“Touch of Evil” - Orson Welles (1958)

Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil holds a special place in the hearts of many film noir enthusiasts as one of the most flamboyant examples of the genre.  In many ways its visual and dramatic extravagance remains uneclipsed even today.  The film was not much of a hit at the box office when it was first released in 1958, due in part to Universal Studios’ cutting down and re-editing the film prior to its release, much against the director’s wishes.  There have been some “restored” versions more appealing to cineastes since then, but even that bastardized first release was widely appreciated in Europe.  It won the International Critics Prize (the top award) at the 1958 Brussels World Film Festival.  Since then, Touch of Evil’s reputation has steadily grown, and it is now ranked as an all-time classic [1,2].  In the British Film Institute’s most recent polls of film directors and critics concerning the all-time greatest films, it was ranked 57th on the BFI’s 2012 Critics’ Poll [3] and 26th on the BFI’s 2012 Directors’ Poll [4].

The story of Touch of Evil, which is loosely based on the novel Badge of Evil (1956) by Whit Masterson, concerns murder and corruption in two adjacent border towns straddling the U.S.-Mexican border.  And besides incorporating the usual noirish equivocations concerning honesty, loyalty, and justice, it also included provocative slants on ethnic and social stereotypes.  Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty told this dark story in a dramatic fashion, with their expressionistic, black-and-white rendering of mostly nocturnal scenes featuring many wide-angled moving-camera shots and quasi-threatening low-angled closeups.

And interestingly for cinema buffs, Welles included a number of famous actors in small roles.  Besides the casting several Welles favorites, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff, and Ray Collins, in small character roles, he also had bit parts for the following well-known faces:

Joseph Cotten, Keenan Wyn, Dennis Weaver, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eva Gabor, Mercedes McCambridge, and Marlene Dietrich (!)

But what makes the telling of this complicated tale particularly effective is the way it continually crisscrosses between the narrative threads involving its four principal characters [5].  These four  characters are each almost social stereotypes that symbolize a dramatic theme of the story:

• Police Captain Hank Quinlan (played by Orson Welles).  He is a crafty but unprincipled cop who will use any means to ensure that the person who his intuition convinces him is guilty will be convicted of the crime.  Although Quinlan, as the main character in this piece, would be expected to embody the highest standards of American justice, he in fact is shady, prejudiced, unscrupulous, and repulsive – the kind of person that simple-minded and prejudiced Americans (you can guess whom I mean) think is common in Mexico.
   
• Ramon Miguel “Mike” Vargas (Charlton Heston).  He is a highly principled Mexican narcotics officer dedicated to seeing that justice is served in accordance with the full letter of the law.  Mike Vargas is also handsome, romantic, chivalrous and heroic – the kind of person that typical audiences might assume to embody the “American” ideal.
   
• “Uncle Joe” Grandi (Akim Tamiroff).  Although he is an American citizen, he is a Mexican gangster and current leader of the Grandi family criminal syndicate.  He is slimy and ruthless, the epitome of the stereotypical Mexican villain.
   
• Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh).  She is the newly married American wife of Mike Vargas.  A beautiful and elegant blonde, Susie is probably another, in this case dreamlike, stereotype for a Latin American population (Janet Leigh may have been the ultimate Caucasian beauty icon – she was to serve in a similar role soon in Psycho (1960).)  Like her husband, Susie is loyal, brave, and a believer in justice.  But she also may hold her own personal stereotypical views, as evidenced when she calls a young Mexican man she meets, “Pancho”, which is perhaps an allusion to a character in the popular U.S. television series The Cisco Kid (1950-56).

The film begins with one of greatest-ever opening shots – a more than three-minute crane-and-tracking shot that begins in one country and finishes in another.  It starts with a time-bomb being surreptitiously loaded into the trunk of a car in a Mexican border town and then tracking the car as it is slowly driven through the border control into the U.S.  Midway through the shot, it shifts its focus to a newly married couple, Mike and Susie Vargas, who are walking in the same direction across the border.  When the couple are embracing on the U.S. side of the border, the shot ends with the sound of an explosion.  The time-bomb has gone off, destroying the car and its two occupants, one of whom was a wealthy American, Rudy Linnekar.
                                   
So there is a murder case to solve, and Mike Vargas, knowing that the bomb was planted on the Mexican side of the border, feels he has to take part in the investigation.  He sends his wife Susie back across the border to wait in their hotel while he looks into the matter.  This separation of Mike and Susie introduces two parallel narrative threads that will intertwine throughout the rest of the film. 

At the scene of the crime, Police Captain Hank Quinlan shows up to take charge of the investigation.  Quinlan is an obese and disheveled slob with an overbearing personality who relies on his fabled intuition to solve crimes.  He is always attended to by his loyal assistant Pete Menzies (Joseph Calleia), whose life he once saved by taking a bullet intended for Menzies.  In this case Quinlan immediately intuits that sticks of dynamite were used to commit the crime.  He also adopts a scornful, dismissive attitude towards Vargas, whom he considers to be wandering outside his proper jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, as Susie Vargas returns to her hotel, she is accosted by young thugs from the Grandi family who have been sent to her by “Uncle Joe” Grandi.  Joe Grandi’s brother was earlier arrested and is facing trial in Mexico City based on evidence supplied by Mike Vargas, and Joe wants to intimidate Susie into getting her husband to back off from the case. 

So early on we see that Mike Vargas faces two hostile adversaries, one challenging his sense of justice and the other threatening his personal life.  These two parallel struggles will gradually dominate the plot more than the original narrative quest, which was to solve the car-bombing crime.

