Free Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow

telescope, and then making the audience into voyeurs by letting us see her throughthe telescope, too – Lawrence and Cohn steamrollered him into shooting a large number of pick-up close-ups of Hayworth, which, though undeniably lovely in themselves, destroy the film’s visual and imagistic coherence; the film’s eye, as it were, stops being beady and cynical, and suddenly mists up. The result is yet another Welles movie that must be discussed in terms of what might have been, ratherthan what is: another mutilated torso. Welles reckoned that Cohn lost about 20 per cent of the footage – a substantial amount – cutting a number of important details; worse than that, he imposed on the film a dreary score by Heinz Roemheld, which Welles wittily and appositely demolishes in a memo that is one of the most useful surviving accounts of his complex understanding of sound, the precisionof his requirements and, en passant, the fineness of his taste. It also confirms just how significant a contribution he expected music to make to his work.
    The memo to Cohn was written after the unsuccessful first preview, for which (as is not uncommon) a temporary soundtrack had been provided, music written by the distinguished film composer and former avant-gardist, George Antheil, for somethingquite different. Antheil’s score had, says Welles, ‘an atmosphere of darkness and menace, combined with something lush and romantic’, whereas the title music as it stood was ‘atrocious’. The score as a whole depends to the point of exasperation on a constant recycling of the Roberts and Fisher song ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’ sung by Elsa (in fact sung by Anita Ellis on the soundtrack), but ‘theresimply isn’t enough musical content in [it] to support its use throughout a serious melodrama’. Moreover, ‘Mr Heinzman’ – at all times Welles refers to Roemheld as Heinzman – ‘is an ardent devotee of an old-fashioned type of scoring now referred to as “Disney”. In other words, if somebody falls down, he makes a falling down sound in the orchestra.’ This is precisely the practice Bernard Herrmannabolished in his scores for Welles, creating instead constant interplay between the music, the image and the text – and silence. Of Roemheld’s inanely associative and compulsively voluble music, Welles notes: ‘If the lab had scratched initials and phone numbers all over the negative, I couldn’t have been unhappier with the music.’ In the sailing montage, ‘he seems to have gone out of his way to createan effect totally different from the one I indicated … the temporary track … had variety, movement, romance . It conveyed the feeling of a journey – a journey – a journey taken into a picturesque and highly-coloured world. It had besides this, a quality of satire .’ He cites the musical response to Hayworth’s second dive: ‘the dive itself has no plot importance. What does matter is Rita’s beauty,the beauty of the scene, the evil overtones suggested by Grisby’s character, and Michael’s bewilderment. Any or all of these might have inspired the music. Instead the dive is treated as though it were a major climax, or some antic moment in a Silly Symphony; a pratfall by Pluto the Pup, or a wild jump into space by Donald Duck.’ The entrance to the bay at Acapulco had, in the preview version,‘a very curious and sexy South-American strain’, which established the ‘rather sinister sort of glamour’ the scene required. What Roemhold provided is corny, ‘second-rate Germanic filler’. It is all a matter, he says, ‘of taste and dramatic intelligence’. Again Welles stresses the deliberate oddness he is aiming for: ‘Our story escapes the cliché only if the performances and the production are original or at the least, somewhat oblique . This sort of music cue destroys that quality of freshness and strangeness which is exactly what might have saved The Lady from Shanghai from being just another whodunit.’
    Welles