Tag Archives: Citizen Kane

The Noir Trilogy of Orson Welles

July 2, 2015 Scott T. Rivers Leave a comment

“It’s a bright, guilty world.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the distinctive film noirs of Orson Welles. The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Touch of Evil (1958) represent an explorative trilogy of betrayal, corruption and irrationality.

Welles, the iconoclastic filmmaker, creates disorienting worlds enveloped by foreboding shadows and uncertainty, with the camera occasionally functioning as a voyeuristic observer. His characters range from emotionally shattered and trapped individuals (Michael O’Hara in The Lady from Shanghai) to men of power and potential greatness (Franz Kindler in The Stranger, Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil) who sell their souls to cover their tracks.

Though The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai are stylistically rooted in the 1940s noir tradition, Welles alternately distorts and transcends the genre — culminating in his masterpiece Touch of Evil. Viewed chronologically, the noirish elements in The Stranger serve as a springboard for the surreal odyssey of The Lady from Shanghai which, in turn, foreshadows the nightmarish Touch of Evil. What flows between these films is a bleak undercurrent of paranoia and despair.

Many critics, including Welles himself, have labeled The Stranger as his most impersonal and mainstream film. However, Welles imbues a haunting noir atmosphere into this postwar thriller, which emerges as a telling portrait of small-town America: Shadow of a Doubt meets Notorious. Beneath the simplistic surface of the film’s Connecticut community lies, in the words of Allied War Crimes Inspector Wilson (played by Edward G. Robinson), an “obscenity [that] must be destroyed.” That “obscenity” is Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler (Welles).

In the guise of history professor Charles Rankin, Kindler becomes a dictatorial and isolated character who gradually loses all rationality when he realizes that Wilson has learned his identity — not unlike Quinlan’s psychological unraveling when Vargas discovers the planted evidence in Touch of Evil. Once exposed, the viewer follows Kindler’s unstoppable descent into madness and guilt.

Edward G. Robinson as Inspector Wilson.

A particular noir characteristic is Kindler’s bizarre obsession with clocks, which he calls a “hobby that amounts to a mania.” The clock motif is integral to Welles’ film noirs because Kindler and Quinlan are doomed individuals whose time has run out. In The Stranger‘s climactic scene, Kindler is impaled on the sword of the clock tower, then falls to his death — a sordid end that parallels Quinlan’s undignified collapse in the murky canal waters. The deaths of Kindler and Quinlan are disturbing and lonely acts that Welles depicts with a poetic sense of tragedy. Welles’ unorthodox villains have an oddly sympathetic quality which add to their irrationality.

Another noirish aspect of The Stranger is the perverse relationship between Kindler and his small-town bride, Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young). On their wedding night, Kindler is more concerned with taking care of loose ends — such as burying the body of Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), a former Nazi colleague who the Allied War Crimes Commission set free in the hope of tracking down Kindler. In a disturbing sequence, Kindler confesses to his wife that he has committed murder. However, Mary chooses to protect him and keep his admission a secret, despite Kindler’s revealing comment to her: “Murder can be a chain — one link following another until it circles your neck.” When Wilson confronts Mary with information about her husband’s past in the form of Holocaust footage, she literally runs from the truth and into the dead of night.

Robinson’s performance as Wilson parallels his portrayal of Barton Keyes two years earlier in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, which makes his casting predictable. Perhaps The Stranger might have been more intriguing if producer Sam Spiegel allowed Welles to use Agnes Moorehead in the Wilson role — thereby resulting in an offbeat gender reversal.

The most noirish scenes in The Stranger are weighed heavily during the first half-hour. In the memorable opening sequence, Wilson ominously pursues Meinike through South America as the escaped Nazi nervously reassures himself, “I am traveling for my health.” The cinematography of Russell Metty (who later collaborated with Welles on Touch of Evil) develops a shadowy, menacing atmosphere that reflects Meinike’s uncertain frame of mind. Welles and Metty evoke noir stylistics in the unlikeliest of settings, such as a school gymnasium where Meinike knocks out the unrelenting Wilson.

The atmospheric cinematography of Russell Metty.

In the most chilling and visually accomplished scene, Kindler strangles Meinike in the woods during their “absolution,” an unsettling image underscored by Metty’s fluid, naturalistic photography. Predating Touch of Evil‘s now-legendary opening shot, the Kindler-Meinike confrontation was filmed in a single four-minute take. Unfortunately, the film has too few of these Wellesian touches.

While The Stranger remains a conventional thriller, The Lady from Shanghai flaunts its cinematic iconoclasm from beginning to end. Welles defies Hollywood tradition with a nightmarish charade. Like Touch of Evil, he places the viewer in the middle of an evolving psychological hell. Since Orson’s Irish sailor is as unconvincing as Rita Hayworth’s femme fatale, The Lady from Shanghai can be viewed as a distorted, fun-house parody of classic noir. Modern-day critics who bemoan the film’s confused plotting and bizarre motivations never acknowledge its stream-of-consciousness framework established by Welles’ tongue-in-cheek narration as Michael O’Hara. There is a method to this chaos.

Told from O’Hara’s point of view, the viewer never is sure whether the film is a strange dream or the barroom ramblings of a drunken sailor. The Stranger and Touch of Evil focus on the gradual loss of power and sanity, but The Lady from Shanghai plunges into madness from the introductory moment when O’Hara says, “Some people can smell danger. Not me.” Though O’Hara supposedly is a romantic hero, there are no heroes in Wellesian noir — only trapped individuals tainted by evil. O’Hara is the biggest sucker of them all, thus making him fair game in the hands of the Bannisters and George Grisby.

With its abrupt shifts in tone and locale, The Lady from Shanghai is a noir of never-ending jolts. Like Touch of Evil, viewers never know exactly where they are, but they have a better idea than O’Hara as they follow his descent into the abyss. The film’s uncertain landscape is abetted by Welles’ evocative shooting off the Mexican coast and in the San Francisco Bay Area, which lends a bizarre travelogue quality to O’Hara’s disorienting voyage.

