Inside Orson Welles’ Hall of Mirrors

It’s hard to write about Orson Welles without resorting to myth. Even the facts are legendary. Orphaned at a young age, by 17 he was a world traveler and the author of an immensely popular series of beginners’ guides to Shakespeare. At age 20, he was in New York, directing an all-Black production of Macbeth that was a runaway success, and made a formative impression on a teenaged James Baldwin. By 23, he was in such high demand as a radio actor that he used ambulances to ferry him between gigs across town. With Welles, the truth often seems stranger than fiction, although the larger-than-life director would probably be the first to suggest the line between them is irrelevant and almost immaterial. After all, good stories take on lives of their own.

In 1938, while directing a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds (1898), the adolescent Welles received a shocking lesson to this effect. Welles opted to introduce the story through a mode of direct address that came to characterize much of his subsequent cinematic work: framing the narrative as a breaking news story. The format was so convincing that police stations across the country were called, with some listeners driven to genuine panic. Before the episode’s hour was up, police had arrived at the CBS offices to try and force the program off the air. The next morning, newspapers ran headlines that inflated the hysteria, indicting Welles for causing mayhem and demanding stricter oversight for the still-new medium of radio. Though the damage was largely confined to clogging up emergency switchboards, Welles soon became notorious nationwide as a trickster.

As he surely learned when his name was decried by those who had never even heard his radio program before, even an idle fiction can metastasize into a new kind of truth. In his subsequent career in cinema, Welles returned to this theme time and again, relentlessly examining how a well-constructed narrative can be mistaken for fact and often emphasizing the unintended consequences of constructing myths so powerful that they engulf their creators. His expressive style coalesced into a lurid, paranoid version of film noir.

As a new exhibition at the Cinematheque Française acknowledges, there is something meta-cinematic about Welles’s relationship to myth, a theme so central to his being that it extends beyond the screen. Often starring as the villain in his own productions, Welles was plagued by botched edits and lost friendships on even his most successful ventures, while allowing his persona as a self-indulgent, gregarious raconteur to swell somewhat beyond his control. He cultivated a self-destructive identity on both sides of the camera, often staking his entire reputation on his next project, which would inevitably return to the same murky land of untruths, from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Kafka’s Trial.

If the most iconic image from Welles’s oeuvre is the “hall of mirrors” from The Lady from Shanghai (1947) – the actor/director refracted endlessly, until reality and reflection become indistinguishable – that same beguiling multiplicity also captures how the legendary figure once characterized himself: “My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear on stage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?”

Citizen Kane (1941)

Thanks to radio and the infamy of War of the Worlds, Welles was already a household name when he produced his first movie Citizen Kane, which was both the most hotly anticipated and heavily scrutinized film of its moment. Long since hailed as one of the greatest movies of all time, it’s essential to remember that Kane was a commercial failure upon release. Even by today’s standards, Kane is far too idiosyncratic to represent its era’s cinema. Welles’s complex tracking shots, elaborate sets and interlocking scene transitions still stagger new audiences.

Structured as a narrative of interlocking flashbacks (again using the introductory device of a news broadcast), the film’s mad search for the meaning behind the last word of media tycoon Charles Foster Kane (played by Welles) descends into an abyss of irrupting perspectives, until all sense of top or bottom, beginning or end, truth or lie, dissolve into mystery – only to snap back into focus in the film’s penultimate shot. While trying to follow Kane’s byzantine plot sometimes feels like hanging on for dear life, repeated views will reward those who absorb Welles’s lifelong lesson: It’s far more fun to revel in artifice than seek truth. I especially love the sheer profusion of disguises the 25-year-old Welles employs to play Kane across at least a dozen different ages. In the film’s opening newsreel, the morally vacuous news magnate appears in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reenactment scenes alongside Teddy Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

The Lady from Shanghai is one of several instances in Welles’s life where he was asked to turn out a conventional version of a bankable plot, and instead made something far stranger and more magnificent. Adapted from a novel that Welles claimed to have only read after he signed on to direct, this louche noir established a character dynamic Welles would repeat throughout his career: a mysterious globetrotting millionaire, a streetwise woman, and a downtrodden naif. But it’s one of the few films Welles made in which he did not play the antagonist, casting himself instead as the unworldly sailor Michael O’Hara. The character falls in love at first sight with femme fatale Elsa Bannister (played by Rita Hayworth, Welles’s wife at the time) and is cursed with the task of unraveling the devil’s bargain of her good fortune.

