D: Orson Welles. P: W: Orson Welles,
(uncredited) William Castle, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle. Ph: Charles
Lawton Jr, (uncredited) Rudolph Maté, Joseph Walker. M: Heinz Roemheld. St:
Orson Welles (Michael OHara), Rita Hayworth (Elsa Bannister), Everett Sloane (Arthur
Bannister), Glenn Anders (George Grisby), Ted de Corsia (Sidney Broome)
As
Michael O’Hara, the Irish sailor seduced by Rita Hayworth’s siren, Orson Welles
speaks for a legion of film noir protagonists when he acknowledges that he is
no longer the master of his fate. The same is true, of course, of the more
hubristic characters with whom O’Hara becomes ensnared, once their cruel and
murderous schemes are set in motion.
The
hero’s self-deprecating voiceover (he repeatedly refers to himself as a “fool”,
a “boob”, a “fathead”)is no exaggeration. If one can forgive him for falling for
Hayworth’s luscious Elsa, the unhappy wife of the brilliant, crippled attorney
Arthur Bannister, his naivety when he agrees to “murder” Bannister’s paranoid
partner, George Grisby– a ruse to help the latter start afresh elsewhere –
would scarcely be credible were his brains not addled already. (Columbia chief
Harry Cohn was flummoxed by the screwy plot; predictably, the French New Wave
critics adored it.)
As
O’Hara intuits, the central characters are conjoined on a deeper level, gripped
by collective madness – “I must be insane, or else all these people are
lunatics. ”A kind of delirium colours the entire production, spreading out from
Welles’ direction – it was his stated intention to create “something off-centre,
queer, strange”. We can recognise
this in the character of Grisby – shot in wide-angle close-ups that make his
face loom from the screen, whether he’s gazing lasciviously at Elsa or ranting
about nuclear apocalypse – and in the almost surrealistic use of backdrops: the
aquarium, where O’Hara and Elsa have an assignation while eerily amorphous shapes
swim behind them; the off-season amusement park where O’Hara hides from the
police, a triumph of expressionistic set design.
Society
itself seems to be infected, as demonstrated by O’Hara’s farcical murder trial
– Grisby’s plan inevitably has backfired and he really has been killed,
although not by O’Hara, whose signed confession strengthens the case against
him. In any event, it is clear he will get no justice here. The proceedings are
interrupted by sneezing jurors, coughing and fits of laughter from the
audience; Bannister, defending O’Hara in the knowledge he is Elsa’s lover
(“This is one case I’ve enjoyed losing”), cross-examines himself, the tone
becoming increasingly absurd. The denouement is chaotic: O’Hara, on a nod from
Elsa, swallows a handful of Bannister’s painkillers and is rushed out of court,
taking advantage of the ensuing confusion to effect his escape.
Except,
of course, there can be no escape. The undertone of hysteria achieves
hallucinatory intensity once O’Hara, feeling the effects of the drugs, makes
his way through the “crazy house”, tumbling woozily down a gigantic slide
before encountering Elsa and Bannister for the last time in a house of mirrors.
This bravura scene exemplifies one of noir’s primary visual and thematic tropes
– the psychological connotations of mirrors and reflective surfaces, symbolic
of duplicity, fractured minds and, in this case, the shattering of plans, as
Elsa and Bannister shoot each other to death. (Welles’ staging evokes the haunting
image of multiple Kanes in Citizen Kane,
and was inspired perhaps by the famous house-of-mirrors set piece in Charlie
Chaplin’s The Circus – Welles was one
of Chaplin’s greatest admirers. Fear in
the Night [1947] may have been the first noir to utilise a room lined with
mirrors, but director Maxwell Shane was no Orson Welles when it came to
realizing its potential.)
Knowledge of Elsa’s culpability appears to free O’Hara from her embrace, but not even her death releases him completely: “Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her; maybe I’ll die trying."
Kevin Grant
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