Everett Sloane and Rita Hayworth as the pitiful Bannisters.

There is an undeniable sensuality in The Lady from Shanghai which cannot be found in Welles’ other film noirs. Hayworth’s Elsa Bannister is a highly desirable woman. When Elsa entices O’Hara with an exotic job opportunity (“Would you like to work for me? I’d like it”), it proves a temptation difficult to resist. However, this obsession goes beyond the character of O’Hara — the shots of Elsa swimming and sunbathing have a voyeuristic quality as Charles Lawton Jr.’s camera hovers provocatively over her body. The predatory point of view could well be that of Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), a powerful attorney who believes that all people can be bought.

Like many noir protagonists, O’Hara is a foolish man willing to do foolish things, thereby leading to some irrational decisions. Grisby (Glenn Anders) convinces O’Hara to accept $5,000 in exchange for taking the rap in Grisby’s fraudulent murder. O’Hara agrees to the deal and, of course, Bannister’s creepy associate ends up dead. Until his unfortunate exit, the eccentric Grisby lends a morbid touch of black humor to the proceedings, especially the manner in which he says “target practice.”

As the prime suspect in Grisby’s murder, O’Hara is “defended” by none other than Arthur Bannister, who offers his client these words of encouragement: “I want you to live as long as possible before you die, Michael.” Playing against convention, Welles adds comic punctuation to the courtroom scenes by making the attorneys orate like game-show hosts, having the jury continually sneeze and cough, and casting Erskine Sanford as an ineffectual judge. Evidently, Welles has a low opinion of the legal system. Ironically, O’Hara manages to escape before the verdict is read.

The Lady from Shanghai‘s famous “hall of mirrors” shootout parallels The Stranger‘s clock-tower climax. Like Kindler, the Bannisters’ future is all used up. Utilizing elements of German expressionism, Welles takes noir tradition and smashes it. After the bullets are fired and the mirrors (or psyches) are shattered, the viewer is left with a certain detachment and ambivalence toward the fate of O’Hara and the pitiful Bannisters. “One who follows his nature, keeps his original nature in the end,” O’Hara reminds Elsa as she breathes her last.

Elsa Bannister fires away in the "hall of mirrors."

Elsa fires away in the “hall of mirrors.”

Elsa’s act of betrayal towards O’Hara and its outcome have less of an emotional impact than the Mary/Kindler and Menzies/Quinlan relationships. “I made a lot of mistakes,” the self-pitying Elsa tells O’Hara. “You can fight, but what good is it? We can’t win.” And she dies alone. There is a cruel irony when the dying Bannister condescendingly tells his wife, “You made a mistake, lover. You should have let me live. You’re going to need a good lawyer.” Like Quinlan and Kindler, he dies unrepentant.

What remains is a sordid, corruptible wasteland as O’Hara walks away from the woman of his nightmares. “Everybody is somebody’s fool,” he surmises. And in The Lady from Shanghai, it is the fool who survives.

The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, for all of their visual bravura, remain wildly uneven works — flawed by studio interference (both films cry out for director’s cuts that never will be seen) and Welles’ eccentric miscasting in the pivotal roles of Kindler and O’Hara. Yet they serve as stepping stones for his definitive noir statement: Touch of Evil.

Perhaps his most accomplished and assured film since Citizen Kane (1941), Welles paves the road upon which other contemporary noirs will follow. More than 57 years after its release, Touch of Evil maintains a timeless quality. Even a director as visually hyperbolic as David Lynch has yet to make a movie as unsettling as this one.

Best of all, Welles is superbly cast. There’s not a trace of “acting” in his complex portrayal of police captain Hank Quinlan, whose voice sounds as though it emerged from the bottom of a sewer. Welles’ accomplishments as an actor always have been underrated in contrast to his filmmaking achievements, yet Touch of Evil reminds the viewer that he was a vital performer — not the hammy individual seen in The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai. With the exception of Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1966), Quinlan represents Welles’ most detailed character study.

Welles as corrupt police captain Hank Quinlan.

Welles as corrupt cop Hank Quinlan.

Mostly shot on location in Venice, California, Welles creates a border-town hellhole bathed in darkness and surrounded by a gallery of disturbing characters. The result is somewhat akin to a carnival freak show. Strangely enough, viewers are so mesmerized by Welles’ seamless nocturnal vision that the daytime scenes (particularly those at the seedy Mirador Motel) appear somewhat jarring, as though the viewer has stepped out of a windowless, smoke-filled bar into the blinding sun of a midafternoon.

The breathtaking, expansive opening shot (culminating in the time-bomb explosion that kills millionaire Linnekar) establishes the film’s ominous tone, which is solidified once Quinlan arrives at the scene. A brief exchange between narcotics investigator Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) and the cynical coroner (Joseph Cotten) provides a telling introduction to Quinlan — not only for Vargas, but for the viewer as well:

Vargas: “I’d like to meet [Quinlan].”

Coroner: “That’s what you think.”

Quinlan is an instinctively brilliant yet corrupt police captain mired in Shakespearean tragedy. His monstrous, though sympathetic presence dominates the film (even when he is off-screen) and sets in motion a sleazy labyrinth of drugs, perversity, murder and lawlessness. Touch of Evil proves to be an apt title, since every character (including Vargas) is tainted and corruptible. There are no innocents in this decaying world.

Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) gets a nasty surprise.

Of all the Wellesian creations, Quinlan is the epitome of film noir. Like Charles Foster Kane, he is a dictatorial individual plagued by regret, loneliness, immorality and loss (i.e., his wife’s murder). For years, Quinlan has been an isolationist (he lives near the border yet refuses to learn Spanish) and a law unto himself; therefore, it is inevitable that Quinlan creates his own downfall in a confused, paranoic state of irrationality — predating Richard Nixon’s Watergate cover-up. Welles’ distorted camera angles represent Quinlan’s tortured, inebriated frame of mind. He is a man lost in his own excesses, hence the classic reference by bordello madam Tanya (Marlene Dietrich): “You’re a mess, honey.”

