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Welles before KaneAuthor(s): Joseph McBrideSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1970), pp. 19-22Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1210377.

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WELLESBEFOREKANE

JOSEPH MCBRIDE

Welles Before KaneOrson Welles has never mentioned to interview-ers that he did any experimentation in film priorto his coming to Hollywood-undoubtedlypreferring the world to think that he burst full-blown on the scene with Citizen Kane. To aninterviewer who asked him recently how hearrived at Kane's cinematic innovations, hereplied airily, I owe it to my ignorance. If thisword seems inadequate to you, replace it withinnocence. But Welles was far from being afilmic innocent. There have been a few furtivementions, largely unheeded by film historians,of a film he shot in 1938 for use in a MercuryTheatre stage production, William Gillette'sfarce Too Much Johnson, which ran for twoweeks at the Stony Creek Summer Theatre inNew York before Welles decided not to bringit to Broadway. He reportedly shot a twenty-minute silent prologue to the play, and ten-minute films to introduce the second and thirdacts. Included in the cast were Joseph Cotten,

Edgar Barrier, Marc Blitzsteinr and VirginiaNicholson, Welles's first wife. I have not beenable to see a print of Too Much Johnson. Welleshas one, but he says that it is not worth seeingwithout the play. He also shot a film as prologueto his 1939 vaudeville show, The Green God-dess, depicting an air crash in the Himalayas,according to his associate Richard Wilson. Thisalso has so far proved impossible to locate.But I have been able to unearth an extremelyinteresting little silent film called The Hearts ofAge, preserved in a private collection, whichapparently was Welles's first venture into film.It runs about four minutes and stars Wellesand Virginia Nicholson. The copy I saw, untilrecently probably the only one extant, was theoriginal 16mm print. It was donated, as part ofthe Vance collection, to the Greenwich (Conn.)Public Library. The sound of the splices clickingthrough the projector was nerve-wracking--though the film is in remarkably good condition

19then directly down to the nucleus of a carbom atom. With animage, a narration and a dashboard, it gives a clue to the relativesize of things and what it means to add another zero to anynumber.

Photography and the City. 1969. 15 minutes. Color. A film aboutthe influence photography has had in the shaping of cities andthe solving of urban problems. The first part is a historic reviewof some of the photographs that for the most part, by intent,have had an influence on the city. The last part is essentially acatalogue of those images from which a wide variety of in-formation about the city can be derived.Tops. 1969. 7 minutes, 15 seconds. Color. A visual study of tops.

Films in ProgressThe UN Information Center. Another fiction of reality, pro.

posing a communications hub for the United Nations. In thisfilm we really go beyond ourselves, Eames said; what wereally end up doing is making a case for the UN.

Man's View of Himself. A study of man's changing notion ofwhat makes him unique, and a realization that only when manstops worrying about what makes him unique can he solve theproblems his uniqueness poses. Commissioned by IBM.Memory. Commissioned by IBM.The Perry Expedition. Commodore Perry's 1853 Opening ofAsia, as seen through Japanese documents of the times. Com-missioned by the Smithsonian Institute.

Two films for the National Aquarium. One on shellfish, andanother on the introduction of exotic species into an environment.The latter will consist of 25 rapid, consecutive examples.

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20 WELLESBEFOREKANE---but my apprehensionaboutprojecting t wasmore than assuagedby the excitement of dis-covery. It was like findinga youthfulplay byShakespeare.Access to the film has now beengiven to the American Film Institute, and aduplicatenegativefor preservations lodged inthe Libraryof Congress,which has alsomadeastudy copy that can be viewed by scholarsonLibrarypremises. (A study copy can likewisebe seen at the GreenwichLibrary.)It will prob-ably also be included in the AFI Welles retro-spective in Washingtonthisspring.The credit cards list only the title and theactors, but they are in Welles's handwriting.Another person who has seen The Hearts ofAge called Welles when he was in Hollywoodrecently and asked him about it. At first hedidn't remember t, but when assuredthat heappears n the film,he recalledthat, yes, it hadbeenmadein the summerof 1934, when he wasnineteen, at the dramafestivalhe sponsoredatthe Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois, fromwhich he had been graduatedthree years be-fore. He denied that he directed or edited it,claimingthat it was just a homemovie. TheVance collection records, however, state thatWelles co-directed he filmwith WilliamVance(who produced it and makes a brief appear-ance), and there is much internalevidence tosupportthis.The late Mr. Vance was a college studentwhen he met Welles; he later went on to pro-duce and direct television commercials.I sawa ten-minuteadaptationof Dr. Jekylland Mr.Hyde, made in 1932, which he stars in anddirected. It is nothing more than a crude andrather risible student movie. The Hearts ofAge is somethingmore, however.Though it isafflictedwith facile symbolismand flippantob-scurity, there are many directorialand photo-graphic flourishes which point unmistakablyto Welles's later work. A few of the shots areeerily prophetic of Kane, and the film showseven morethanKanetheextent to whichWelleswas influencedby Germantheatricaland cine-maticexpressionism, articularlyby F.W. Mur-nau'sNosferatu.And if someof the cameraworkis perfunctory (especially when Welles is not

