Orson Welles and stinging the frog

The launch of Richard Linklater’s film Me and Orson Welles is a reminder of how enigmatic the career of Orson Welles remains, a quarter of a century after his death. He had the world at his feet as a young man, after the success de scandale of The War of the Worlds, and the success d’estime of Citizen Kane, which routinely tops critics’ polls of the greatest film ever made.

But he died poor after over-eating at the relatively young age of 70, having made only a handful of films since Kane, always struggling with financing. (One remains unreleased even now because of contractual issues to do with its funding).

So why couldn’t he just bite his tongue and charm the money people rather than feeling the need to insult them? In a characteristically sharp article in The Guardian, about a month ago, David Thomson reminds us that Welles liked to tell, against himself, the story of the scorpion and the frog:

Of how the scorpion begged a lift across a stream; how the frog did not trust the scorpion; of how the scorpion said, but if I sting you, froggie, you will die, and I will drown. And so they set out and the frog had gone halfway when he felt the pain of the stinger. Why? he cries out, why did you do it? Now we will all die. I know, says the scorpion, but it is my character.

But Thomson also points out that dying rich isn’t necessarily a good quality in a film-maker. George Lucas, who only ever had one good idea (OK, perhaps one and a half), is currently worth $3 billion.

[Welles] may have died broke – his abiding condition – but he did not do it for the money. He did it for the sake of the medium and his artistic soul. That is a dangerous way to go, but it’s a big reason why the young honour him. Hollywood has always fancied it could undermine and destroy the great talents that came its way by giving them money. … Orson died alone in 1985 and you can read the reports as signs of sadness. On the contrary, I suspect he was exhilarated at the end. Real sadness is being worth $5bn and not knowing what to do with it.

The secret of ‘The Red Shoes’

The Red Shoes isn’t the best of Powell and Pressburger’s movies – that title would come down to a duel between A Matter of Life and Death and Colonel Blimp. But it was certainly the most profitable, and also the most influential.

In Pressburger’s biography there are accounts by both men of why the film was so successful.

Powell put it down to timing; it caught the change in the post-war mood:

I think the real reason The Red Shoes was such a success was that we had all been told for ten years to go out and die for freedom and democracy, for this and for that, and now that the war was over, The Red Shoes told us to go out and die for Art.

Pressburger, with less of eye to a good aphorism, thought that audiences were able to understand the sense of the whole film – in a way that critics were not:

Michael and I have made several good films, among them several better films than The Red Shoes. Why then is The Red Shoes by far the best known film that we have made? Those who try to see it with magnifying glasses (like most critics) see only the rough, the crude, the immature bits (especially the last sequence between Vicky and Julian in her dressing room). But audiences understand better; they inhale mechanically the air of the whole thing and find something disturbing, something mysterious, almost – dare I say – religious, something which they feel must be true, without having been told what.

Famously, the film inspired Gene Kelly to make An American in Paris. And it inspired others, too. In 1988, I produced for Channel 4 a series called Comment, which filled with opinion pieces the short gap between the end of the news and the start of the soap at 8pm. It was usually recorded in the studio, but I had a small budget for location filming. Through his publisher, a then very frail Michael Powell agreed to record a Comment, and we drove to his house in the Cotswolds to film him. He had prepared soup for the crew; his wife, the film editor Thelma Schoenmaker, kept an eye on him to make sure he didn’t tire himself.

I’d worked with the same crew before, on other shoots. Afterwards, the sound recordist was quite emotional. When he’d seen the name “Michael Powell” on the call sheet, he said, he hadn’t imagined for a moment that it would be the film director. It’s quite a common name. But seeing The Red Shoes as a youngster had made him want to go into film and television production.

The picture at the top of the post is from the blog Verdou, which has a fine long post on many aspects of The Red Shoes.

The mystique of underground car parks

Tom Sutcliffe had an entertaining riff in the Independent last Friday on the film trope of the underground car park, apparently as a result of watching State of Play. For those of us of a certain age and interest. the underground car park is forever associated, in movies, with All the President’s Men, as well as the dozens of gangster movies which have used it. Tom writes:

Underground car parks feature in a lot of thrillers because they are functionally helpful locations for a director. They feature a multitude of hiding places and a shortage of safe escape routes. They allow for the sudden and serendipitous arrival of third-parties but can also be plausibly deserted. And the repetitive architecture and murky shadows create a kind of concrete hall-of-mirrors which automatically increases our uncertainty and anxiety.

There’s another reason as well. They’re also ‘functionally helpful’ for the producer and production manager. It’s a luxury to have a location which can be closed off from the outside world for the duration of filming. And the fact that there are so many underground car parks which look all but identical means that the location fee should be negotiable.

Watching Kite Runner

Watching Kite Runner on a DVD recently, and not having read the book, I was struck by a few things. The first was that the epic scene which shapes the entire story – the kite ‘battle’ in which Amir halts another boy’s winning streak just in time to save his father’s record – is a wonderful filmic moment, one of those sequences for which film could have have been invented, with its movement, colour, scale and illusion.

And perhaps this connects to the strongest resonance for me, in the portrait of the exiled Afghan community in California, and the way that such communities re-form themselves – in conditions of hardship and poverty – in such a way that they become reflections of their home cultures, still trapped inside the amber. Some of Britain’s Anglo-Asian film-makers have touched on this (Bend It Like Beckham comes to mind) but the picture of that Afghan world in California seemed, to this British viewer, both honest and nuanced. And by chance the next morning I read a review of Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland which touched on cricket being played in New York.

The link between New York and cricket may not seem obvious, but look out of the window on the drive to JFK and you’ll see dozens of games being played on any half-suitable patch of land.The games are all being played by immigrants from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the West Indies (“there’s a limit to what Americans understand,” says a character towards the end of the book, “the limit is cricket”).