During the first Quinlan/Vargas confrontation, Vargas asks, “Who’s the boss: the cop or the law?” In Wellesian noir, the law does not triumph — it remains hidden in the shadows. “Even though [Quinlan] doesn’t bring the guilty to justice, he assassinates them in the name of the law,” Welles told Peter Bogdanovich in the 1992 book This Is Orson Welles. “He wants to assume the right to judge, and no one has the right to judge except under the authority of law. . . . But what he stands for is detestable.”

Touch of Evil follows the paralleling descent of Quinlan and Vargas. They are moral opposites who, by the film’s conclusion, have much in common.

Quinlan was an honest cop who became corrupt through the tragedy of his wife’s strangulation — not unlike Vargas’ loss of control after his wife, Susan (Janet Leigh), was drugged and framed for the murder of Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff). When Vargas enters Grandi’s bar and says, “I’m no cop now,” it is apparent that he has gone over the edge and lost the rationality to enforce the law. Quinlan’s obsession for vengeance now has become Vargas’ — in fact, Vargas resorts to Quinlan-style methods to hunt down his nemesis. Utilizing a bugging device (another Nixonian trait) to record Quinlan’s confession, Vargas has become what he despises and knows it.

Partners in betrayal: Menzies (Joseph Calleia) and Quinlan.

When Quinlan loses his power, he rapidly deteriorates. The descent begins when Vargas accuses Quinlan of planting the sticks of dynamite to frame Sanchez, thereby making Quinlan vulnerable for the first time. In retaliation, Quinlan forms an unholy alliance with the slimy Grandi (a character of black comedy not unlike Grisby in The Lady from Shanghai) to kidnap and drug Susan — a short-lived partnership that Quinlan’s loyal partner, Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia), observes with disgust and heartbreak. When Quinlan strangles Grandi, he succumbs to irrevocable madness. This leads to the ultimate betrayal as Menzies resolves his moral dilemma by helping Vargas bring down Quinlan, but only after he discovers Quinlan’s cane near the body of Grandi.

“Quinlan is the god of Menzies,” Welles said in a 1958 Cahiers du Cinema interview. “And, because Menzies worships him, the real theme of the scenario is treason, the terrible impulsion that Menzies has to betray his friend.”

However, Quinlan already has betrayed Menzies’ trust through his manipulative deceit and corruption. “All these years, you’ve been playing me for a sucker,” Menzies angrily tells Quinlan. It is ironic yet poetic destiny that Quinlan and Menzies end up killing each other. For all his “famous intuition,” Quinlan’s disloyalty toward Menzies is the final act that does him in.

Touch of Evil can be considered a summary of the film noir themes Welles examined in The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai. In his noir trilogy, the guilty are doomed to a violent demise in a world where evil is permitted and justice is distorted. As for humankind, they are best represented by the philosophical Tanya, who delivers Touch of Evil‘s closing line (“What does it matter what you say about people?”) and walks away into a bleak, uncertain future. In the end, the viewer remains surrounded by darkness.

Feature Articles

His Lunches with Orson – Henry Jaglom Remembers Orson Welles

January 20, 2015 Stuart Galbraith IV Leave a comment

Alternately sad, hilarious, outrageous, and revelatory, My Lunches with Orson is the must-read Peter Biskind-edited book of transcribed tape-recorded conversations between the great director-writer-actor Orson Welles and his friend, confidant, disciple, and go-between in those terrible last years, fellow director-writer-actor Henry Jaglom.

By the late 1970s through the mid ‘80s, Welles’s meteoric rise in the 1930s and early forties was a distant memory. His last completed work, F for Fake (1974), was barely released, and though today it’s recognized as a daring, innovative work, and the time it was mostly met with hostile reviews. Pauline Kael’s vicious essay, Raising Kane, since discredited, tried to deny Welles his unimpeachable masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), suggesting co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz was the true auteur behind that film. Later, Charles Higham, infamous for his disreputable, trashy “biographies” (e.g., Errol Flynn: The Untold Story; Higham was also notorious among his peers as a thief, pilfering one-of-a-kind archive material) further damaged Welles’s career with books theorizing that Welles pathologically abandoned projects before they were finished.

But Welles was a peerless cinema artist responsible for the movie widely regarded as the greatest ever made, to say nothing of nearly a dozen or so other masterpieces and near-masterpieces. And yet no one, even the most successful actors and directors in Hollywood, people who regarded Welles as a personal friend and a major influence on their own careers, would help him when he needed them most. Instead, during this time, Welles was forced to rely on income as a pitchman (for Paul Masson wines, etc.) and intermittent work doing TV guest spots and movie cameos.

The exception was Henry Jaglom, who directed Welles in Jaglom’s first movie, A Safe Place (1971), as well as Welles’s last film appearance, in Jaglom’s charming Someone to Love (1985). Jaglom called in every favor, asking friends and colleagues from his BBS/New Hollywood days and beyond, contacts he had made through the distributions and film festival screenings of his own films (Sitting Ducks, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, etc.) to locate financing for Welles’s latest projects: The Big Brass Ring about a gay presidential candidate in 1940s America; The Cradle Will Rock, an autobiographical project about the Federal Theatre Project’s 1937 musical of the same name; a version of King Lear to have starred Welles; and The Dreamers, based on two stories by Isak Dinesen that was to have starred Welles’s partner, Oja Kodar.

The dismally unsuccessful efforts to get any of these projects made has long been the source of much speculation and confusion, but My Lunches with Orson traces the unraveling of these projects in heartbreaking detail and clarity.

And yet My Lunches with Orson isn’t merely depressing. The great raconteur Welles was on myriad talk shows of the period is also on display, but here, privately dining with Jaglom at Ma Maison, he speaks with a candor that, on almost every page, is outrageously funny and revealing. For instance, there’s a long discussion where Jaglom passes along an offer for Welles to appear on The Love Boat, which Welles is reluctant to accept. The money isn’t so hot and the obvious lure for down-and-out talent – a free cruise – doesn’t appeal to him. “They don’t know that I can go on any cruise in the world free,” he says, “if I lecture, or do magic one night and then sign autographs.”