on thescreen), manyof the shotsarebeautifullylit and composed, and the general lack of co-herence s almostoffsetby thehumorof Welles'sperformance.At first he filmseemshopelesslyobscure,oneof those bastard children of 1920's Frenchavant-gardism hat still afflict us today, but apatterngraduallyemerges.It becomesclearthatthe filmis an allegoryof death.The firstshot isof a spinningChristmasreeball, laterrepeatedand echoed again when a white-robedfigurewalks past strokinga globe; Kane of course.Afterthe openingshot,we see a quickmontage(much too quick for comfort, with that pro-jectorchurningaway) of bells ringing,someofthe shotsin negative.Thenwe see anold lady-

Virginia Nicholson in grotesque make-up-rockingback and forth. The camera,smoothlyhand-heldin contrastto the jerkycameraworkin Dr. Jekyll,pulls slowlybackto show thatsheis suggestively straddlinga ringing bell. Thenext shots reveal a man in black-face,wiggedand dressed in lacy little boy's costume incon-gruouslycompletedby footballknickers,pullingthe bell rope, with the old lady on the roofabovehim.Afterthe secondshotof the spinningball, we see a tilted shot of a gravestone withthree elongatedshadowsmovingslowly on thegroundbehindit, andthena gravemarker iltedin the opposite directionwith a hand graspingaround it.A shadow hand rings a shadow bell, hazylatticeworklighting all around it; we are re-minded that Welles, by the age of nineteen,had alreadydirectedand lit more than a scoreof plays, both with the Todd School'sstudentcompany and in Dublin, where he had beenan actorwith the Gate and Abbey Playersanda directorat the Gate Studio.There is nothingin Dr. Jekyllto comparewith the supplenessofthis film'slighting. The hand bell falls harshlyto the ground in the next shot, no longer ashadow now, and we return to the old ladyridingthe bell with an obscenelypainedexpres-sion as the black-faced man tugs spiritedlyaway. She opens an umbrellaover her head(Welles was also fond of Keaton,who liked tofool aroundwith umbrellaswhen it wasn'train-


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WELLESBEFOREKANE 21ing). We see a hand spinning a globe in close-up, and then a striking shot, worthy of Murnau:a gray tombstone, dizzily tilted, with a shadowhand creeping up it (a white shadow, becausethe shot is in negative) and beckoning with along finger, while a corporeal hand crawls alongthe edge of the stone. We see a piano keyboard-a flash-forward, as it turns out-and thenOrson Welles opening a door over a ricketyflight of stairs.

It is always a strange experience to stumbleback upon the first screen appearance of one ofthe monstres sacris. The shock of that first en-trance is not only the shock of recognition, it islike a glimpse of a platonic form. We are watch-ing a privileged drama; every step, every ges-ture is hazardous and exciting, because whatis at stake is the formation of a legend. Some-times we are startled, as when we see Chaplinwithout tramp's costume as a suave, top-hattedvillain. Does he know what we know? Or arewe witness to the very moments in which thegreat secret makes itself known? Enchanting tosee Katharine Hepburn sweep down a staircasein A Bill of Dicorcement, Cukor's camera whip-ping across an entire room to intercept herflight; but how would we react if we could seeGarbo in the advertising film she made for adepartment store, demonstrating how not todress? With a bravura that will come to beknown as his, Welles the director delays Wellesthe actor from appearing until we are sufficient-ly expectant of a grand entrance, an apparitionthat will transfix our attention and conjure upour unquestioning awe.Whatever doubts we might have as toWelles's self-awareness are immediately dis-pelled by his appearance, mincing and leering,in a sort of comic Irishman costume, his facegrotesquely aged like the lady's, his hairlinemasked and a wispy clown wig protruding fromhis temples. He starts down the stairs, bowingto the old lady. He carries a top-hat and a cane-later to be the talisman of other Wellesiancharacters, from Bannister in The Lady fromShanghai to Mr. Clay in The Immortal Story.He descends the stairs, seen from a variety of

