Free Orson Welles: Hello Americans by Simon Callow Page B

did he allow this to happen, again and again?
    No doubt the answer lies in the condition of the film industry: its cost-intensiveness means that it is in the hands of those who can best raise and make money. Occasionally, a George Schaefer or aDavid O. Selznick will emerge who is responsive to the idea of art; in the case of Selznick, this brought with it massive interference. Welles had a further difficulty, which was that for all his appreciation of popular culture, he was at heart an experimentalist: to keep him interested, each film had to be a challenge. The point of genre was to play with it, invert its conventions, challenge it fromwithin. This has never been the route to popularity. In The Lady from Shanghai he had, because of a personal connection, access to one of the greatest icons of the screen. To expect that he would be allowed to deconstruct and reinvent her at the expense of her owner (because that is what, in effect, Harry Cohn was) was an unrealistic notion. To assume that the machine of Columbia Studios wouldput itself behind him and attempt to realise his highly idio-syncratic vision was to surrender to fantasy. It is fascinating to find, then, that the central character of The Lady from Shanghai is just such a figure, a dreamer, a romantic, who explicitly associates himself (or did before Harry Cohn made his cuts) with the figure of Don Quixote – whose bony profile was to cast such a long shadowover Welles’s life and work.
    The film that we have – compromised, butchered, coarsened, cheapened – is still a remarkable and a highly personal work. The Lady from Shanghai is the story of Michael O’Hara, just as Carmen is the story of Don José. Welles had done some intensive work on his version of the Prosper Mérimée story while preparing The Lady from Shanghai ; James Naremore persuasively suggeststhat he may have used it as his model. Something happens to both Don José and Mike O’Hara; by the end of their respective stories, both are changed, whereas Carmen and Elsa Bannister remain what they always have been: spiderwomen, catching men in their webs. They both die, but unlike poor love-maddened José, Michael O’Hara lives; to that extent it is an optimistic tale. The opening of thenarration, over a mysterious shot of the Brooklyn Bridge at night, might well have some autobiographical resonance for Welles (and more than one review eagerly seized on it as such): ‘When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little that can stop me. Once I’d seen her, I was not in my right mind for some time.’ We are thus immediately introduced to Welles’s Irish brogue, a thing muchmocked, though in fact it is a more-than-halfway decent west of Ireland accent such as he may well have heard fifteen years before, in Galway, at the start of the mad adventure that was his career. It is perhaps rather relentlessly deployed, however, the same cadence repeated over and over again, and ultimately becomes something of a straitjacket, stiffening his phrasing and inhibiting his naturalexpressiveness; its authentic softness lends a certain sleepiness to Michael’s utterances, too. No sooner have we heard our hero than we see him, in Central Park, in the dark, catching sight of a beautiful young blonde in a carriage, and setting out to pick her up. The first glimpse of Hayworth transmogrified into a short-haired platinum blonde must have been a real shock, and perhaps a thrill,for the film’s initial audiences; it again turns us into voyeurs, goggling at Elsa rather than simply looking at her.
    Welles himself – for the first time on film sans beard, false nose or other facial make-up – might have been quite a surprise, too. It is a remarkable face, astonishingly protean, seeming to change with every changing angle: now puffy, now angular; huge eyes and small retroussénose surmounting heavy and seemingly boneless jowls; often, in repose, seeming sullen, only to blaze with animation in action. Dick