But there’s another reason: “I don’t like the man who plays the captain. From Mary Tyler Moore. He has a kind of New York accent that gets my hackles up. I can’t stand it!”

Welles gleefully gets Jaglom’s hackles up, too, saying outrageous things about various actors (e.g., “Larry [Olivier] is very – I mean, seriously – stupid”; he refers to Dudley Moore as “the dwarf,” etc.”), films (he and Jaglom share a dislike of Vertigo but argue over the merits of Powell & Pressburger), and various nationalities and ethnicities. “Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks…Measure them. Measure them!”

The book, of course, is much more than this, with Welles making astute observations of 20th century history and art that he was so much a part of, as well as prescient statements about Hollywood and the industry that so stupidly rejected him. Most significantly, it helps clarify exactly why (and because of whom) he was ultimately unable to get any of these promising works off the ground, and identifying those who, like Prince Hal in Falstaff, rejected him and broke his heart.

Long after reading My Lunches with Orson some questions remained, and Henry Jaglom generously took time out from the busy postproduction of his latest film, Ovation (2015), to answer them:

WCP: Reading and hearing about Orson Welles’s last years, prior to this book one had the image of the two of you desperately trying to sell people these magnificent projects, but that no one was buying. The book reveals a subtly different reality, one more complex, that instead of Welles being bereft of any offers at all, the two of you were fielding a variety of obscenely complex proposals, some shaky at their end rather than yours. Welles, however, was quite understandably cautious. He wasn’t about to agree to anything without a signed contract that ensured him final cut, and one that explicitly detailed where and how certain things would be done, and by whom. For instance, at one point he’s very insistent that postproduction on one project be done in the United States (rather than France) for tax reasons. On another (or maybe it was the same project) he talks about wanting to make sure that he retained home video rights. In other words, rather than the image of the artist denied his paints it was more a case of the artist desperately wanting to move forward but more so wanting to ensure that he wouldn’t get screwed over like so many times in the past?

Henry Jaglom: No, basically it was about him being denied his paints, though it is also true that his need for self-protection required certain things, certain freedom, casting, final cut. But essentially no one was buying, except that one time with Arnon Milchan and the actors Milchan required all said no in one way or another. No one else ever offered a real deal.

WCP: Well, then, do you imagine if the deal hadn’t fallen apart that he might have compromised his position on some things in order to make it happen, or would he have held film, even if that meant killing an offer? What if, say, everything had been set, but they insisted on an actor Welles didn’t like (e.g., Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman in The Big Brass Ring)?

Henry Jaglom: All three too “ethnic” he said, couldn’t win the Midwest, couldn’t become President. Wish he’d lived to see Obama, it was beyond his imagination. Wish my parents, for that matter, had lived to see the unimaginable Obama.

WCP: Other than Cameron Crowe’s Conversations with Wilder, I can’t think of another book where one can clearly hear the subject’s voice, and all the subtleties that go with it, as one reads it. (I didn’t hear Hitchcock’s voice while reading Truffaut’s book, for instance.) As you and Peter Biskind were putting all this material together, did the Orson Welles you knew so well come alive again in that sense, a person that was in some ways very different from his public persona?

Henry Jaglom: He was, on the tapes, exactly as I had remembered him nearly 30 years before

WCP: Near the end of the book Welles is essentially saying that he’s got to make a living with money coming in NOW, not later. That people didn’t seem to realize that he, too, was mortal, That he had bills to pay, people to support, that he couldn’t devote a year of his life on a film, however personally rewarding, if founded on a vague promise that he’d be paid once everything’s done. What struck me as so profoundly sad about those remarks is that they’re nearly identical to what scads of struggling professional writers with a couple of books or scripts under their belts go through all the time – only in this case, here it was happening to the greatest living filmmaker. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’m not sure what it is.

Henry Jaglom: Exactly. I don’t see a question here, though.

WCP: Well, maybe it’s more an observation that the book clarifies just how tragic the situation was, that on one hand he had to eat and pay bills just like the rest of us, and to the degree that impeded his ability to make films, that – try as you might – he was in a pretty hopeless situation. Let me put it another way: What should have been in place then, and perhaps still needs to been in place now, to ensure artists like Welles are able to work? Some sort of National Endowment for the Arts program? One partially funded by the major film companies? And, were he now the age he was then, do you think the adoption of new technologies like HD video would have made it easier for him to keep making films, or has the distribution end of things changed so radically that it might be worse?

Henry Jaglom: Yes, only a National Government thing would have made a difference. Films can be made much less expensively now, the technology would have enthralled him, but distribution theatrically is much worse. But non-theatrically has become something else and I think that the long form of quality TV that started with The Sopranos, combined with the incredible simplification of the technologies would have allowed him to possibly thrive. But the problem was he didn’t want to make films like mine with limited audiences like I’m happy with. He had had too big a taste of mass success (even if never financial success) to make “small” films for limited audiences, he needed to “show them” that he was still capable of making a BIG film, especially after F For Fake failed to even get distribution. (Today I could have distributed it like I did for Max Schell’s My Sister Maria and several their films.) But, once having failed at even that, the small art film, he reverted to the idea that his “next” film should show “them” that he was still in their game. That was his most self-destructive notion, combined with the idea that I was lucky because I wanted to make films about ”people sitting in rooms talking to one another” and he needed to bring “Elephants onto the hills above Rome,” [as] he would say.

WCP: Throughout the book, Welles frequently expresses very strong, negative opinions about seemingly unimpeachable movies and directors. For instance, I was surprised by his dislike of Powell & Pressburger, who movies I would have expected him to adore for their intelligence and cinematic innovation. Do you think he really felt that way? Or did he sometimes say something controversial for effect, or could his opinions have been colored by so many decades of professional disappointments at being treated so badly?