angles, intercut with the old lady watchingwarily. Then Welles shows the character walk-ing down the steps three times in succession,a common enough avant-garde affectation butappropriate here to underscore the fateful na-ture of the character's arrival. Presently we aretreated to quick appearances of Miss Nicholsonas a Keystone Kop and Mr. Vance as an Indianwrapped in a blanket (making a face into thecamera as he passes), neither of which hasmuch connection with the already rather tenu-ous story.It seems that Welles's character is a figure ofdeath, for he disturbs the indefatigably rockingold lady by appearing all over the rooftop ofan adjoining building-and making a chokinggesture with his cane for the man in black-face,a gesture echoed twenty-five years later byQuinlan in Touch of Evil. One of those quaintinserts dear to Griffith and Stroheim interruptsthe action: a hand pouring coins from a shell,and a broom sweeping the money away. (Laterwe will see a hand dropping a crumpled five-dollar bill to the floor, but nothing else willcome of it.) Death appears at the window, leer-ing coyly and dangling two heart-shaped lolli-pops, tortuously wrapped around each other.These especially infuriate the old lady, whoaccelerates her rocking. From the smilingDeath, Welles cuts to a skull, to a yanking rope,to a pair of feet hanging in mid-air, and to thehead of the black-faced bellringer, dangling ina noose. Then we see a drawing of the hangedbellringer, and soon a hand enters the frameand draws a little bell as signature in thecorner.There is a startling transition to Death walk-ing into a darkened room (the underworld?)carrying a candelabrum. He places it on a pianoand starts to play, the camera tilted wildly tothe right as he pounds furiously away: verymuch The Phantom of the Opera. We see hisfingers coming closer and closer to the camera.Abruptly the pianist hits a wrong note andstops. He plunks at the keys, bending his headowlishly to test the sound (a good job of mimingby Welles). He gets up and discovers that theold lady is lying dead inside the piano. Death


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22opens the piano bench and takes out, instead ofsheet music, a pile of thin slabs, shaped liketombstones. He shuffles through them: Sleep-ing, At Rest, In Peace, With the Lord,and The End, leaving the last behind. Hesits down again to play, undulating deliriously.We see the bell again, and then his hands play-ing the piano. Then the slab, The End.It would be pompous to claim that we canlook at The Hearts of Age and see that its makermust have become a great director, just as itwould be extrapolate Chaplin's greatness out ofMaking a Living. But we can see, through theyoung man's melange of styles, the conglomera-tion of postures both congenial and unassimilat-ed, a vigorous, unguarded, personal approach

to even the most second-hand of ideas and mo-tifs. It would be foolish to try to justify TheHearts of Age as a self-sufficient work. It isjuvenilia, and Welles might be rather embar-rassed by it today. But Citizen Kane, we shouldremember, is also the product of youthful eclec-ticism. That is part of its charm; its strength,like that of the first nouvelle vague films, comesfrom the integration of these divergent stylesinto a coherent framework, each part approp-riate to the drama. We can see in The Heartsof Age that Welles, like all young artists, hadto work a penchant for gratuitous allusion andself-indulgence out of his system before beingable to create a unified work.

DISSOLVESBY GASLIGHT

JOHN L. FELLDissolves by Gaslight

ANTECEDENTSO THEMOTION PICTURE N NINETEENTH-CENTURYELODRAMA

Drama is the necessaryproduct of the age inwhich it lives, and of which it is the moral,social,and physicalexpression.The contempor-aneousdramapossessesan archaeological alue.It is the onlyfaithfulrecordof its age. In it thefeatures, expressions, manners, thoughts andpassionsof its periodare reflectedand retained.-DION BOUCICAULT,877INTRODUCTIONBy 1911, the narrative structure of film hadmore or less established itself. The devices ofany television thriller today are little differentin essence from those of the one and two-reelersthat came from the old Biograph studio just offNew York'sUnion Square.

For story, early films largely cannibalizedthe substance of the last century's theatricalmelodrama. The process seems almost pat evi-dence for Marshall McLuhan's proposition thata new medium devours as content the mediumit seeks to replace.However, the similarities of expository formbetween movies and melodrama are strikingtoo. Clearly both often responded to the sameshaping forces. Melodrama often colored anddefined-and sometimes anticipated with itsown tools-the later film techniques. Then, ex-cept as it survived in the movies, melodramadied. As a profitable venture it disappeared byWorld War I. New styles of acting and writinghad evolved. Theater had captured a more so-


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