as an opera star. Does she exist in the film primarily to demonstrate Kane's arrogance of power? A related quibble: I find the portrayal of her exasperated Italian music teacher, Matiste (Fortunio Bonanova), a silly, intrusive bit of tired comic relief.   
• Rosebud. The most famous of all MacGuffins, the thing on which the plot of Citizen Kane depends. It's not just that the explanation of how it became so widely known as Kane's last word is so feeble -- was the sinister butler, Raymond (Paul Stewart) in the room when Kane died, as he seems to say? -- it's that the sled itself puts so much psychological weight on Kane's lost childhood, which we see only in the scenes of his squabbling parents (Agnes Moorehead and Harry Shannon). The defense insists that the emphasis on Rosebud is mistakenly put there by the eager press, and that the point is that we often try to explain the complexity of a life by seizing on the wrong thing. But that seems to me to burden the film with more message than it conveys. 

And yet, and yet ... it's one of the great films. Its exploration of film technique, particularly by Gregg Toland's deep-focus photography, is breathtaking. Perry Ferguson's sets (though credited to RKO art department head Van Nest Polglase) loom magnificently over the action. Bernard Herrmann's score -- it was his first film -- is legendary. And it is certainly one of the great directing debuts in film history. I don't think it's the greatest film ever made. In the top ten, maybe, but it seems to me artificial and mechanical in comparison to the depiction of actual human life in Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953), the elevation of the gangster genre to incisive social and political critique in the first two Godfather films (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974), the delicious explorations of obsessive behavior in any number of Alfred Hitchcock movies, the epic treatment of Russian history in Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966), and the tribulations of growing up in the Apu trilogy (Satyajit Ray, 1955, 1956, 1959). And there are lots of films by Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut, Robert Bresson, and Jean-Luc Godard that I would watch before I decide to watch Kane again. There are times when I think Welles's debut film has been overrated because he had a great start, battled a formidable foe in William Randolph Hearst, and inadvertently revealed how conventional Hollywood filmmaking was -- for which Hollywood never forgave him. It's common to say that Citizen Kane was prophetic, because the downfall of Charles Foster Kane anticipated the downfall of Orson Welles. That's oversimple, but like many oversimplifications it contains a germ of truth.     

Mr. Arkadin (Orson Welles, 1955)

Michael Redgrave in Mr. Arkadin

Gregory Arkadin: Orson Welles
Guy Van Stratten: Robert Arden
Mily: Patricia Medina
Burgomil Trebitsch: Michael Redgrave
Jakob Zouk: Akim Tamiroff
Sophie: Katina Paxinou
The Professor: Mischa Auer
Thaddeus: Peter van Eyck
Raina Arkadin: Paola Mori
Baroness Nagel: Suzanne Flon

Director: Orson Welles
Screenplay: Orson Welles
Cinematography: Jean Bourgoin
Art direction: Orson Welles
Film editing: Renzo Lucidi, William Morton, Orson Welles
Music: Paul Misraki

"What if?" is the question that haunts every Orson Welles film after Citizen Kane (1941). What if Welles had had the financial, production, and distribution support for his films? Of none of them is the question more appropriate than Mr. Arkadin, which was edited by other hands than Welles's and not even shown in the United States until 1962, and at one point was said to exist in at least seven different versions. In 2006, the Criterion Collection released a three-DVD set that edited together all of the existing English-language versions of the film, following what was known of Welles's original plan, along with his comments on some of the other versions that had been released. It's probably as close as we're going to get to what the director had in mind. So what if Mr. Arkadin had been under Welles's control all along? Would we have a more coherent narrative and style? Would the protagonist, Guy Van Stratten, have been played by a more skilled actor than Robert Arden? (It's a role that would have been perfect for someone like William Holden.) Would Welles have called on the best makeup artists to provide him with a more convincing prosthetic nose and a wig and beard whose edges don't show? Would the function and the fate of Patricia Medina's character, Mily, have been clearer? And does any of this really matter? For what we have here, despite Welles's later description of the film (or its handling) as a "disaster," is one of the most fascinating works in his storied, troubled career. There are sequences that are haunting, even if their purpose in the film is unclear, such as the procession of the penitentes, who in their tall, pointed hoods look like exactly what Mily mistakes them for: "crazy ku kluxers." Or the Goyaesque masks at Arkadin's ball. Or the sequence of truly wonderful cameo performances, including a hair-netted Michael Redgrave as the junk dealer Burgomil Trebitsch, who keeps trying to sell Van Stratten a busted telescope (which he pronounces "telly-o-scope"). Or Mischa Auer as the proprietor of a flea circus. Or Katina Paxinou as a Mexican (?) woman named Sophie. And then there's one of Welles's most celebrated speeches, perhaps second only to his "cuckoo clock" monologue in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), in which Arkadin tells the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Though analogues have been found in folklore around the world, this particular formulation of it seems to have been Welles's own:

