Orson Welles: Hello Americans Read Online Free PDF Page B

as these are of flawless metal, well ground and polished, so must the individual be of good blood,trained and fit physically.’ It is a perfect example of Popular Front writing, and could almost have come out of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male ; Welles must have done it superbly and it might have had the same impact in the film as Harry Lime’s amoral little aria in The Third Man . When Rankin finishes speaking, a spring breaks in the clock. Then the screenplay continues as in the released versionuntil after the screening of the death-camp films to Mary.
    In the subsequent sequence, another cut, Rankin gives Mary a sleeping draught; she ‘brings her hands together in the immemorial gesture of blood guilt. Now her subconscious is in control and thus she acknowledges her complicity in the crimes of [Kindler].’ When she sends Noah to the bell tower in her stead, she realises he’s going tohis death and faints. Then comes the second most damaging cut, another more impressionistic dream sequence in which Noah climbs to the belfry: a rung breaks and he falls; rung after rung breaks; at last one stays intact. ‘Beneath it the two shafts of the ladder stretch down into space like a pair of cosmic stilts.’ Red, the dog (poisoned by Rankin), is at ‘the base of this lunatic machine’, howlingand barking. His barks merge with the music. Then Rankin is on the ladder. The camera dollies in on his eye until it fills the screen. Rankin says, ‘Failing to speak, you become part of the crime … with these hands. The same hands that have held you close to me.’ The pupil of his eye fills the screen, then turns into the face of the clock. After this the film would have proceeded as released untilthe final dialogue, which was to have been between Wilson and old Potter of the soda fountain (Billy House), who says he’s had enough trouble, but ‘they say accidents come in threes’. ‘In threes?’ asks Wilson. ‘What about World Wars? Mr Potter, I devoutly hope and pray you’re wrong. Good night, Mary. Pleasant dreams.’
    The dream sequences – which so strikingly anticipate the Hitchcock of Spellbound – are obviously tricky to bring off and may or may not have worked, though on the page they certainly add much-needed depth to the character of Mary Rankin. They also suggest an allegoric quality to the whole film. The film in the shooting script is a perfectly accurate reflection of two of Welles’s most pressing political concerns: the survival of fascism and the threat of a Third World War.The film Welles wanted to make was in the nature of a warning: the evil that Hitler represented had by no means been expunged. The introduction of the element of the subconscious, and the revelation through it of Mary’s guilt at her innocent collaboration with Rankin, exemplifies another preoccupation of Welles’s: the complicity of the silent majority; it is another of his wake-up calls to America.All these are potent themes. The question is whether the essentially melodramatic plot device could ever have made them serious points. (It is almost the mirror image of the plot of Tomorrow Is Forever , Welles’s most recent appearance as a film actor, where a war hero returns to his unsuspecting wife in disguise, instead of, as in The Stranger , a war criminal disguising himself in order to insinuatehimself into the heart of an innocent woman.) It is of course true that from the time the film was shot up to the present day, covert Nazis have been unmasked, and Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal have pursued them to the ends of the earth. Many of them have changed their names, married and had children. To be credible, however, the approach to such material would have to be rigorouslyrealistic, an approach that was never to be that of Welles. It underlines the difficulty Welles had in dramatising his ideas – his natural inclination was to melo-dramatise them, except (one can only monotonously repeat) in Citizen Kane , where of