Orson Welles: Hello Americans Read Online Free PDF Page A

longhaired, unshaven, pointinga gun at her. She tells him that she’s come to kill him. Soon they’re joined by Wilson, who confronts him with his past. ‘I followed orders, I did my duty,’ he says, wild-eyed, as Mary shoots him in the shoulder. Finally he staggers out onto the parapet; the mechanism of the clock springs to life as he scampers round to safety; suddenly turning, he is impaled on the sword of the Teutonic knight whois circling Satan round the clock, and he and the knight fall 124 feet to the ground. The breathtaking brilliance of the staging of this piece of Grand Guignol is bizarrely undercut by Wilson’s jaunty last line to Mary as she descends the stairs leading from the tower: ‘Sweet dreams!’ he chortles. Kaper’s music – strings, horns, piano arpeggios – swells headily: THE END , says the final caption.Indeed.
    Kaper’s music is blatantly incongruous, purveying a curiously inappropriate swirling romanticism in flat contradiction to the theme and tone of the film. The question of tone is one that hovers over a great many of Welles’s films, always excepting Citizen Kane and largely excepting The Magnificent Ambersons . It is not coincidental that those two films were scored by Bernard Herrmann,whose music (as well as having uniquely atmospheric properties) was always solidly based in formal structure, integrating the elements and lending the film a powerful sense of unity. It is easy to mock Kaper’s workman-like score; the problem is that its excitable lyricism spreads a layer of monosodium glutamate over the whole film, and Welles’s genius for detail, for tension, for atmosphere, is diffused and diluted. The use of sound, so potent in both Kane and Ambersons – where Herrmann so well understood when to shut up, recognising the power of silence punctuated, perhaps, by a clock or a sleigh-bell or the whirr of an engine – is negligible here. A question almost impossible to answer at this distance, and in the absence of letters or memoranda, is whether Welles willingly acceded to the cornymusic and the absence of a sound score, or whether he was overruled. Whichever it was, it shows a tragic indifference to his great strengths as a film-maker. Not that either score, musical or sonic, represents the greatest problem with The Stranger as it stands, but they do administer the coup de grâce . The truth, once again, is that the film Welles actually shot was infinitely more interestingand ambitious than the one posing under the same name and now widely available in a spanking new print. Whether it would have been, in the last analysis, a better film we can never know, but it is almost a relief to know that Welles’s originality and imagination had not deserted him completely, which is the inevitable conclusion after a viewing of The Stranger as it was released. Thanks to thediligent labours of that tireless Welles sleuth, Bret Wood, it is now possible to discern the film that might have been; what he has uncovered reveals a framework that not only enhances the narrative, but suggests the mind of an artist at work.
    The finished film as edited by Welles lasted 115 minutes; the presently available version is a full twenty minutes shorter. The single greatest cut, imposedby Spiegel and Goetz before shooting began, removed what would have been two complete reels depicting Meineke’s tortuous quest for Kindler in Latin America. But much more damaging are cuts removing the entire framework of the film. In the director’s cut, the film opens with the sound of a bell tolling, under the image of a demon silhouetted against a white screen. The camera pulls back andwe see that it is in fact nothing but the shadow of a tree in Mary Longstreet’s bedroom. She is asleep on the bed; a man’s voice tells her to get up and walk through fields, through the cemetery. She obeys, while the voice recites the names of members of her family who have died for their country. She goes trance-like to the bell