Henry Jaglom: He certainly said some things for effect or mostly to get a rise out of me, like some of his silly stuff about the Irish and some other groups, but what he said about actors and directors and movies expressed his real views in every case.

He knew I loved Powell and Pressburger, so perhaps he said whatever more strongly than he might otherwise. But where we agreed, like on post-black-and-white Hitchcock like Vertigo he was just as strong and opinionated. These comments were his real views, [and] I don’t believe they were influenced by his disappointments or said for effect.

WCP: And yet the book is often hysterically funny in the way Welles criticizes fellow actors. For example, saying John Gielgud played Shakespeare “as though he were dictating it to his secretary…’Witness this army…Have you got that, Miss Jones? Such mass and charge, led by a delicate and tender prince…Am I going too fast for you?’” This was a facet of his personally one normally didn’t see on The Merv Griffin Show.

Henry Jaglom: But he meant the criticisms he made, and the judgments about others and their work, even when he knew he was being funny and entertaining. We knew each other so well and this book only reflects a small percent of that. But, of course, he wasn’t going to show that side on Merv Griffin.

WCP: During the last ten years of his life, friends and professional colleagues in a position to help him get one of his films off the ground essentially turned their back on him. My Lunches with Orson identifies some of these people. And while most of the actors and filmmakers Welles has harsh words for have since passed away (Olivier, Charlton Heston, et. al.), some of the others are still living. Have you heard from people like Peter Bogdanovich, John Landis, Burt Reynolds or others since its publication? And were you and Peter Biskind compelled to leave anything out?

Henry Jaglom: My deal with Biskind was that the only things I could insist on his taking out were personal things about Oja Kodar, though I did get him, with some pressure, to agree to take out one most personal item about Bogdanovich and one intimate one about Spielberg, both I felt much too personal. Yes, John Landis called me up and was very upset and – needless to say – so was my old friend Peter, to put it mildly, especially after Maureen Dowd’s review in The New York Times. I don’t know Burt Reynolds but can’t imagine he can read.

WCP: According to the book, there was a kind of unspoken agreement that the subject of Welles’s weight was off-limits. What the book doesn’t address, and perhaps you never discussed with him but maybe the backers you negotiated with, was the question of whether or not he was insurable, what with all his various maladies. Was that ever a concern, and did you ever discuss a back-up plan/director should he have become unable to finish one of these late-career movies, as was done with John Huston on The Dead?

Henry Jaglom: His weight was the one subject we never talked about, though he would from time to time tell me how many laps he had swum that day, trying to earnestly prove that he was trying. And when we were together in LA or New York or Paris or Cannes he ate carefully, but I learned that late nights at hotels were a very different story. Whether he was insurable never came up, strangely enough, because we knew there were doctors who would write what was necessary. What various maladies, his knees were his main problem. Your mentioning John Huston reminds me of one of the most touching days. Shortly after Orson died, Huston called and came up to my cutting room to see footage on my Kem of Orson talking about this and that in his last film, which I was cutting, Someone To Love. Huston with an oxygen mask attached to his face and a nurse/girlfriend carrying it, as he sat and watched his old friend for the last time.

WCP: What are your thoughts on the current plans to release The Other Side of the Wind?

Henry Jaglom: You know as much as I do. It was some of my best acting and scenes from it moved around the Internet a few years ago, which was fun and are now vanished. It was hard to tell what it would look like if somehow all put together. I am skeptical but Bogdanovich tells me that they are “working on it.”

WCP: This year marks the centenary of Orson Welles’s birth. Will you be participating in any special screenings/events to mark the occasion?

Henry Jaglom: All kinds of people planning all kinds of things. Did you see the four shows on TCM with me hosting about Orson one night some months ago, two of his films and two of mine? Interviews about him in-between. It was well done, and they are talking about something for his 100th Birthday, as are many others.

WCP: You’re now several years older than Welles was when he passed away. When you look back at those conversations now, can you see things now that you couldn’t see when you were in your forties? And are there things the older, wiser Henry Jaglom wishes the younger version of yourself had asked him about?

Henry Jaglom: Really? I’m older than Orson was? Wow, I feel like a kid, the same age I was then. Hard to believe but I’ll take your word for it. No, there is absolutely nothing I feel that would be different, nothing I didn’t see and feel I understood about him back then, nothing I can think of that I would have asked him about that I didn’t. I’ve always been very open and easily communicative and Orson made it easy to be that way with him because he was so open and communicative with me. I just wish I could show him the films I’ve made; that would be a lot of fun.

It was also really interesting to discover that Welles had some input into your screenplay for Always. Since his death, when you’re writing, shooting, or cutting do you ever ask yourself, “What would Orson do?”

Henry Jaglom: All the time! I have tapes somewhere of his sitting behind me smoking his cigar while I’m editing Can She Bake A Cherry Pie? and commenting and suggesting all sorts of things. I always have his voice in my ear while I edit, which I’m doing right now as I write this, on my new film, Ovation.

<br />

Feature Articles

The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of: “Funny Bones” (1995)

February 15, 2014 Doug Krentzlin 4 Comments

“The Best Movies You’ve Never Heard Of” is a series of articles devoted to little-known movies of exceptional quality that dedicated film buffs may be aware of, but have somehow fallen through the cracks of the general public’s awareness.

“We were funny people. We didn’t have to tell funny stories. We were funny. We had funny bones… I think there are two types of comedians. There’s a funny bones comedian and a non-funny bones comedian. They’re both funny. One is funny, the other tells funny.”

– George Fawkes

“Comedy’s a magnificent shambles, huh? Purposeful, intentional chaos. If it isn’t funny, you die a double death, right?”

– Tommy Fawkes

“I never saw anything funny that wasn’t terrible, didn’t cause pain.”