With their honeymoon plans disrupted, Mike consoles Susie and concedes to her that “all border towns bring out the worst in their country”.  He reminds her of the positive side of things, that the U.S.-Mexico border is “one of the longest borders on earth. . . . an open border”, and he wants to work to keep things that way.  Susie then insists that she wants to stay near her husband while he pursues his investigation on the U.S. side of the border.  So he installs her and leaves her alone in a mostly vacant motel on the U.S. side that is tended by a tremulous night manager (Dennis Weaver). The night manager’s hyper-twitchy behavior only adds to Susie’s, and the viewer’s, nervousness.  Little do they know that this motel is owned by the Grandi gang.

As the car-bombing investigation proceeds, Quinlan identifies a prime suspect: a young man named Sanchez who had just secretly married the victim Rudy Linnekar’s daughter.  But during the search of Sanchez’s apartment, Vargas discovers by accident that the incriminating dynamite sticks that were found there must have been just recently planted there by someone.  He suspects Quinlan of planting the false evidence in order to frame Sanchez.  In fact Vargas begins to wonder if Quinlan has been doing this for years – framing his Mexican suspects with false evidence in order to guarantee criminal convictions.

At this point Grandi privately approaches Quinlan seeking a clandestine alliance.  After all, he tells him, they both need to get rid of their common enemy: Vargas.  Then the scene shifts to Susie Vargas’s motel room, where she is attacked by Grandi family hoods, who then drug her and abduct her to a hotel room across the border.  We can presume that Quinlan has bought into Grandi’s plan to frame the Vargeses as drug pushers and addicts.  Although we know that Mike Vargas is a straight-arrow, the prevailing American prejudice against Mexicans makes Grandi’s plan feasible.

Later that evening we get an insight into what drives Quinlan.  At a bar, a half-drunk Quinlan melancholily talks to his long-time comrade Pete Menzies about his life’s great tragedy.  His wife was strangled thirty years ago, and despite Quinlan’s relentless efforts, he was never able to catch the perpetrator.  And he concedes that strangling is the most effective way to commit a murder, because the murder weapon is so hard to identify.  Since then, he tells Menzies, he has always made sure that no culprit (identified presumably by his intuition) could ever go free.

Unaware of the dire straits his wife is in, Vargas gets access to past court records in order to confirm his belief that Quinlan has been framing people for years by planting evidence that is discovered by his unsuspecting and loyal workmate, Menzies. 

While Vargas is trying to convince Menzies of his boss’s guilt, Quinlan goes to the Mexican hotel room where Grandi is waiting with the drugged Susie Vargas lying passed-out on the bed.  Things have presumably worked out in accordance with their joint plan.  But then Quinlan double-crosses Grandi by strangling him with Susie’s stocking.  The idea is apparently to pin the murder on the presumed drug addict Susie. 

Eventually Menzies becomes convinced of Quinlan’s duplicity.  The key piece of evidence was his finding in the just-seen hotel room Quinlan’s walking cane, which his somewhat inebriated boss had left there.  So Menzies agrees to cooperate with Vargas in order to collect convincing evidence of Quinlan’s guilt. Their plan is to wire Menzies with a hidden microphone that can be used to record self-incriminating comments by the unsuspecting Quinlan, while Vargas will be lurking nearby with a radio-connected tape recorder.  The scene is now set for the famous nighttime tracking sequence, in which Quinlan walks by a canal spouting his customary  contempt to Menzies, with Vargas surreptitiously trailing them at a close distance in the shadows. 

The final shots are dramatic. Quinlan’s cunning enables him to figure out that Menzies is bugged to record his voice; and after killing Menzies, he almost saves himself, but not quite.  Vargas winds up with the evidence needed to absolve himself and his wife of any wrongdoing.  At the close, Quinlan’s old flame, the brothel madam Tana (Marlene Dietrich, still looking seductive at the age of fifty-six), is asked if she has any comments on the man she knew, and she says sadly and wearily,

“He was some kind of a man! . . . . What does it matter what you say about people?”

So Touch of Evil was really concerned with the struggle between Quinlan and Vargas, which amounted to a contest between upholding the community-based laws (Vargas) or sidestepping those laws in order to follow one’s selfishly-construed version of what is right (Quinlan).  The original issue of solving the car-bombing crime had faded into the background.  Indeed in the end we learn that Quinlan’s hunch was correct – Sanchez ultimately confessed to the authorities offscreen that he was the one who had put the sticks of dynamite in Linnekar’s car.  But the point is that Quinlan was defying the way the way the legal system is supposed to work by planting false evidence in order to frame his suspect. 

The legal system is one of the four pillars, which I have labeled “RMDL” (the legal system is the ‘L’ in this acronym) [6], of rationalist-based modern societies that have arisen in the last couple of centuries.  And it is the U.S. that is supposed to be the flagship country of this form of government.  So in Touch of Evil the irony – one that jabs at some American ethnic prejudices –  is that it is a U.S. citizen who defies RMDL and a Mexican citizen who staunchly upholds it. 

 

Welles spins this utterly dark tale in mesmerizing film noir fashion by continually shifting back and forth among his four iconic characters – Quinlan, Mike Vargas, Susie Vargas, and Grandi.  One might criticize that these four characterizations are exaggerated and schematic.  But their emphatic representations are just the right dramatic elements Welles needed to sustain his dark, complex, and expressionistic narrative.