The third thought is that for all the courage of the producers in filming so much of the dialogue in Dari, with subtitles, which would conventionally be regarded in Hollywood as a surefire formula for losing money, it must have helped that the timings of the story (1978-2000) conveniently bookended the period of Russian, then Taliban, rule, rather than the American/”Allied” occupation. In the circumstances the line, “The invaders always leave” is almost too knowing. Maybe the film’s success is also an indication that David Putnam’s attempt, in his unsuccessful sojourn as Head of Pictures at Columbia, to make pictures which had meaning beyond the borders of the United States, was simply ahead of its time.

There’s also the memorable speech about the only sin being theft (“Every other sin is a variation of theft… When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”). Amir’s father Baba, initially unsympathetic, turns out to be the “centre of good”, when he faces down a Russian soldier at a checkpoint, and makes the call to the General to let Amir ask for the hand of his daughter (“If not now, then when?”). Of course, the plot turns, twice, on theft; one framed, of a watch; one real, of a child.

Colonel Blimp and the ‘good German’

I watched again Powell and Pressburger’s classic wartime film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp a couple of weeks ago, and it sent me back to A F Kennedy’s BFI monograph about the film.Blimp was released in 1943, in the teeth of opposition from Churchill, who had not seen it but had had reports from his staff. Although Powell and Pressburger made a number of war films, I think of Blimp as part of a trilogy which connects 49th Parallel to A Matter of Life and Death. The question that links all three is a simple one: ‘why do we fight?’. In Blimp, the role of the German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, played by Anton Walbrook, is to show British audiences the values that matter, that are worth fighting for.

Walbrook is a ‘good German’ – initially thrown unwittingly into the duel with Clive Candy as a young man, later an anti-Nazi whose children have joined the Party, who ends up in Britain as an ‘enemy alien’ just before the second world war. And without delving too deep into screenwriting theory, he is also the “centre of good”, a term developed by the screenwriter and teacher Robert McKee to describe the character (there’s almost always one) who carries the values of the film we are as audience invited to empathise with. One of the benefits of this is that he has all the best speeches. His hymn to England, in the Alien Registration Office, in which he evokes the country through the memory of his dead English wife, is currently on YouTube. (There’s also a screenplay online).

It’s impossible to watch the film without feeling the autobiographical resonances. Pressburger was a Hungarian Jew who had learned German long before he spoke English, had attended a German speaking university, and had worked for the Ufa studios in Berlin before fleeing the country in 1933, during the first great purge of Jews, after a tip-off from a Nazi colleague. Walbrook, born Adolf Wohlbrück, was a half-Jewish Austrian, and also gay, who had left Germany in 1936. Both were classified as “enemy aliens” when the film was made.

According to Kennedy’s essay, Walbrook was confronted by Churchill about Blimp during the interval of a play in the West End in which Walbrook was performing. Churchill wanted to know whether Walbrook thought the film good propaganda. Walbrook’s reply?

“No people in the world other than the English would have had the courage, in the midst of war, to tell the people such unvarnished truth”.

The list of works which might have been great

One of the films which Michael Powell tried to develop, after Peeping Tom made him notorious to the point of being unemployable, was a film that I would have loved to have seen: a version of The Tempest starring James Mason as Prospero and the young Helen Mirren as Miranda (’such creatures’). Since reading about it, I’ve had half an eye for similar unmade possible masterpieces, but with little success.

On holiday, I stumbled across another one. According to Jenny Uglow’s wonderful biography, the Newcastle wood engraver Thomas Bewick, he of British Birds fame, turned down the chance to cut a set of engravings to Robert Burns’ new poem Tam O’Shanter because he was too busy.

The unmade might-have-been masterpieces in your notebook?

The birth of the piano

In Clint Eastwood’s engaging documentary Piano Blues, he says, quite early on, that the piano wasn’t invented until the industrial revolution, and that it had 20,000 pieces. It sounds as if those two facts should be related.

The documentary also features some fine piano players – for me, I enjoyed the footage of Professor Longhair, some of which can be seen on You Tube.

Some criteria for “worst films”

I’m not a fan of the film critic Joe Queenan – a man for whom the word “meretricious” might have been invented, too interested in the easy gag regardless of its truth – but he has a list of six criteria for “worst films ever” in an article in the Guardian. (Really five, since one effectively repeats itself).

For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful. … Two, an authentically bad movie has to be famous; it can’t simply be an obscure student film about a boy who eats live rodents to impress dead girls. Three, the film cannot be a deliberate attempt to make the worst movie ever, as this is cheating. Four, the film must feature real movie stars, not jocks, bozos, has-beens or fleetingly famous media fabrications like Hilton. Five, the film must generate a negative buzz long before it reaches cinemas; … it cannot simply appear out of nowhere. And it must, upon release, answer the question: could it possibly be as bad as everyone says it is? … Six, to qualify as one of the worst movies ever made, a motion picture must induce a sense of dread in those who have seen it, a fear that they may one day be forced to watch the film again – and again – and again.

On museums and monuments

This quote from the film-maker Claude Lanzmann, who made Shoah, among other documentaries:

“Museums and monuments institute oblivion as well as remembrance”.

The full interview, about his film on Sobibor, is here.

The photograph, of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, was taken by Mandan Lynn.

The power of comedy

I watched Preston Sturges’ 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels again at the weekend. Without rehashing the plot, Sullivan, celebrated (and rich) Hollywood comedy director, decides he wants to make a film about the suffering around him – in an age of migrants and depression – and needs to get some experience of it before he does so. Well, be careful what you wish for…