My first month watching two Welles features -- a pace I have to keep for this month and August if I want to watch eight films in six months -- demonstrated the wide range of Welles' talents as both a filmmaker and an actor.
Both films also go by two names.
The first I watched was his 1955 film Mr. Arkadin, which is also called Confidential Report. Technically, this represented the nadir of Welles' skills. The actors he cast are really quite bad, not a recognizable face in the cast other than his own -- and the bad acting includes him. But more on that in a moment.
The real technical issue with the film is its shoddy look. When I watched Welles' incomplete Don Quixote film that was cobbled together and released in 1992, I was aghast at the poor filmmaking on display. It reminded me of a bad student film, with amateurish camerawork, poor editing, and a post-dub of the voices that was simply ridiculous. Of course, this film was incomplete so we can't really know what Welles intended to do with any of it, and what's bad about it could be blamed on the guy who wove the footage into something vaguely resembling a narrative film.
That same excuse does not fly with Mr. Arkadin. Welles was fully alive for the entirety of its production, and though some of the problems that famously plagued his shoots -- which I haven't read up on in this particular case -- may be to blame for what we're seeing here, Welles ultimately greenlit these raw materials to go out as a completed film.
Although I found the camerawork (by Jean Bourgoin) mostly to be terrible, it was really the way Welles stitched it together in the editing room that drove me to distraction. Renzo Lucidi is the credited editor, though IMDB mentions Welles as an uncredited editor, and of course his massive ego would not have allowed anything he didn't approve of to go out without a knock-down, drag-out fight. Of course, that's what happened on a number of his films, which is why he had such a checkered career, with so many films released that were only some small percentage of his actual vision.
The editing here is frenetic. Shots are layered upon one another to no end, often sacrificing the logic of the dialogue in the process. It looks like the editor was on speed and just kept on getting more and more worked up the faster the edits occurred. It looks like garbage.
I didn't like the story either, though aspects of it remind me of both The Lady from Shanghai and Citizen Kane. Like Shanghai, it's about a man who involves another man in an intricate plot intending to frame him or double cross him, and like Kane, it's an intricate mystery piecing together details about an unknowable personality. But Welles' script is so jumbled and garbled that I quickly stopped caring what was happening. (I guess it might have been clever at some point in there, at least according to Japanese filmmaker Shinji Aoyama, who is quoted in the film's Wikipedia entry as saying it is one of the greatest films of all time.)
The single worst thing about the movie may be Welles in the title role. Yes, the lead (Robert Arden) is bland, and yes, the series of women with sort of interchangeable roles who traipse through the picture range from ridiculous to forgettable (with the lone exception of Katrina Paxinou in what was probably the film's best, and most successfully paced, scene). But Welles is just an overblown idiot here. First of all he looks absurd. This look would be better suited to one of his Shakespearean adaptations than a film that seemed to have been set in the present day in 1955:
He reminded me a bit of this guy:
Though of course that comes much later.
You can imagine the type of performance that goes along with that appearance, and you'd be right. I'd call it scenery chewing, but some of the sins Welles commits are of extreme interiority, like he's an insane person on lithium. Anyway, he's always the biggest person on screen, and I'm not just talking about his increasing body size. He's "big" even when he's quiet, as in all the choices he makes are to one extreme or another, and he's out of sync with all the other actors. It's laughable.
In terms of the techniques you would expect from Welles, given his past work, there were a couple. For one I noticed he's still very interested in depth of field, as there's a shot with a folder in the foreground on a bed -- the "confidential report" of the alternate title -- and the characters in the background that's quite striking. It almost looks as though it's a novelty oversized folder to create the effect, which I'd be able to confirm with one quick google search if I could be bothered. But Mr. Arkadin does not warrant any more of my time than I've already given it.
There were also a lot of high-angle shots, and different camera angles in general. In fact, my notes from the viewing read "Too many camera angles." The multiplicity of angles contributes to the sense of frenetic disarray created by the editing. This is a movie made by a person who has too many tricks and can't make tough decisions on which ones not to use. What's worse is that some of them are used badly.
The results were much better with The Trial, which came out seven years later in 1962. No, it didn't take him seven years to make his next movie -- though after Mr. Arkadin, I wouldn't be surprised if it had -- but I've already seen the film that came out between the two of them, 1958's Touch of Evil. I don't know if that was heralded as a comeback for him at the time (I believe it was) but it definitely helped point him in the right direction for his adaptation of the famous Franz Kafka novel.