This scorpion wanted to cross a river, so he asked the frog to carry him. No, said the frog, no thank you. If I let you on my back you may sting me and the sting of the scorpion is death. Now, where, asked the scorpion, is the logic in that? For scorpions always try to be logical. If I sting you, you will die. I will drown. So, the frog was convinced and allowed the scorpion on his back. But, just in the middle of the river, he felt a terrible pain and realized that, after all, the scorpion had stung him. Logic! Cried the dying frog as he started under, bearing the scorpion down with him. There is no logic in this! I know, said the scorpion, but I can't help it -- it's my character.  

Perhaps it was Welles's character that betrayed him into making movies that flopped but turned into classics.

The Trial (Orson Welles, 1962)

There may be sensibilities more different from each other than those of an exiled Midwestern bon vivant and a consumptive Middle European Jew, but they rarely come together in a work of art the way they did in Orson Welles's version of Franz Kafka's The Trial. It was made in that fertile middle period of Welles's career that also saw the creation of Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), and it holds its own against those two landmarks in the Welles oeuvre. In the end, of course, the Wellesian sensibility dominates, the American tendency to affirmation overcoming (barely) Kafka's pessimism: Welles's Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is rather more assertive than Kafka's protagonist. He doesn't succumb "Like a dog!" to his assailants but defies them. That said, Perkins, now carrying the indelible stamp of Norman Bates into all his roles, is superlative casting: We can believe that he's guilty -- even if we never find out what his supposed crime is -- while at the same time we sympathize with his plight. The real triumph of the film is in finding the settings in which to stage K.'s ordeal, ranging from K.'s stark, low-ceilinged apartment to bleak modern high-rise apartment and office buildings, to ornate beaux arts exteriors, to the labyrinthine courts of the law. The film was shot in the former Yugoslavia, in Italy, and in the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris. Welles chose a novice, Edmond Richard, who had never shot a feature film, as his cinematographer. Richard went on to shoot Chimes at Midnight, too, as well as some of Luis Buñuel's best films, including The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). The cast includes Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Elsa Martinelli, and Akim Tamiroff, with Welles himself playing the role of Hastler, K.'s attorney, after failing to persuade Jackie Gleason or Charles Laughton to take the part. The Trial is probably longer and slower than it needs to be, and there is some inconsistency of style: The scenes involving Hastler, his mistress (Schneider), and K. are shot with more extreme closeups than the rest of the film, where the sets tend to overwhelm the human figures. And the ending, with its explosion followed by a rather wispy mushroom cloud, is a little too obviously an attempt to bring a story written during World War I into the atomic era. Some think it's a masterpiece, but I would just rank it as essential Welles -- which may or may not be the same thing.

Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)

For a forthcoming review, I recently read the third volume of Simon Callow's projected four-volume biography of Orson Welles, in which Callow says, "murky though the world it discloses may be, every frame of Touch of Evil celebrates the art of film." I think that's exactly right, and it may be why so many of us love it -- and why it leaves many others cold. Touch of Evil is as mannerist as a Caravaggio painting, a dazzling demonstration of style and technique that takes precedence over character, over narrative, even over the performers on screen. The movie is, again in Callow's words, "mercurial, fluid, inventive, constantly morphing stylistically in dream-like fashion." Who else but Welles could have made so much of Charlton Heston in brown-face as a Mexican cop? Who else would have scattered so many familiar faces, from Akim Tamiroff to Zsa Zsa Gabor, throughout a film without turning it into a gallery of cameos? Who else would have encouraged Dennis Weaver to give such a hilariously jittery over-the-top performance? And is there a better curtain line than the one spoken by Marlene Dietrich as the bloated corpse of Hank Quinlan (Welles) lies wallowing in the canal: "He was some kind of a man.... What does it matter what you say about people?" It's a film populated by grotesques -- even the "normal" people like Vargas (Heston) and his wife (Janet Leigh) have something askew about them. The only authentic human emotion on display in the movie is that of Menzies (Joseph Calleia), whose love for Quinlan comes to such a bad end. What we see today is a restoration, made in 1998 in a laudable act of corporate responsibility by Universal, which had botched the release of the movie 40 years earlier. It follows the suggestions made by Welles himself in a 58-page memo after Universal hacked up the original release version. Among other things, the restoration removed the credits that had been superimposed over the celebrated three-minute, 20-second tracking shot that begins the film. The restoration also allows us to see Russell Metty's cinematography in pristine condition.