Take One (Jul-Aug 1971)

It’s a brilliant idea. Just great. They never gave him any trouble again after that. They thought, “my God, he did three day’s work in one shot!” The little touches that he adds from scene to scene. Were they all in the script? The things like Akim Tamiroff’s hairpiece which was a running gag throughout the whole film. That was not in the script, no. And of course, | wasn’t in those scenes, So | don’t know how they were created, but | know they weren’t — it wasn’t in the script. The scenes are put together in a very loose atmosphere that makes for that kind of creativity. Was there any.ad libbing in terms of dialogue? ’ Orson has a marvelous ear for the way people talk. One of the many things | learned from him was the degree to which people in real life overlap one another when they’re talking. In the middle of somebody's sentence you will, in fact; apprehend what he’s talking about and you will often Start to reply through his closing phrase. People do that all the time. Orson directs scenes that way — to a larger degree than most directors do. There’s a marvelously counterpointed scene in Lady from Shanghai in which the people sit in the dark — obviously he doesn’t ‘want a visual image to intrude — and you hear two conversations interwoven. He likes that, and | do too. | think it’s very valuable, and I've tried to use it in scenes myself since. He not only changes dialogue, as... dialogue is changed all the time on film. It's some of the most creative work in putting a scene together. All of Hawks. Pardon? All of Hawks had to be written on a daily basis. It goes on all the time. Sure. Orson is, as | said, a very instinctive, intuitive creator, and he would restage whole scenes. | mean put them in different places. We were shooting in this crummy hotel in Venice, and at three o'clock in the morning — in the middle of night shooting — we were down in the basement of this old hotel, peeing in a drain in the corner of this old basement, and he said, “Gee, these pipes and this boiler. That’s marvelous. You know this — we should do the scene with Joe Calleia here — where he shows you the cane.” He zipped up his fly and said to the first assistant, ‘Get Joe Calleia down here.” They said, ‘“Jesus, Orson, we were gonna do that scene on Friday, they've got it set up at the studio.” He said, ‘‘That’s terrible. That’s no place. We’re going to do it down here. We'll do it right now.” And they said, ‘“‘Well, we’ve got to finish this scene.”’ He said, ‘| can finish this scene in one shot. It'll take you an hour to get Calleia out of bed. Get him down here and |’ll have this scene finished by then.” And he did. That’s beautiful. And it is better there. Cause that is the turning point of the film. It's a great scene. And part of the reason it’s good is he... Here’s Joe Calleia getting up out of bed in the middle of the night, and staggering down to Venice. They take him down in this stinking basement and they give him the cane, and they say ‘Joe, now do it.”” And he says, ‘“‘What-whatwhat???” “The scene.” “Where?” You know, and it's marvelous. ‘Orson Welles’s Use ‘Sound _by Phyllis Goldfarb 10 Sound and space are immutably related, whether they complement one another or, as is often the case in the movies of Orson Welles, they conflict. Welles’s early films, especially Citizen Kane, were remarkable for the way in which sound was used to elongate space. The screen was forced to give up part of the flatness of its nature. In later films, sound is put to a variety of uses, not the least of which is a negation of reality. What we hear no longer works in conjunction with what we see. Eisenstein might have called it harmonized counterpoint. The sound is temporally synchronized with its source, but at the same time mismatched — not in terms of direction (since, in most theaters, there is a single loudspeaker), but of distance and surroundings. As a result, there is a tension created between the space and the sound, between our aural and visual perceptions. If this tension remains unresolved, a partial fragmenting of our senses takes place. Sound becomes disembodied and takes on a force and presence of its own. Every time a movie is projected on a screen in front of us, we relinquish part of the power we have over our psyches. The narrative film invites us to participate in a fantasy, and to a certain extent we always do. The creative artist is able to take advantage of the vulnerable position in which the moving picture medium places its audience, in order to present a previously unavailable experience. Orson Welles is such an artist. He gains control over our ability to organize the barrage of stimuli that is constantly assaulting us. A careful study of Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil reveals a progression toward manipulation of the viewer’s powers of concentration, his visual and aural perception, and disorientation of his spacial and temporal organization. lf there is a progression toward fragmentation and disorientation in these four films of Welles, it is not to be found within the narratives; in these four movies the narratives move away from fragmentation, toward consolidation in terms of time, place and structure. Kane moves forward and backward through time and space; it covers perhaps three generations. While The Magnificent Ambersons is composed of a number of moments just before and during