★★★★

Notes:

1. J. Hoberman, “Jokers Wild”, The Village Voice, (15 September 1998).   
2. Roger Ebert, “Touch of Evil (1958)”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com (13 September 1998).     
3. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).     
4. “Directors’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).    
5. Tim Dirks, “Touch of Evil (1958)”, AMC Filmsite, (n.d.).   
6. See my discussions of RMDL, which can be accessed by clicking on the tag  “RMDL” under the “LABELS” section of this site. 

“The Trial” - Orson Welles (1962)

Franz Kafka’s haunting novel The Trial (1925) is justly famous, but its enigmatic nature left it open to multiple interpretations and presented challenges to any filmmaker wishing to adapt it to the screen. It was left up to an intrepid filmmaker like Orson Welles to take on the challenge with his 1962 film of Kafka’s tale.  Welles had had early commercial success with films like Citizen Kane (1941)  and The Stranger (1946), but he was subsequently more or less banished from Hollywood and was at this point working in Europe under constrained budgets.  For example in connection with this film production, Welles, who usually strove for an expressionistic atmosphere, was not given the finances to construct his own sets and was forced to look for existing premises in which to shoot his dramatic scenes.  He ultimately found locations and settings appropriate for his film in Paris, Milan, Zagreb, and Rome.  For example, he  shot much of the film in the abandoned Parisian train station (now a museum) Gare d’Orsay. Nevertheless and despite these limitations, he came up with a masterwork [1].

Kafka’s story of The Trial was actually written during 1914-15 and, like most of his work, was never fully completed during his lifetime.  His friend Max Brod edited and finished off the manuscript for posthumous publication in 1925.  And Welles then did some of his own reediting by reordering some of the chapters when he wrote his screenplay for the film.

The story of The Trial concerns a young man, Joseph K., who is awakened early one morning and told by the intruding plainclothes police officers that he has been accused of a serious crime.  But K is not informed of what he has been accused, nor is he immediately incarcerated.  He is merely told that he must report to government offices to face the so-far unstated charges. The rest of the story concerns K’s frustrating and ultimately in-vain efforts to find out just what he has been accused of so that he can make efforts to clear himself of the charges.  As such the story has been considered to be an example of absurdist fiction and existentialist narrative, as well as offering a metaphor for man’s obsession with guilt [2,3].

Besides these more personal and individualistic themes, though, many commentators also attribute themes associated with more exterior, social issues to Kafka’s story.  In particular, the depiction of an obscure and oppressive bureaucracy that intrudes into every corner of one’s personal life seems to anticipate for many people the 20th-century horrors of Stalinism, Naziism, and the Holocaust. In fact in this connection, Welles’s, himself, was once under FBI investigation [4].  Even today, there is a pervasive sense of uneasiness concerning how vast and inscrutable organizations may mysteriously use hidden surveillance technologies to invade our privacy and exert control over our lives.

So we may attribute two separate streams of interpretation to The Trial – the existential and the social.  In Welles’s film there is a particular focus on the existential side of things, though at the film’s conclusion there is imagery that invokes horrors on the social side, as well.

Welles said he did not make his film “based on” on Kafka ‘s book, but, rather, “inspired by” Kafka’s work [5].  In particular, Welles altered the character of Joseph K. somewhat, making him more assertive than Kafka’s character, and he also introduced elements of what might be said to be black comedy into his film.  Despite these alterations, though, I would say that Welles’s The Trial very much captures the anxious spirit of Kafka’s work.

Welles achieved these moody effects by means of his characteristic expressionistic mise en scene, which he admitted was inspired by his viewing of the works of early German Expressionistic filmmakers [6].  This involved high-contrast black-and-white photography, as well as many extreme high- and low-angle shots that present the story’s principals from a psychologically disturbing perspective.

The Trial’s narrative meanders through three general phases.

1.  Guilt

In the beginning the focus is on the disturbing and encompassing nature of guilt.  In the opening sequence Joseph K. (played by Anthony Perkins, who had recently starred in another noirish masterpiece Psycho (1960)) is shown (in a carefully crafted tracking shot of 3:40 duration) being awakened in his room at 6am by plainclothesmen.  Even though he doesn’t know what he has been charged with, K acts guiltily.  Later he talks to another boarder in his rooming house, Marika Burstner (Jeanne Moreau), and again their conversation is clouded by concerns of guilt – on this occasion in connection with their tentative romantic relationship.  Then K is shown in his vast, desks-in-a-row office where he is made to feel guilty by insinuations made by his boss when K’s teenage cousin stops by for a visit.  These and other similar scenes all highlight that our lives are infused with guilt.

Indeed our social institutions, particularly our religions, are dominated by notions of guilt.  Humans are called upon to take responsibility for their actions that have negative outcomes, and the principal mechanism to place a behavior-modifying burden on people for these unwanted actions is guilt.  In addition, humans are presumably the only animals that know that death is inevitable for everyone.  But we don’t know why we are faced with this punishment.  So our institutions tend to proclaim that we all must be intrinsically guilty for this situation – we are all guilty at birth.  But why?  This is the question the underlies Joseph K.’s situation in The Trial, and its understanding points to the idea that guilt is a man-made construction [3].

2.  The Law and Its Execution

The second phase of the film shifts the main focus from personal guilt to an immersion into a vast and unknowably labyrinthine legal system – the instrument for adjudicating and punishing guilt.  While attending an opera, K is interrupted and escorted to an obscure courtroom building where a hearing on his case is being conducted in a crowded auditorium.  K ascends to the stand and makes an impassioned speech dismissing the still-unstated charges against him and then walks out of the room.  So K is shown not to be a passive victim but an assertive responder, if only he could figure out where he stands in the legal system.

