And Now . . . Homage to Welles

“Joe, the turtle boy . . . He walks and eats and sleeps just like a turtle but talks the English language as well as you and I. And shaves himself with a safety razor. And as an added attraction, folks, Joe plays the zither” 

Carnival barker’s spiel in I’m No Angel (1933)

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How many American moviegoers in 1933 knew what a zither was is uncertain. But just over a decade-and-a-half later probably most people (and not just moviegoers) in the United States and Great Britain did know. For the theme from the movie The Third Man  (1949), played by Anton Karas on that instrument, became a smash hit in both countries, including a spell of eleven weeks as the number one recording in the US. Set in an ally-occupied Vienna that is still hung over from the war, the movie itself, directed by Carol Reed and adapted by Graham Greene from his novel of the same name, is one of the great noir mystery/thrillers of all time.

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Title characters of films and plays come in all varieties; they can even not come at all (Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot) or be dead the whole way through (Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry). It takes about an hour before moviegoers catch a glimpse of the title character of The Third Man, and even then the first things they see are his highly-polished winged-tip shoes; the rest of him is cloaked in darkness. When a sudden circle of light penetrates the recess in which he is hidden, his face is seen in semi-profile. The cheeks are puffy, the texture soft and smooth, and there is the look of an incipient doubleness to the chin. The title character is Harry Lime; the actor, Orson Welles.

All Welles’ physical features that were so wrong for the itinerant Irish seaman in his own film The Lady From Shanghai (see my previous blog entry) are absolutely perfect for the black- marketeer Harry Lime. A black-marketeer—but not a criminal at the scuffling end of the game. He is an entrepreneur, dressed in a comfortable overcoat, a fashionable hat, and soft gloves (as well as those highly-polished wing-tips). And he has the physical complaint of successful businessman—dyspepsia (he regrets that his favorite tablets are no longer available in Europe).

Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotten), a naïf lured to Vienna by his old pal Lime, knows Harry to be something of a rogue, and he can’t understand why Major Calloway of the British Army (Trevor Howard) is so keen to nab him. After all, what’s a little hustling of stolen tires and such like? Except it’s stolen penicillin, which is then watered down to ineffectualness. The results to patients, especially the children, are disastrous.

When Holly does get to meet Harry in the Prater amusement park, they ride the famous Ferris Wheel to the top, and Harry, looking down to the ground, speaks of those Holly has called “his victims”:

“Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.”

Harry Lime is the type of role that Welles was born to play—no phony accent, no pretense of a past murder with his own hands. No, his voice displaying a jauntiness touched with an edge of menace, the soft-featured and well-tailored Harry Lime is Welles at his white-collared best--an entrepreneurial criminal whose reading of history* is the most famous set piece in the film:

“Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.“ 

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*Supposedly written by Welles himself.

Only 65 Years Late: A Review

The 1947 film The Lady From Shanghai, written, produced, and directed by Orson Welles is rightly celebrated for the startling inventiveness of its Hall of Mirrors dénouement, most especially striking when Everett Sloane, playing a crippled lawyer, Arthur Bannister, multiply appears supported by his two canes, stiffleggedly lurching forward like a wooden soldier. However, despite those advocates who proclaim the movie’s status as a masterpiece of film noir, the truth is that it is no better than dull gray.

Welles had his role as director left off the credits list, probably miffed because the studio excised about an hour from the original running time. But the problem with the film is not what was cut out, but what was left in. And that begins with Welles himself, who took on the hero’s role (Michael O’Hara, also known as “Black Irish”) and provided a sporadic voiceover for the Hibernian merchant sailor, delivered not in a vaudeville Oyrish, but in an aren’t-we-all-poets-at-heart-we-folks-from the-land-of-the-little-people voice, which might have been conjured up by Eugene O’Neill only in the throes of a bad spell of insomnia. And then there’s Welles’ countenance--the smoothness of his jawline, the softness of his cheeks. O’Hara is a man who has lived a life on the open seas, has killed a man in Spain, and done time in prisons in several countries, while his portrayer doesn’t look as if he spent even one hour in after-class detention in grade school.

The movie gets going with O’Hara spotting Bannister’s wife, Elsa, (Rita Hayworth) riding in a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park. “Once I’d seen her—but once I’d seen her—I was not in my right mind for quite some time.” If that was the case, he was the mildest romantic madman in history. He backs away when he very quickly learns she is married, and rather reluctantly allows himself to become a crewman on Bannister’s yacht after the lawyer hunts him down at the seaman’s hiring hall.

Hayworth, herself, is, well, not really herself in the movie. Her famous long red hair has been cropped and dyed a standard Hollywood blondish. She’s pretty, but Hollywood-standardish pretty. The movie offers a few shots of her in a bathing suit, but no sex appeal oozes from her. Supposedly,  Elsa Bannister has a past filled with hard knocks and hard living (out in the Far East; apparently that’s why she’s the Lady from Shanghai), but as with Welles, there’s no sign that grit and abrasion have had any effect on Hayworth’s features. And her voice has that dead affectlessness you hear in middling dubbing jobs. 

As the yacht makes its leisurely way from New York City to San Francisco Bay via the Panama Canal and a longish sequence in Acapulco, there’s not very much noir or tension but lots of sunlight and water. Except for Sloane, the rest of the actors read off their lines in the typical Hollywood character part manner: a fake Brooklyn accent here, a curl of the lip and a snarl there. There’s a courtroom scene late in the day, which offers second-rate Three Stooges decorum, and a few crowd scenes that Welles directs with the aplomb of a bullock organizing events at Pamplona.    

In sum, in this hash of a film there’s no real sense of danger lurking in the meeting (there’s no mating) of Elsa and O’Hara. You’d think with a good-looking wife, an inadequate husband, and a rootless stranger you’d have the makings of a great film noir—and you do: it’s called The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was made the year before.