The Lady From Shanghai relies upon at least six framed murders to weave its tangled web, an absolutely stupefying construction of plot for which the only appropriate conclusion is a shootout inside a maze of mirrors. That priceless cinematic motif has been ripped off by Hollywood more times than I can count, perhaps because it so cunningly gets at the heart of cinema’s confabulation between identity and image. When mirrors shatter, the violence feels just as real as a shot to the heart.

Mr. Arkadin / Confidential Report (1955)

Mr. Arkadin (released in Europe as Confidential Report) may be the most ‘Wellesian’ movie the director ever made, which is largely what makes it so frustrating. No fewer than six different versions of the film have been released, none of which can be considered truly definitive, as the director had the celluloid ripped from his hands by an exasperated producer before his final cut. 

In broad strokes, the plot is the same as The Lady From Shanghai, only this time Welles assumes his rightful place as the mysterious villain, Gregory Arkadin. The elusive billionaire, whose hardscrabble origins threaten to become his undoing, is dogged by cornball American smuggler Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden), who pursues the émigré’s secret almost as hard as he pursues his daughter (Welles’s future third wife, Paola Mori). This vaguely oedipal story is further perverted by the suggestion that nothing might separate a continental connoisseur such as Arkadin from the obnoxiously uncultured Van Stratten besides secrets and luck.

Early drafts of Welles’s screenplay were titled Masquerade, and that word may help unlock this notoriously tricky film. Van Stratten and Arkadin first cross paths at a lavish masquerade ball held in the latter’s gothic castle, amidst a rollicking crowd scene of Goya-inspired papier-mâché masks. Even after the party, Welles plays the role of Arkadin from behind a ridiculously fake wig and beard. Welles was himself in exile from Hollywood at the time, his reputation burnished abroad by projects still considered embarrassing back home. If Arkadin’s eventual downfall is a kind of unmasking, one wonders what to make of Welles’s own compulsion for disguise.

Touch of Evil (1958)

According to Hollywood legend, Welles returned to California after Arkadin and asked Universal Pictures to hand him their worst script, which became Touch of Evil. In reality, Welles still regularly found work as an actor despite being persona non grata behind the camera, and had already signed on to support the picture before his costar, Charleton Heston, suggested he could direct it as well. The resulting film is a magisterial summation of a titanic career, retaining the complex coherency of Citizen Kane while also metabolizing all the darker obsessions of Welles’s later career. It also birthed the single greatest tracking shot of all time, not to mention a scene in an elevator that may as well have kick-started the French New Wave by way of pragmatic inspiration.

A delirious murder mystery set on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Touch of Evil once again finds Welles in the role of the heavy, here playing despicable American police captain Hank Quinlan. For the first time, however, he meets his match in Heston, who takes up the moralizing investigator role (usually the flimsiest part of a Welles film) as Mexican special prosecutor Miguel Vargas, who happened to be passing through the crime scene on his honeymoon. When a car bomb planted on one side of the border explodes on the other, both parties claim jurisdiction, and the case devolves into a slugfest of subterfuge and framing. 

In Touch of Evil, “truth” is merely the most convenient construction of cause and effect, its besmirched nobility embodied in the role of Miguel’s new wife, Susan (Janet Leigh), who spends the entire film sleep-deprived, menaced and drugged, passing back and forth between parties as a pawn in their war for the upper hand. Featuring cameos from Golden Age vamp Marlene Dietrich and Welles’s old friend Joseph Cotten, this late career coup de grace was perhaps the happiest ending Welles could have had in Hollywood – and still the final cut was butchered by the studio in an effort to clarify its plot. As with everything else Welles put his name on, the whole story is almost too confounding to believe.