Later K’s uncle Max takes him to his lawyer friend, the advocate Albert Hastler (Orson Welles).  But K is distracted by Hastler’s beautiful assistant, Leni (Romy Schneider), who tries to seduce K and who also urges K to confess to his guilt.

Subsequently K returns to the courtroom where he had made his speech and is surprised to find it empty.  The only person around is the beautiful wife of the courtroom guard, Hilda (Elsa Martinelli), who also offers herself to him without qualification.

When K later does talk to the advocate Hastler, he soon sees that the advocate is a cynical manipulator and is of no use in connection with K’s legal difficulties.  So K eventually dismisses Hastler, but before he leaves the office, Leni urges him to visit the official court portraitist, Titorelli, who supposedly knows all the ins and outs of the legal system and the people at the top.

On the way to visit Titorelli, K is hounded by a frenetic pack of giggling and laughing young girls who seem to be aggressively after him.  Titorelli’s room turns out be a small, slatted enclosure, through the slats of which the loudly cackling pack of young girls can be seen and heard.  All of this creates a claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere for the conversation between Titorelli that ensues. 

With his insider knowledge Titorelli explains to K that there are three possible types of acquittal:

• definite acquittal – this is a theoretical designation that nobody knows how to achieve.
• ostensible acquittal – rearrests for the same charges are inevitable, and one will be involved in an endless cycle of court cases.
• indefinite deferment – one’s court case will get tied up in a literally endless sequence of proceedings  

K departs from Titorelli’s premises under a cloud and hurries down a surrealistic slatted corridor  with the shrieking girls in pursuit.

3.  Closing In
Commanding voices now direct K through further mazes until he reaches the basement of a cathedral, where a priest emphasizes to him the hopelessness of his situation.  Then Hastler mysteriously shows up, and he tells him about the cryptic and fatalistic “Before the Law” parable that is a metaphor for the eternal mystery of every man’s ultimately doomed fate [7].

Finally, K is grabbed by two rough-looking police guards, who usher K to the outskirts of town and down into a large hole in the ground, where they apparently intend to execute him with a large butcher’s knife.  With K lying submissively on the ground between them, they lean over their victim and hesitantly pass the knife back and forth between them, apparently waiting for K to do the job himself.  In Kafka’s story, K is knifed “like a dog” at this point, but in the film K just laughs derisively at the two men, who then scramble up out of the hole.  Once out on top, they toss a pack of dynamite down into the hole where K is.  K grabs the bomb and throws it, but we immediately see a massive explosion that apparently destroys everything in the vicinity.  The final images are those of the mushroom cloud from the explosion.

That final shot of the mushroom cloud was Welles’s way of reminding us that we live under the cloud of likely nuclear annihilation.  In other words, we face a self-imposed death sentence, the current collective mindfulness of which is much lower today, by the way, than it was back in 1962, even though its danger and likelihood is undiminished from that time.  This is something, like the horrors of the Holocaust, which Kafka also could not have anticipated in his day, but the universality of this deranged death sentence makes it particularly appropriate to connect with Kafka’s tale.

Another interesting subtheme of Kafka’s that appears throughout the film concerns the take on femininity in the story.  Many of the women that K encounters – Marika Burstner, Leni, Hilda, and the pack of young girls – are aggressively seductive and represent lascivious distractions from K’s serious concerns.  In casting Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, and Elsa Martinelli for these cameo roles, Welles was presenting some of the most alluring feminine European movie stars to portray this notion of feminine distraction and devotion to sensual physicality.  Their presence in the film is likely to give the viewer a different feeling than what one probably gets from reading Kafka’s story.

So we can say that Welles did inject references to significant social themes in his rendition of The Trial.  But nevertheless and as mentioned above, the principal focus and aesthetic virtue of his film concerns his presentation of Kafka’s existentialist theme.  This was accomplished by means of Welles’s well-developed film noir mise en scene, which he had honed in connection with his earlier works along these noirish lines – The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), and Touch of Evil (1958).  But The Trial represented the culmination of Welles’s film-noir aesthetics.

We can observe that the film noir is actually the ideal mode for Kafka, because it employs emphatic expressionist techniques to convey paranoia, hopelessness, and fear of incarceration – just what Kafka was talking about [6].  As filmmaker and writer Paul Schrader remarked regarding the aesthetics of film noir [8]:

“The actors and setting are often given equal emphasis. . . . When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor, it, of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood.”