Which I didn't realize this was until just a few days before I watched it. The Trial, despite its famous associations, is quite a generic sort of title and could have been used for any sort of movie, though likely one involving a trial. But Welles loved his adaptations, so I probably should have guessed.
Making this connection gave me a lot of additional excitement about my second June movie. I only just read this book for the first time about five years ago, and I really enjoyed it. "Enjoyed" is the wrong word. I found it intellectually stimulating and invigorating.
Alas, The Trial works better on the page. When you live with the tedium central to Kafka's themes over a series of weeks, it's enriching; when you live with it over a couple hours, it can make you impatient for it to be over. Which kept The Trial from landing higher in my estimation despite some very good filmmaking.
I noticed the difference right away. Although this was Edmond Richard's first feature as a cinematographer, his work is so much more crisp and purposeful than the work of veteran DP Jean Bourgoin in Mr. Arkadin. The first shot is of Josef K's bedroom, which the camera (and probably also the set) makes look impossibly undersized -- an early metaphor for the type of psychological imprisonment the story will saddle on its protagonist. (Who is played by Anthony Perkins, by the way, making this the second Perkins film I have seen this month after On the Beach.)
The set continues to be a masterstroke on The Trial, enhanced by Richard's photography. As one might expect if having seen later Kafka adaptations, the sets seem to be out of a dream space, either much bigger or much smaller than they should be, to further the film's themes. One unforgettable scene involves a giant warehouse-sized room that seems to be filled with a thousand people at desks on typewriters, none of them divided from their neighbor by more than a foot or two. There are strange court chambers and file rooms jammed with rows and rows of filing cabinets. The palatial office/convalescence room of the advocate, played by Welles himself, is absurdly grandiose, able to have rooms filled with what appear to be just random stacks of documents and old newspapers.
Let's take a moment to pause and discuss Welles himself as an actor. While his role here as the advocate is very similar to his role as Mr. Arkadin -- both characters are larger than life and inscrutable -- the effectiveness of the performances couldn't be more diametrically opposed. There's something truly chilling about his advocate character, not only the bizarre power he wields by rarely leaving his bed (and sometimes controlling things from under the covers). What I found most memorable was that he seems to speak almost without moving his mouth, all the subtle malice and menace contained in his wide-eyed stare.
Here is what I mean:
As discussed earlier, seeing The Trial on film underscored for me how much better it works as a book than a movie, but that's no fault of Welles'. This is a very faithful adaptation, including all the narrative circumlocutions involving the women K meets -- one of whom is played by Welles' wife, Paola Mori. (Who also appears in Mr. Arkadin.) You get a sense of the Kafkaesque absurdity of it all for sure.
It also allows him to really pursue his natural inclination toward amplifying his themes through extreme camera angles, though this time in a more restrained manner. Here's a shot of Welles the first time he is seen standing next to K, though in reality they are close to the same height:
A moment later we are shown that the advocate is indeed on an elevated surface, but as this is our first time seeing them side by side, it works as a symbol of how the strange bureaucracy that has ensnared K towers over him.
A shot through tunnels under the city also reminded me of The Third Man, which Welles appeared in but did not direct.
Another important point of contrast between The Trial and Mr. Arkadin: the use of black and white. It was likely a financial limitation for Welles in both instances, but in the former it serves his themes, while in the latter it feels like a shortcoming. It's the perfect film stock for the stark The Trial, but Mr. Arkadin has a number of scenes with large parades, colorful costumes (you would assume, anyway), and even a masquerade ball. It seems to scream out for the color that it does not have.
Oh, I said both films have two names. Even though The Trial is entirely in English, its credits appear in French, where the title is listed as Le Proces.
Welles himself bookends the film, speaking the opening parable "Before the Law" against a series of still drawings, as well as at the end concluding with "My name is Orson Welles, and I wrote and directed this picture." I'm starting to see the groundwork laid for the type of fourth-wall-breaking authorial role Welles played in his work, which was so richly parodied by Will Ferrell in the Funny or Die show The Spoils of Babylon.
As a side note, I watched both films on YouTube, the first free and the second a rental. That's the first time I've ever done a rental from YouTube. It was perfectly smooth. Under some circumstances, that "landmark moment" might be the occasion for its own post, but since I'm already writing about The Trial here, let's just move on.
Well it took me about four sittings to finally get through this post. Hopefully that's not what my next installment of this series will entail. August will be my second (and final) two-movie month with Chimes at Midnight and The Immortal Story.
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