Free The Magic World of Orson Welles by James Naremore

and “thirties comedy.”
    The scripts for
Heart of Darkness
and the “Mexican Melodrama” are worth a longer comparison, because they not only illustrate Welles’s early preoccupations but also imply interesting things about his working conditions. Throughout his stay in Hollywood, Welles had to do at least one or two thrillers of the “Mexican Melodrama” variety for every
Ambersons
or
Macbeth
. (It is said that he offered to do
Smiler with a Knife
for free if RKO would let him proceed with the expensive Conrad film.) He once said that he preferred stories that affected the “heart” rather than the “spine,” but like any good Hollywood director he had to adapt his thematic interests to a genre, often making his films interesting through the sheer force of style. This is not to say that Welles regarded the thriller as an inherently bad form; he had been doing thrillers on radio for years, and for a New York actor he was refreshingly free of snobbery. There was, however, a certain tension between his ambitions and the demands of Hollywood.
Heart of Darkness
and the proposed Mexican film demonstrate this tension fairly clearly, chiefly because they have so much in common. Both are concerned with demagoguery and manipulations; both involve a perilous journey into the heart of a jungle; and both use a doppelganger theme, in which a liberal protagonist is set off against a fascist look-alike. (Welles was to play a dual role in
Heart of Darkness
, and he might ultimately have done the same for the Mexican film.) In fact the two projects are so similar that the “Mexican Melodrama” could be described as an attempt at redoing Conrad in a more popular, less experimental and expensive form.
    Certain aspects of the Conrad script ought to be reemphasized because they make an interesting comparison with the later undertaking. An important theme in both projects (somewhat concealed by the melodramatic form of the second film) is the irrational drive to evil that can be detected in the most humane of men. The Conrad novella (which Welles and Koch had done on radio soon after the Mars broadcast) develops this theme against the background of nineteenth-century Belgian imperialism in the Congo. Welles’s script updates the story to make it apply to the rise of fascist dictatorships, but in most respects he is faithful to the original. Welles himself would play Mr. Kurtz, a man who, according to Lionel Trilling, embodies allthe extremes of his civilization. Like Welles, Kurtz is a latter-day Renaissance man—a painter, a writer, a musician, and a public speaker with a powerfully hypnotic voice—but we gradually learn that he is also the most hugely successful agent in the exploitation of the Congo. He has gained ascendancy over the Africans by persuading them that he has magical powers, and he has exercised his rule with extreme cruelty, giving himself over to acts of lust and violence that Conrad cannot even name.
    The powerful effect of this character study derives largely from the fact that it is told impressionistically, through the eyes of the semiautobiographical narrator, Charles Marlow. Marlow’s gradual discovery of Kurtz’s secret, first by secondhand reports and then by a voyage up the Congo, is like a glimpse into the abyss, transforming him from a complacent European romantic (resembling Conrad’s readers) into a wiser but more troubled character. What worries Marlow most of all is that he recognizes a subtle affinity between himself and Kurtz, a potential for evil that he believes is at the heart of civilization itself—as if all our ego-ideals could barely protect us from monsters of the id. Hence the story has a double edge: it is an attack both on European imperialism and on Rousseau’s view of humanity.
    Welles understood these themes—indeed he had been concerned with them since adolescence—and he recognized that the effect of the