Certainly this is the case in The Trial, where Welles’s expressionistic settings and camera arrangements constantly impose a threatening surroundings on the beleaguered Joseph K.  The positive effects of this moody atmosphere more than compensate for some minor deficiencies in the finished product.  The background music, while often evocative, is sometimes too jazzy and distracting. And the dubbed dialogue (Welles is said to have used his own voice to dub eleven of the characters’ spoken lines [9]) is sometimes unclear and too rushed. But overall, Welles’s The Trial is a masterpiece.  In fact even though Welles’s Citizen Kane has often been ranked as the greatest film of all time [10], Welles, himself, regarded The Trial as his best work [5].  And it truly is worthy of being considered a film classic.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “The Trial”, RogerEbert.com, (25 February 2000).  
2. Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Existentialist Aesthetics”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (17 February 2015).   
3. Temenuga Trifonova, “The Trial”, Cinémathèque Annotations on Film, Issue 38, Senses of Cinema, (February 2006).    
4. Cristina Vatulescu, “The Medium on Trial: Orson Welles Takes on Kafka and Cinema”, Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2013).    
5. Huw Wheldon, "Orson Welles on THE TRIAL", Interviewed on the BBC in 1962, Wellesnet, (1962).   
6. Jeffrey Adams, “Orson Welles's ‘The Trial:’ Film Noir and the Kafkaesque”, College Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3, Literature and the Visual Arts (Summer, 2002), pp. 140-157.
7. Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”, (translation by Ian Johnston), Franz Kafka online, (1915).   
8. Paul Schrader, “notes on film noir”, Film Comment, Vol. 8, No. 1 (SPRING 1972), pp. 8-13.     
9. “The Trial (1962 film)”, Wikipedia, (30 August 2018).    
10. “Sight and Sound: Critics’ Top Ten Poll”, Wikipedia, (26 August 2018).    

“The Stranger” - Orson Welles (1946)

After the box-office failures of his first two films, Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Orson Welles was forced to operate within the confines of studio-imposed restrictions in order to secure Hollywood’s funding for his third film, The Stranger (1946).  Welles proceeded this time to crank out a more conventional film noir, completing the work on time and under budget and thereby ensuring that the film enjoyed a modest profit.  In fact the film went on to receive a US Oscar nomination for Best Story, although I would say that the basically absurd screenplay by Anthony Veiller is the worst element of the film.  What does make the film distinctive are the various touches of Wellesian expressionism in the telling of the tale. In particular, there are a number of intricate crane and tracking shots that lure the viewer into the sinuousness of the narrative.  In addition, Welles employs a liberal dosage of low-angle and high-angle shots that emphasize the expressionistic atmosphere of various dramatic situations.

The film’s story concerns a notorious Nazi war criminal’s attempts to avoid capture by hiding himself in anonymity in a small American town.  He is tracked to this town by a relentless US federal agent, and the narrative relates the resulting cat-and-mouse game of the two men.  Although films noir often feature exaggerated plot events and circumstances, there are so many implausible elements in this story that the viewer’s suspension of disbelief is continually challenged along the way [1].  I will mention a few of these implausibilities below.

Because this story depicts how an evil character comes to prey on an essentially innocent and idyllic small American town, The Stranger has been compared, unfavorably, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which might be thought to have more polish.  I would say, though, that the two films are on a par, and I wouldn’t put Shadow of a Doubt above The Stranger (despite the latter’s plot absurdities). 

One of the compelling features of The Stranger is the magnetism of its three principal leads, all of whom occupy significant portions of narrative focalization:

• Orson Welles plays Franz Kindler, the alleged mastermind behind the Nazi extermination camps.  When he comes to the middle-class town of Harper, Connecticut, he assumes the name Charles Rankin, and he is generally known by that name in the film.  Welles seemed to relish playing roles of demonic characters, and his emphatic performance  provides dramatic electricity.
   
• Edward G. Robinson plays Mr. Wilson, the US government official from the Allied War Crimes Commission office. His appearance as a clandestine investigator in a scene is usually first signaled by an image of his smoking pipe.  Robinson’s persona is very much a reprise of his quiet, calculating role in Double Indemnity (1944), and it plays well here, too.
   
• Loretta Young plays Mary Longstreet, who is the daughter of a US Supreme Court justice and who marries Charles Rankin (Kindler).  The perpetually young and elegant Ms. Young always had a unique feminine charisma and glamour that elevated the films she was in.  I have always found her eyes and emotive facial expressions to have some sort of hypnotic allure to them.

The narrative of The Stranger passes through four basic phases.

1.  Coming to Harper, Connecticut
Wilson, the Allied War Crimes Commission official, arranges to have convicted Nazi war criminal Konrad Meinike (played by Konstantin Shayne) released from prison in the hopes that the man will unknowingly lead them to the whereabouts of the still at-large Franz Kindler.  Sure enough Meinike leads them to the small town of Harper, Connecticut, where he immediately looks up a prep-school teacher there, Charles Rankin (Kindler). The secretive Kindler is paranoid on seeing his old comrade, and in bravura 4:10 tracking shot he lures Meinike into the woods and strangles him.  Then he buries corpse there. 

Early on one sees two implausibilities:

• Kindler shows no trace of a German accent.
   
• The supposedly meticulous German’s burial of Meinike’s corpse is so flimsy, that a dog can sniff it out and start digging it up.

Afterwards on that very day, Kindler marries Mary Longstreet, after which they go on a honeymoon.  Here is another implausibility.  Why would a man seeking to vanish from view marry the daughter of a US Supreme Court Justice.

Meanwhile Wilson, who had arrived in town tracking Meinike and was almost killed by the man, is masquerading as an antique dealer and lurking around to see if he can find who is Kindler.

2.  Closing in  
In the second phase of the film, more and more incriminating evidence points to Rankin as Kindler.  There is a conversation over dinner at Judge Longstreet’s house, with Wilson present as a guest, where Kindler makes an impassioned speech about the demonic essence of Nazism and of Germans, in general.  He does this to establish his anti-Nazi and anti-German credentials, but his subsequent remark that Karl Marx was a Jew, not a German, gives his prejudices away.  At any rate, anyone listening to Kindler’s over-the-top hate-filled comments would see that he is essentially a psychopath.  By this time both Kindler and Wilson have identified each other as enemies, and the cat-and-mouse game ensues. 