– Bruno Parker

British filmmaker Peter Chelsom’s 1995 movie Funny Bones, which he produced, directed, and co-wrote with Peter Flannery, is the type of film that defies simple categorization. It is, among other things, a tribute to Vaudeville, a celebration of English eccentricity à la the old Ealing comedies (it was even filmed at the Ealing studios), a backstage soap opera, a drama, a tragedy, a melodrama, a mystery, a thriller, a fantasy, a horror story, a musical, and a very, very, very black comedy. Speaking of which, it is the single best movie ever made about the subject of comedy. There have been several films about performers doing comedy, including Roy Del Ruth’s Always Leave Them Laughing, Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Alfred E. Green’s Top Banana, Carl Reiner’s The Comic, and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memoirs, but Funny Bones doesn’t just concern those who perform comedy, it deals the very nature of comedy itself. The theme of Funny Bones, however, isn’t anything as trite as posing the question, “What is comedy?” (A question so inane that it only deserves the exact same answer that Louis Armstrong gave to someone who once asked him what jazz was: “If you gotta ask, you ain’t never gonna know.”) Rather, the main focus of Funny Bones is exploring the difference between those who want to be funny, those who instinctively know how to be funny, and what it takes to be funny.

It’s impossible to summarize Funny Bones’ story in a sentence or two. The film does have a plot, but it’s so complex and labyrinthian that seeing exactly how it unfolds and discovering the secrets the various characters are hiding are among of the chief pleasures of watching the film for the first time. (Subsequent viewings of Funny Bones can be ever more rewarding; no matter how many times you see it, there’s always something new to discover.) Perhaps the best way to convey some idea of what Funny Bones is like without spoiling the fun is to take a look at the two characters the film revolves around.

The first one we are introduced to is Jack Parker (played by British comedian Lee Evans in his theatrical film debut) in the film’s mysterious opening scene depicting a botched robbery at sea. A young man in his 30s, Jack is first glimpsed perched at the top of the mast of one of two boats rendezvousing out in the middle of nowhere off the shore of Blackpool, England. (As Janet Maslin pointed out in her New York Times review of Funny Bones, Jack’s “most important scenes in the film have him perched above other characters at precarious heights.”) We don’t learn exactly what is being stolen or why until later in the film. What is clear in this sequence is that Jack is being betrayed by his companions, led by a slimy, corrupt cop appropriately named Sharkey (Ian McNeice), and that one of the people involved meets a macabre end when he’s thrown overboard and his feet are chopped off by the boat’s propellers, causing him to bleed to death under the water.

It isn’t until a little later in the movie that we discover that Jack’s is really a natural-born comedian and that he comes from a family of performers. His father, Bruno (Freddie Davies), and uncle, Thomas (George Carl), were a celebrated slapstick comedy team known professionally as the Parker Brothers. His French-born mother, Katie (Leslie Caron), was a singer, who is now divorced from his father, but used to participate in the family act, as did Jack. A deeply troubled individual who has already experienced more than his share of sorrow, Jack is, nonetheless, an enormously talented comic, even more so than his elders. With Jack, comedy is instinctual, even when he’s not performing. When taken into police custody because of a presumed suicide attempt that takes place in the aftermath of the robbery, he can’t resist turning an interview with a psychiatrist (Gavin Millar) into a Vaudeville routine.

Psychiatrist: “Where were you born?”

Jack: “Blackpool.”

Psychiatrist: “Why Blackpool?”

Jack: “’Cause I wanted to be near me mother.”

Psychiatrist: “Have you lived here all your life?”

Jack: “Not yet.”

But Jack is no idiot savant; from years of experience. he knows the mechanics of comedy by heart and is also something of a technical wizard. We observe Jack at the decrepit warehouse on the Blackpool docks where he lives with his father, uncle, and pet dog, meticulously putting together a reel-to-reel tape recording of sound effects and snippets from several different radio broadcasts. The purpose of this recording is explained in a crucial mid-film scene set on an open mike night at a small Blackpool nightclub. That night, appearing under the pseudonym “Val Radio,” Jack performs a “dummy act” in time to his sound montage recording, giving the film audience its first indication of what a brilliant physical comedian he is.[1] The routine has the club audience laughing hysterically, but when Sharkey shows up unexpectedly, Jack’s cut off in mid-act by the club’s owner. In is then that we get the first hint of the dark secret Jack harbors. He’s been banned from performing by the local law for the past twelve years. Why Jack got banned is one of the film’s mysteries that isn’t answered until late in the proceedings. Nevertheless, it’s been established that Jack, indeed, has funny bones.

If Jack is one side of a coin, then the flip side of that coin is Tommy Fawkes (Oliver Platt). Like Jack, Tommy is the son of a professional comedian in his 30s whose life’s calling is comedy. Unlike Jack, Tommy isn’t funny. It isn’t just a lack of talent; it’s his attitude. Tommy is an arrogant, hipper-than-thou, privileged rich kid who can’t help feeling superior to those around him. Jack and Tommy are first linked by a transition from the Blackpool sea to a Las Vegas casino on the night of Tommy’s big debut at a prominent venue after years of playing tiny comedy clubs. Chelsom makes the transition with the aid of music: French singer and songwriter Charles Trenet’s original 1946 recording of “Le Mer” (The Sea) plays underneath the opening scene and, when the locale shifts to Vegas, it is in the middle of an elaborate stage rendition of the Americanized version of the song, “Beyond the Sea,” performed by a dancer (Harold Nicholas) backed up by a big band and a line of chorus girls.

In a scene that’s almost as nightmarish as the one preceding it (but in a different way), Tommy waits to go on in his dressing room fighting a major case of backstage jitters. Everything that subsequently happens in that dressing room conspires to add to those jitters. The attempts of his joke writer Al (William Hootkins) to both pump him up and calm him down only succeed in infuriating him.

Al: “How’s the star of the show?”

Tommy: “I’m gonna die.”

Al: (joking heartily) “Tommy, you’re among friends. We won’t let you die!”

Tommy: “No, Al, I don’t mean on stage–although I feel like shit—I mean, I’m gonna die!”

Al: “What is this? What’re you talking about?”

Tommy: “If I don’t do it, make it happen—you know, find that feeling—in two weeks, I’m just not gonna live any more.”

