Orson Welles: Hello Americans Read Online Free PDF

tower, climbs up into the belfry, looks down and sees an angry mob below.The mob looks up and sees two people fighting on a ledge of the belfry; they finally fall and die. Then, and only then, do we get the titles, followed, as in the present cut, by the scene in which Wilson tells his colleagues to ‘leave the cell door open’, and the scene of Meineke at customs entering an unspecified Latin American country. Then the two-reel cut followed: in these scenes Meinekewas shown going to a kennels, where he is given a truth serum under whose influence he says he believes that God delivered him from prison. He has, he tells them, a message from the All-Highest. They send him on his way, watched by a young woman working for Wilson. Meineke goes to the morgue, where he gets a new passport and a new identity; shortly afterwards Wilson’s young female agent is broughtin, dead, savaged by dogs. Meineke next visits a photographer, as in the released version, but a sequence is cut that explains Kindler’s new name – F( Ran )z ( kin )dler. (Representative John Rankin, incidentally, was chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee – a sly touch, though whether it was Welles’s or that of one of the other screenwriters is hard to know.)
    Whether the two cutreels, and even the cut explanation of Rankin’s name, are a tremendous loss is hard to judge – everything depends on how they were done (and, as already noted, the scenes on board ship and at customs are among the most visually tony sections of the film). But from a narrative point of view, the opening dream sequence not only makes sense of a number of baffling elements in the released version – Mary’sfinal-reel sleepwalk to the bell tower; Wilson’s constant reference to her unconscious (‘we have only one ally: her subconscious’); his otherwise incongruous final line – but also seems to turn the whole film into her nightmare. What could be more appalling for a pretty, nicely brought-up young woman in Harper, Connecticut than to find out that her fiancé is not at all who he seems to be, butthe monster of the death-camps, whose existence had only recently been revealed to the general public, and the horror of which may well have entered into the subconscious of many a suggestible individual. This is a curious and far-fetched premise, but it has a certain poetry about it, and it takes Welles into a territory where he was very comfortable as an artist: the dream- or nightmare-world inwhich Expressionism resides. It also makes perfect sense of his own performance of Rankin as a baffled ogre, the stuff both of fairy tales and of nightmares.
    There are further cuts that explain some of the narrative hiccups. Another seriously damaging one is the scene in which Mary and Rankin meet each other for the first time under the bell tower. Rankin says, ‘You know my first impression ofyour town was the incongruity of a Gothic clock in a Connecticut church tower,’ dealing with that question, and also establishing him as a connoisseur of clocks, which is the only lead Wilson has on him. Rankin then speaks the lines first heard in voice-over at the beginning of the film, telling her to get up. Mary is frightened of heights, but he persuades her to cross a bridge; the screenplaythen intercuts Meineke on board ship for America with Mary announcing her engagement to Rankin. After this the screenplay continues substantially as in the released version, until after the scene between Noah and Wilson. The next scene between Mary and Rankin is another significant cut and a real loss: in it Rankin describes the ideal social system in terms of chronometry. ‘The force that runs theclock, the spring or the weight, or whatever it is, is the head of the State. The pendulum is his government which transforms his inspirations into law. The train of gears are the working masses … formed into economic units which engage each other without friction … the teeth are individuals, just