Kindler, worried about the burial site in the woods, takes Mary’s dog out for a walk to inspect the site.  But the dog sniffs the corpse and starts digging there, leading Kindler to eventually kill the dog.  Afterwards there is an effective 1:53 tracking shot showing Wilson and Mary’s brother Noah (Richard Long) discussing the poisoning of the dog as they walk along.

3.  Culprit Identified 

The killing of the dog leads Wilson and the authorities to look for and find Meinike’s body in the woods.  Wilson is now sure that Mary’s husband is his man, and he convinces Mary’s father, her brother, and her maid that her husband is a Nazi.  To convince Mary, Wilson shows her some at-that-time recent film footage of the Nazi death camps and gas chambers.  But Mary cannot believe that the man she loves is a Nazi and refuses to cooperate with Wilson.

Wilson predicts to Judge Longstreet that Kindler will try to kill Mary, but rather than save the woman, he chooses to let things play out (another implausibility).

4.  Ending in the Clock Tower  
Harper has a church with a defective mechanically animated clock in its tower that now comes more in focus. Kindler was famously known to be obsessed with clocks, and Rankin (Kindler) has been spending much time in the clock tower trying to fix the clock (another implausible activity for the supposedly cautious fugitive).  Feeling cornered, Kindler now retreats to the clock tower more than ever.  He also believes that the only person who could testify that he was acquainted with Meinike (and hence that he could be Meinike’s murderer) is Mary.  So he sets up a (implausible) trap in the clock tower to murder her there while he is away.  There are further implausible events [2], until in the end, Kindler, Mary, and Wilson all wind up in the top of the clock tower where the final reckoning is played out.


All the way along we have known that Rankin is Kindler and is essentially evil, so there is no suspense in identifying the guilty parties.  What we have instead are two gradual encirclements of predatory spiders moving in on their prey.

• Wilson has been slowly, but relentlessly, closing in on Kindler.  Kindler’s world gradually diminishes until it finally ends up as just the confines of the clock tower.
• At the same time Kindler has been increasingly putting pressure on and threatening his loving wife, Mary.  We see her enclosed and trapped by her psychopathic husband’s obsessive belief that she is the one witness who can identify his guilt.

These two encirclements come to a head in the clock tower at the film’s close.

There were two aspects of Welles’s original plans for the film that were denied by the studio through the offices of the film’s editor, Ernest Nims.  One was to include a significant early section of the story showing Meinike’s flight through Argentina before arriving in Harper.  Another was to have the role of Wilson played by a woman, Agnes Morehead, instead of Edward G. Robinson.  I think both of these ideas would have widened the film’s scope and extended its dramatic range beyond these two narrow “spider-encirclements” that are the focus of this film.  As it is, we are just left to savor primarily the expressionistic theatrics and cinematography that Welles has concocted for this story.
★★½

Notes:

1. For further discussion of these implausibilities, see Brian Koller, “The Stranger (1946)”, filmsgraded.com, (24 June 2011).
2. For example, why would Mary, now knowing that her husband is a mass-murderer, go alone to the clock tower to meet him there?

“Citizen Kane” - Orson Welles (1941)

Citizen Kane (1941) was initially a box-office failure, but it went on to be nominated for nine US Film Academy Awards (Oscars) and become one of the most famous movies ever made. Critics and film scholars have been almost uniform in their praise – it regularly topped Sight and Sound’s poll of critics, conducted very ten years from 1962 to 2002, and it topped the American Film Institute’s lists of greatest movies in 1998 and 2007.  And even the making of the film has been the subject of numerous book-length studies [1,2,3,4] and Oscar-nominated documentary films (e.g., The Battle Over Citizen Kane, (1996). 

Controversy over the making of the film has primarily been concerned with (a) efforts on the part of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, on whose life much of the film’s material is based, to limit the film’s distribution and (b) questions about the degree to which the 25-year-old Orson Welles, who produced, directed, and starred in the film, deserved credit for also being the co-author of the script.  I won’t go into those issues, here, but I think it’s fair to say that the film was a technical marvel and had a revolutionary effect on subsequent film expression for many top filmmakers.  But my concern here is not so much on how the filmmakers achieved their superb effects (which were amazing, given the technical constraints of the day under which they operated), but is instead on how the film looks to a modern audience today.

The story of Citizen Kane is a character study over the life and career of a wealthy and ambitious newspaper magnate.  For legal reasons the film purports to be a fictionalized account, but there is no doubt that this portrait is very much based on the life of William Randolph Heart, a famous contemporary figure and, to a lesser extent, on the life of Samuel Insull, another wealthy magnate. So one might expect that this production would take the form of a documentary film with an attempt to give a realistic account of a historical figure (and indeed Citizen Kane starts off under the pretense of a documentary).  But instead of delivering documentary realism, Citizen Kane comes up with one of the all-time great presentations of expressionistic filmmaking.

How Orson Welles accomplished such a feat is still amazing to consider. He said that in preparation for his first film directorial effort (he was already a theatrical stage actor and producer), he privately watched John Ford’s film Stage Coach (1939) some forty times, with  a varying collection of technical professionals on hand to give him advice on how effects were achieved. Irrespective of who deserves credit for what, Welles had an estimable collection of professionals working on the production staff as collaborators, including cinematographer Gregg Toland, film editor Robert Wise, and musical composer Bernard Herrmann – and, of course, scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz.  What this team came up with was a dazzling display of various effects that worked together to achieve the expressionistic presentation of a psychological investigation – who was Charles Foster Kane, and what did he ultimately seek? 