Al: “You mean you feel desperate, that’s all. A lot of people feel desperate before doing something exceptional.”

Tommy: “You know, Al, I’m not gonna play safe any more. I’m gonna take it to the edge –right to the edge—and do pirouettes.”

Al: “Pirouettes? What—what are you talking about?”

Tommy: “Pirouettes, you dumb fuck! And if I fall… well, so be it. You know? Who gives a shit, you know?!”

Getting increasingly apprehensive, Al warns Tommy not to do “the sheep story,” pointing out that it’s a mainstream audience out there who won’t appreciate a joke with “the ‘F’ word” in it. “You’ll lose ‘em with the ‘F’ word,” he pleads. Tommy’s next visitor is his fiancée Jenny (Peter Pamela Rose), who bursts into tears over Tommy’s rudeness and breaks off their engagement. “You’re so cold! You wonder why people don’t laugh at you?” she wails before storming out of the dressing room. (The look of sheer horror on Tommy’s face reflected in the mirror at something so traumatic happening to him right before he goes out on stage is one that just about any actor or performer can identify with.) Last and most nerve-racking of Tommy’s visitors is the man he’s lived in the shadow of his entire life, his father, world-famous comedian George Fawkes (Jerry Lewis). George’s lackadaisical attitude as he peruses the dressing room (“New mirrors,” he casually observes, an ad-lib by Lewis) only intensifies his son’s case of nerves, especially when he tries to put him at ease. “You couldn’t ask for a better audience,” George says, “That room is filled with people, friends, old friends of the family. The whole of show business is there. They’re all just hoping and wishing and ready to laugh, son.” After George leaves, the heavens themselves add another twist of the screw to Tommy’s anxieties: a rumbling thunderstorm begins outside.

And just when Tommy is convinced it can’t possibly get any worse, it does… with a vengeance. After the dancer’s number is over, he spots George in the audience and encourages him to come up on stage. (Listening on the dressing room monitor, Tommy fearfully begs, “Don’t do it, dad! Oh, please don’t do it!”) Being a 24-carat ham, George unhesitatingly goes up on stage to overwhelming applause and a standing ovation. George then proceeds to do an impromptu stand-up set, beginning with, “As the cow said on a cold, wintry morning, thanks for that warm hand.” Overshadowed yet again, it’s the last straw for Tommy: he makes a beeline for the men’s room and throws up in a toilet.

Reduced to a neurotic bundle of nerves, Tommy finally takes the stage. Assuming an angry young man persona, he barely get some mild chuckles with his first jokes. Desperate, Tommy launches into the “sheep story.” Sure enough, as Al had predicted, even before he gets to the F-bomb punchline, he’s already lost the audience. Even the Japanese tourists aren’t amused. (It should be noted that this supposedly “edgy” piece of comedy material is actually one of the oldest blue jokes in the book.) Realizing how badly he’s bombed (people are already walking out), Tommy tells the crowd, “I gotta run. You’ve been a lousy fucking audience! My name’s Tommy Fawkes and I got two weeks to live!“ He flees the stage to a small, unenthusiastic smattering of semi-polite applause. When his friends and family go backstage to Tommy’s dressing room, all they find a handwritten scrawl on the mirror, “Goodbye. Sorry.”

But rather than committing suicide, Tommy turns up in his hometown of Blackpool, where he and his family lived before moving to America when he was six-years-old. Sporting a hideous mustard-yellow suit and a fake pencil mustache, Tommy is going by the name of “Rick Tarascas” (echoing the nom de plume Jack hides behind later in the film). “Tarascas” tells the lawyer he’s hired to represent him, Lawrence Berger (pronounced “Ber-jer”), a charming little milquetoast of a man played by Christopher Greet, that he’s come to Blackpool looking for new and unique comedy material. (By the way, “Tommy Fawkes returns to his hometown to find comedy material” might fit handily into a capsule review of Funny Bones, as so often has been the case, but that’s no more the plot of the film than “an anonymous reporter travels around the country trying to find out what the hell ‘Rosebud’ is” is the plot of Citizen Kane.) It soon becomes apparent, however, that the real purpose of Tommy’s quest is trying to discover the elusive secret of how to be funny.

Jack and Tommy first meet at the aforementioned open mike night. From there, everything in the story builds to the grand finale: a spectacular circus performed at a Blackpool arena, with the Parker Brothers headlining the bill. While his father and uncle are performing, Jack slips out of the audience and Sharkey smells a rat. (“Find Jack Parker now,” Sharkey cautions his men. “It’s all gettin’ a bit French… an’ I don’ like it.”) Events both magical (literally) and sinister occur, karma happens, lives are changed forever, and, after eluding the police backstage, Jack finally makes his triumphant return before an audience. But whether his appearance will result in redemption or tragedy remains to be seen until the film’s final few seconds.

Throughout the movie, Chelsom’s direction reflects his inventiveness. There are several intricately-edited montages depicting Blackpool, its eccentric inhabitants, and the even more eccentric—and downright bizarre—variety acts that audition for Tommy and Berger, including a bagpipe-playing dwarf, a lady with a singing poodle, a backward-talking man, a pair of dancing identical twins, a musical saw player, and a costumed, powdered wig-wearing magician who goes by the stage name of “the Bastard Son of Louis XIV.” Chelsom depicts important flashback sequences in two different film styles: Jack’s flashbacks are shot in black-and-white, utilizing a harsh, hard-edged, documentary-like style, whereas Tommy’s flashbacks are filmed with hand-held cameras, in slightly blurry, over-exposed footage with faded colors like 8mm home movies. As mentioned before, Chelsom’s use of music is also very creative. In addition to John Altman’s superlative background score, recordings by such diverse artists as John Lee Hooker, Memphis Minnie, Willie Dixon, Washboard Sam, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, and the Raymond Scott Quartet are heard.

