Free Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow Page A

implies that he wants this disorientation simply to take the curse off drearily familiar material; almost all of his work, in theatre, on radio and in film, administers shocksto the audience. This is to some extent congruous with Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt : making things strange, unexpected, therefore puzzling and arresting (the opposite, in Brecht’s formulation, of the narcotic and lulling); but in his use of this procedure, Welles speaks simply as a smart showman, a knowing manipulator of audience responses, an entertainer. Where he and Brecht coincide perfectly,though, is in wanting an active, not a passive, audience. ‘The strongest mediums are those which ask the most from the public,’ Welles said in an interview, and this notion was of course anathema to the Harry Cohns of this world, who delighted in Roemheld’s music – ‘the poorest and the purest corn’, as Welles says, and thus perfectly undemanding. Sequence after sequence is rendered ordinary, banal,stagy, phoney or just dull. ‘The audience should feel at this point [in the Chinese Theatre], along with Michael, that maybe they are going crazy. The new dubbing job can only make them feel that maybe they’re going to sleep.’ The music for the Crazy House ‘is an insult to the material … this is a chance for the score to tie together the whole “bad dream” aspect of the production and resolve it– to deliver the story to its climax on a new dimension . Given the faintest premonition of what sort of music was going to be imposed on this difficult and costly sequence, I would never have gone to the trouble or expense of shooting it.’ The end of the picture, he says, is done incalculable injury by a particularly swoony and meaningless reprise of ‘Please Don’t Kiss Me’. His comments on thesound are equally trenchant: he discerns a process of ‘smoothing-out’ in both the effects and the voices. Tracks are frequently dead; vocal tracks lack ‘peaks and accents’. In the song sequence, ‘Grisby’s voice is no longer intrusive and nagging … all the “levels” are so precisely balanced that the sequence achieves, for the first time since I started work on it, an overall quality of flatnessand banality.’ The courtroom scene is deprived of ‘the vitality and punch it previously possessed’, with the echo effect that Welles wanted dropped entirely. The tension created by an over-amplified recording of heavily and deliberately corny Hawaiian music has been lost. Michael’s run from the pier, in which ‘a careful pattern of voices had been built up with the expenditure of much time and effortby me’ – has been ‘junked in favour of a vague hullabaloo’. The interesting sound pattern they developed for the Crazy House has been dropped.
    This eloquent and precise document is a vivid record of the amount of detailed and conscious thought that Welles brought to every aspect of his films. It is one of a long line of similar memoranda to the powers-that-be – stretching from The MagnificentAmbersons to A Touch of Evil – railing against bad and insensitive decisions that have wrecked, or will wreck, his work. They always concern the post-production on the film, editing, music, sound; and they are always too late. This particular memo is an expansion of notes given to Welles by Dick Wilson; it evidently took Welles some time to gather his thoughts and express them with force. Evenas he writes, he seems to know that nothing is going to happen, and indeed, in this case (as in the others) it didn’t. Its only purpose seems to be to set the record straight, an understandable impulse, but an ineffective one. The question arises: how did such a talented, bright, powerful – indeed formidable – man allow himself to be constantly worsted by less intelligent, less talented, altogetherless remarkable men than himself? Knowing how critical post-production was to his work – more, perhaps, than to that of any other major director – how