Of course, that is a question that occupies all of us, but Kane had the means and energy to pursue his quest to the ends of the earth.  He followed his own compass and achieved many things, but there was something that always eluded him.  To portray this life-long quest, the dark recesses of the soul are externally portrayed in expressionistic form as the film narrative proceeds. There are several innovative technical elements that stand out as some of the real strong points of ths film.  In fact, to a certain extent, these expressive strengths are so significant that they really represent the core of what we appreciate about Citizen Kane:

• the narrative framing into separate reflective accounts that present the investigation into Kane’s psyche in different strains and according to the varying perspectives of the narrators;
• the smooth, but disconcerting, time transitions that collapse entire decades of historical events into a single scene (these provoke a certain unease at just how variable time is in the course of life);
• the innovative deep-focus photography, which pulls the viewer, who is normally a somewhat objective silent witness, into a labyrinthine involvement in what goes on;
• the bizarre low-angle and high-angle camera compositions that provide an atmospheric presentation of the enclosing (and sometimes emotionally menacing) environment;
• the moody and emphatic music, both onscreen and off, of Bernard Herrmann.

The story of Citizen Kane is told by means of a framing story that encloses five successive accounts of Kane, as seen from varying perspectives.  These accounts more or less cover the key events in Kane’s life between 1871, when he was about eight years old, to 1941, when he dies of a heart attack.  At the begining of the film, Kane has just died and movie magazine journalists are looking for a way to tell the story of Kane’s life.  It is known that Kane’s last spoken words were, “Rosebud”, but noone knows what that means.  A reporter, Jerry Thompson (William Alland), is given the task of interviewing various past acquaintances of Kane to see if he can find out the mystery behind the meaning of “Rosebud”.  This leads to the five successive narratives:

1. The “News on the March” Movie Newsreel  Narrative (13 minutes) is a presumably objective overview of Kane’s entire life as seen by the public.
2. The Walter Thatcher Narrative (28 minutes) is a relatively objective, external account that outlines Kane’s rise as newspaperman and crusader for public causes as seen from the perspective of the wealthy banker, Walter Park Thatcher (George Coulouris). 
3. The Bernstein Narrative (20 minutes) covers the early years (roughly 1888 to 1902) of Kane’s career as seen from the sympathetic perspective of Kane’s loyal assistant, Mr. Bernstein.  This is a more personal perspective and sees Kane as a charismatic personality.
4. The Jed Leland Narrative (24 minutes) covers the next sixteen years are so from the perspective of Kane’s best friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotton).  Leland is moralistic and critical of Kane’s ultimate purposes, which he condemns as narcissistic.
5. The Susan Alexander Narrative (32 minutes) covers Kane’s declining years when he was married to his second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore).

1. The “News on the March” Narrative
This is a newsreel produced by the movie magazine journalists that presents a presumably objective overview of Kane’s entire life as seen by the public. 

We learn some basic facts, such as that Kane was extraordinarily wealthy and owned a chain of newspapers; that he prominently engaged in “yellow journalism” and helped urge on the Spanish-American War; and that he had been a rising political star whose populist demagoguery led his opponents to brand him variously as a fascist and a communist. In response to those charges, Kane said that he wasn’t either of those two, but was simply “an American”.  (Echoing Kane’s statement only a few days ago, Edward Snowden, who has blown the whistle on the US National Security Association’s mass violation of citizen privacy, remarked to a reporter, "I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American." [5] ) 

Kane married the US President’s niece in 1902, but she left him in 1916 on account of his  affair with a lower-class woman, the public revelation of which ruined Kane’s political career.  In 1918 his wife and young son were killed in an auto accident, but by this time Kane was married to the other woman, who aspired to be an opera singer.  After the Stock Market Crash of 1929 dismembered his newspaper empire, Kane retired to his vast and never-finished castle-like estate, “Xanadu”, and gradually became a recluse.

2. The Walter Park Thatcher Narrative
Jerry Thompson now consults the private library of Walter Thatcher, Kane’s original guardian and financial manager. Born to a poor family, Kane had inherited enormous wealth at the age of eight (“the world’s sixth largest private fortune”), and Thatcher, a stuffy banker from New York, was the one who looked after Kane’s holdings while the boy grew up. When Kane reached the age of twenty-five and assumed control over his financial empire, he immediately bought a newspaper, the New York Inquirer, and began his career of yellow journalism. Like the first narrative, this account is also relatively mater-of-fact, and it includes one of those famous time-transition scenes: Thatcher says “Merry Christmas . . . “ to Kane when he is eight years old, and then the shot dissolves into Thatcher, now visibly older, continuing the phrase by saying, “. . . and a Happy New Year!”.  Seventeen years pass by in one continuous dissolve.  Although in this sequence Thatcher shows himself to be horrified at becoming a key target of Kane’s public crusades against financial cronyism, the viewer is given a rather sympathetic portrayal of Kane as an idealistic spokesman for the public good.

3.  The Bernstein Narrative
Still knowing nothing about “rosebud”, the reporter Thompson goes to visit Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), Kane’s longtime friend and chief assistant.  When asked about “rosebud”, Bernstein warns Thompson how brief, seemingly trivial, moments can long linger in a person’s memory. To give an example, he refers to a personal moment of his that happened forty-five years earlier:

”I was crossing over to jersey on the ferry.  As we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in.  And on it there was a girl waiting to get off.   A white dress she had on.  She was carrying a white parasol.  I only saw her for one second.  She didn’t see me at all. But I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

There is another one of those time-capsuling dissolves in this section when a photo showing the staff of Kane’s rival New York newspaper, The Chronicle, dissolves into an essentially identical photo six years later showing that they had all been bought by Kane’s money to go work for the The Inquirer.

