“So unpleasant”: the “rather poor picture” that traumatised Orson Welles
The word “genius” is tossed around far too liberally (at least towards men), but one of the most consistent recipients of that description is Orson Welles, and he may actually have deserved it.
He made Citizen Kane when he was barely of legal drinking age. And speaking of drinking, it’s impossible to watch his drunken commercials for Paul Masson Wines from the 1970s without feeling overcome with admiration. Anyone who can be as shameless and brave at 65 as they were at 23 is more than deserving of the genius moniker.
Throughout his career, Welles was constantly crashing out with the studio system, partly because he had quite a few revolutionary cinematic ideas and partly because he was a stubborn bastard who got on people’s nerves with seemingly no effort whatsoever. This meant that he was always strapped for cash when trying to make a passion project, and he dealt with the predicament by becoming one of Hollywood’s greatest sell-outs.
Those wine commercials are a great example, but he also hawked frozen peas, sparkling water, and copy machines – ironically, each and every one of these is a masterpiece, featuring his unparalleled flair for baritone theatricality, and when he wasn’t purring about ancient methods of water retrieval and automatic copy collation, he was either presiding over one of his own projects or stealing scenes in projects that belonged to others.
He appeared as an actor in many excellent films, including the film noir The Third Man, but he also participated in quite a few duds. Most of them were pretty harmless (and he greatly improved the Bond spoof Casino Royale), but there was one film that he found genuinely offensive.
When Peter Bogdanovich informed the Hollywood titan that his 1946 film noir The Stranger was the first commercial release to show real footage of the Nazi’s concentration camps, Welles replied that he was usually against that sort of thing as a matter of principle. He referred to it as “exploiting real misery, agony, or death for purposes of entertainment,” but explained that the footage in The Stranger was an exception. He felt justified in using it because, he argued, people were inclined to avoid the full extent of the Nazi’s atrocities and needed to be confronted with them whenever possible.
Then he relayed an experience on a different film that he felt took the reality of the war too far. In 1966, he appeared in the René Clément drama Is Paris Burning?, which was set around the liberation of the French capital in 1944.
Welles called it a “rather poor picture,” but his grievances weren’t just about the quality of the filmmaking – he was absolutely horrified by the way the director tried to blend truth and fiction by employing concentration camp survivors as extras and shooting in the same station where they had been loaded onto trains to be taken to the camps.
“They kept opening up their sleeves and showing me their tattoo numbers,” he said, adding that many of the people playing Nazi soldiers were actually in the German military, “It was so unpleasant, I really could hardly get through the day,” and if Welles found it nearly unbearable, it’s hard to imagine how it must have felt for the people reliving their relatively recent trauma in such a vivid way.