For Funny Bones, Chelsom got first-rate performances from all of his actors. Both Evans and Platt do their best work to date as Jack and Tommy. Davies and Carl exude a feeling of melancholy resignation as the Parker Brothers. Caron is every bit as sensuous and lovely as she was in her younger days with her charming, sympathique turn as Katie. Jerry Lewis gives perhaps his finest serious performance as George, even better than his work in Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Although his lack of even a hint of a British accent belies the idea of George being a native of England, it should be stated for the record that Chelsom wrote the role especially with Lewis in mind, and being the only cast member with a direct connection to classic days of Vaudeville and Hollywood comedy, Lewis’ presence is absolutely crucial to the overall film, despite only having about fifteen minutes of total screentime. Other notable performances are provided by Ruta Lee (as Mrs. Fawkes), Ticky Holgado, Terrence Rigby, and Richard Griffiths. And the late Oliver Reed plays what has to be the most atypical role of his career as Dolly Hopkins, a flamboyantly gay millionaire obsessed with his own mortality. (The fact that most of Reed’s performance wound up on the cutting room floor only adds to the sheer oddness of the role.)

Funny Bones was produced by Disney’s Hollywood Pictures division, and they obviously had absolutely no idea of how to market the finished film when it was released in the spring of 1995. They futilely tried to sell it as a family comedy with ambiguous ad copy like, “Comedy. It’s in the timing. It’s in the material. But mostly, it’s in the bones.” (On the other hand, the theatrical trailer did suggest some of the off-the-wall quality of the film.) But it was to no avail; the film got mixed reviews and quickly vanished from sight. Disney released a DVD of the film in 2003 with no extras, not even the trailer, with the cover featuring Lewis billed as co-star and an equally deceptive tagline, “A zany look at two comedians who’ll do anything for a laugh.” One can only wonder at how many unsuspecting parents thought they’d be safe showing their children a seemingly typical Jerry Lewis comedy with an innocuous-sounding title like Funny Bones only to cause those kids to have nightmares for weeks afterwards!

[1] “Dummy act” is a Vaudeville term for an act where a comedian mimes in time to music or a recording. In the years before he teamed up with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis got his start performing a dummy act with phonograph records he played on stage.

Life-Changing Movies

“Citizen Kane” (1941)

December 15, 2013 Stuart Galbraith IV Leave a comment

A new feature here at World Cinema Paradise, “Life-Changing Movies” pays tribute to those films, festivals, and other special screenings that changed the way we look at the movies. Check back here as our contributors write about their life-changing viewing experiences.

To begin with the obvious, inevitable, but wholly justified inaugural title.

Back in the summer of 1979, I was shipped off by my parents, needing a break from their troubled teenager, for the second time to a filmmaking seminar sponsored by the appropriately named DAFT: Detroit Area Film Teachers. Held at the exclusive, historic Cranbrook boarding school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, teachers and students were provided all the necessary tools – camera, film, overnight processing, lighting equipment, etc. – to produce a short Super-8 film over the course of one week which would then be screened as part of a mini-festival on the final day.

The year before I had made a very modest Claymation short but somebody there, probably John Prusak, aware of my rapidly ballooning interest in movies of all kinds greeted me this year with an enormous gift: my own private Nirvana, a private classroom equipped with a Bell & Howell 16mm projector, screen, and in one corner of the room, something like 200 reels of film stacked in a pile in the corner rising five feet off the floor.

Instead of concentrating my energies on the challenge of writing, shooting, and editing a short film in just seven days, I spent all my mornings, afternoons, and nights plowing through those film cans, this effectively being the era just preceding the home video revolution. (Interestingly, however, the year before someone had gotten their hands on a VHS or three-quarter-inch copy of the still relatively new The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which we all watched one evening.)

I spent hours upon hours in that little classroom, seeing for the first time or rewatching such films as Duck Soup (1933), Lord of the Flies (1963), Night of the Living Dead (1968), untold treasures from the National Film Board of Canada and short films distributed by the late, lamented distributor Pyramid Films.

And then one evening I came across a film I’d always heard, in my teenaged naiveté, was one of the very best of its kind: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). But by this time it was already one o’clock in the morning, far too late to watch the whole thing. But, I figured, I’ll watch the first reel, then pick up where I left off the following morning.

Needless to say that didn’t happen. I was transfixed from the opening scenes, of Charles Foster Kane (Welles) on his deathbed in the castle-like Xanadu, by the abrupt cut to a dizzying virtuosity of filmmaking as a fake newsreel summarized his fabled life, of the next abrupt cut to the newsreel company’s screening room, where reporter Jerry Thompson (William Alland) is assigned to find meaning in Kane’s last words. With short breaks to change reels I finished watching this momentous triumph of movie-making around 3:30 am. And then proceeded to watch it a second time, then and there. And I watched it twice more before the week was over.

(Built in 1922 by the famed Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, Cranbrook, cavernous and bereft of students due to the summer holiday, was especially at night an eerie place to stay, and in its own way quite reminiscent of Kane’s Xanadu.)

Alfred Hitckcock’s Vertigo (1958) last year famously bumped it from Sight & Sound’s 50-year-old poll of the Greatest Films of All-Time but, for my money, there’s still no movie finer than Citizen Kane. I won’t attempt to explain its greatness – people have been doing that for decades – but on a personal level it’s perhaps the most startlingly entertaining of Great Movies. It’s crammed to the gills with so much creativity and ingenuity that, even when one has seen it close to 50 times as I have, there are still always new things to discover. And it still dazzles. It’s as fresh in 2013 as it was 70-plus years ago.

Seeing it that first time was an overwhelming experience, one that demonstrated how far filmmaking conventions could be stretched and even shattered to good effect, and – an especially important lesson in this day and age – how it’s possible to infuse a film with a deeply personal, original vision yet also so involve the audience that they lose themselves completely in the picture they’re watching, and not consciously aware of all they are seeing.

I can’t say watching Citizen Kane that week had any positive impact at all on my own filmmaking ambitions, try as I might, but it reshaped forever the way I look at movies, and made me recognize the limitless possibilities of the medium.

An Oasis of Cinema Scholarship and Reviewing.