This section also features perhaps the best scene in the film: a staff party at The Inquirer celebrating the success of the newspaper. There are brilliantly composed shots here featuring sound and visual combinations across multiple parties and in depth – such as one showing Kane dancing with hired chorus girls in the background while Leland expresses his doubts to Bernstein in the foreground.

Essentially this narrative, which closes with the news that Kane has married the US President’s niece, reflects Bernstein’s loyally supportive view and shows Kane to be charismatic, idealistic, and effective.  He is at his high-water mark.

4.  The Jed Leland Narrative
Continuing his search, Thompson visits a retirement to interview Jedediah Leland, who had long been Kane’s best friend and had worked for Kane newspapers as a drama critic. There is another famous time-capsuled multiple-dissolve scene here, which measures the decline of Kane’s marriage by showing Kane and his wife, Emily (Ruth Warrick), in a series of similar shots at the breakfast table but spread out over sixteen years. This section also recounts his early affair with Susan Alexander, who serenaded Kane with her singing voice, and how this affair led to the end of Kane’s promising political career in 1916. 

Leland blamed Kane for not following his own stated principles, and there is an interesting scene comprising three long (93, 96, and 70 seconds in length), low-angle moving-camera shots showing Leland vocalizing his criticisms and asking to be transferred to the Chicago newspaper.  But this turned out not be a safe enough distance for Leland, and an outspokenly critical column of his criticizing Susan Alexander’s opera performance led to his dismissal and a termination of his relationship with Kane.

5.  The Susan Alexander Narrative

Still searching for something about “rosebud”, Thompson visits Susan Alexander at her nightclub, which she operated after divorcing Kane.  This dreary account shows two people with little in common and the resulting boredom of their life together. Kane stubbornly tried to push Susan’s singing career, but the poor woman had neither the will nor the talent to be successful and only became miserable as a result. 

In the closing scenes, Thompson never finds out anything about “rosebud”, although he has learned quite a bit about Kane’s life.  In the final images, though, the viewer is shown the key to what “rosebud” meant nominally and can speculate what its metaphorical significance was to Kane.

Thus each of the five narratives shows succeeding portions of Kane’s life from progressively narrower and more personal perspectives.  The early narratives provide the public view, while the later narratives offer successively more intimate and critical views of Kane.  Leland criticized Kane as wanting to be loved rather than offering his own love unconditionally.  Susan Alexander felt she was merely an accessory to Kane’s own grandiose ambitions.  So as the focus progressively narrows, Kane is shown to be essentially hollow and selfishly unaware of what the people around him wanted.

On the whole and despite some extraordinarily powerful expressionistic elements to the story, not everything is ideal in Citizen Kane. The Susan Alexander section is too long and drains some of the narrative momentum that had been built up in earlier sections. The character study of Kane is not entirely convincing, either. If we take a step back from the emotionally colored material presented to us, we can perhaps be a bit more sympathetic to Kane. After all, some presumably key events in Kane’s life are merely alluded to, such as his courtship with Emily and the tragic death of Emily and his son.  So we only get a prejudiced selection of events, and other events were of little concern to the narrators talking about Kane, so they are not covered in their accounts. Leland and Susan Alexander, when you reflect on them, are rather selfish, too. They seem to have little empathy for Kane and little interest in making him happy. They merely criticize him for not doing enough to fulfill their own desires, and they offer little in return. And how different were Kane’s dogged attempts to propel Susan Alexander’s career from the currently popular “positive” American attitude of never giving up on one’s goal, as is projected by US star sportsmen such as Michael Jordan? Kane’s never-give-up determination must have been crucially responsible for some successes in his life, too, no?

In fact as a character study, I would consider the depiction of Nader in Farhadi’s A Sepaaration (2011) to be far more subtle and revealing than what is shown in Citizen Kane. Nevertheless, there is something interesting about placing the viewer in the vicarious role of a reporter seeking to extract a kernel of truth from a succession of prejudicial accounts – and this style of truth extraction came well before its cruder portrayal of Rashomon (1950).

But anyway it’s not the character study, by itself, that makes Citizen Kane a great film. What is great about the film is its expressionistic immersion of the viewer into quasi-nightmarish emotional environments as felt by the various people that Thompson talks to. This is the same kind of effect that has powered film noir, and it is no wonder that Citizen Kane had a powerful effect on subsequent film noir productions. After all, films are not really about reality; they more accurately reflect our dreams and nightmares.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Kael, Pauline (ed.), The Citizen Kane Book, Little and Brown, Boston, (1971).
2. Ronald Gottesman, Perspectives on Citizen Kane, G.K. Hall & Co., New York, ISBN 978-0-8161-1616-4, (1996).
3. Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-05367-2, (1996).
4. Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane, British Film Institute, London, ISBN 0-85170-339-9, (1992).
5. Lana Lam, "EXCLUSIVE: Whistle-blower Edward Snowden talks to South China Morning Post", South  China Morning Post, 13 June 2013, (http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1259335/exclusive-whistle-blower-edward-snowden-talks-south-china-morning).

Orson Welles

Films of Orson Welles:

• Citizen Kane - Orson Welles (1941)
• The Stranger - Orson Welles (1946)
• Touch of Evil - Orson Welles (1958)
• The Trial - Orson Welles (1962)