Excerpts from Rosenbaum lecture

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Othello (1952) may have something to do with the Hollywood blacklist
and witch hunts,
we know from his interview with Peter Bogdanovich that Arkadin was
partially based on Stalin, but Welles doesn’t say a word in the same
interview about Van Stratten being based on Nixon, accidentically or
otherwise.
The Cognet documentary also very usefully gives us a rough chronology
of when all of these seven episodes were shot; it was basically in
July 1955, just after the period when Welles was performing Moby Dick
— Rehearsed in London, and at precisely the same time he was filming
tests for Don Quixote with Mischa Auer in Spain.
The missing episode, The Third Man in Vienna, is the only episode in
the series that dealt with eastern as opposed to western Europe,
The series has not aroused the interest of Welles scholars.
One can still bankroll plenty of Welles-related projects nowadays more
readily than one can bankroll the completion or release of many works
by Welles.
an important part of this discrepancy comes from the strong
puritanical streak in American culture that continues to associate
Welles rather fearfully with various kinds of pleasure and freedom -—
a puritanical streak that also leads to many American misperceptions
about Europe,
much of Welles’s 50s TV work in Europe is implicitly or even
explicitly critical of America,
“London Pensioners,” by celebrating the way some old people are cared
for in England, is implicitly offering a reproach to the way that
comparable old people are not taken care of in the United States,
where state support of this kind is generally frowned upon.
idealism about pre-industrial modes of life is a theme that recurs
again and again throughout this TV series. It can even be traced back
to a tiny village in Illinois where Welles spent an especially happy
part of his childhood with his father, called Grand Detour, in a
country hotel where his father often entertained friends from show
business.
Significantly, Grand Detour is the only part of Welles’ own past that
he was willing to associate with “Rosebud,”
Grand Detour was one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you
get thrown out of. It really was kind of invented by my father. He’s
the one who kept out the cars and the electric lights. It was one of
the ‘Merrie Englands’….
During my one meeting with Welles, when we were talking about American
novelists, he mentioned in passing that he used to hang out with West
while he was working for Republic Pictures.) After a little bit of
research on the Internet I discovered that Charles Wertenbaker was
born in 1901, died in 1955, and was a European-based correspondent for
Time magazine. I also discovered that a book by his widow about him,
Death of a Man, remains one of her best-known works today. I ordered
this book on the Internet, and now that I’ve read it, I can vouch for
the fact that Welles is mentioned twice in the book. The first time,
she quotes a letter of his to her that immediately makes it clear how
intimate a friend he was to both her and her husband.
Wertenbaker writes the following: “One early December day when Wert
was especially well, we considered asking Orson Welles down for the
afternoon, to recite Shakespeare and to talk Bible, bulls, and
Botticelli with Wert in the little living room, as he had done several
times in the summer after they had met in Pamplona”
Welles may have shot two versions of this episode because he was
hoping to sell the series to America for syndication and may have
thought that this conversation with Lael Tucker might have seemed too
intellectual and/or too critical of America.
Towards the end of this segment, there’s a shot of Basque peasants
crossing the mountainous countryside in single file and walking past
some crosses that provides an uncanny echo of the funeral of Jacare in
the Fortaleza sequence of It’s All True. One reason why I’m bringing
this up is that the preindustrial, utopian dream of a simple way of
life that I’ve been speaking about, rooted in Welles’ memories of
Grand Detour, finds many manifestations in his work.
(A very inventive recycler, Welles also used part of the theme music
for Arkadin in “St-Germain-Des-Pres,”
The Dominici Affair anticipates the work of Truman Capote when he
wrote In Cold Blood
the relation of America to The Trial. I’m thinking especially about
the casting of Anthony Perkins as Joseph K., as well as the hoped-for
casting of Jackie Gleason in the role of the Advocate — a part
ultimately played by another American, namely Welles himself.
Especially because no attempt is made to make Perkins speak with any
sort of European accent, despite the fact that the film is haunted by
evocations of the Holocaust and numerous dingy locations suggesting
not only Europe but Old Europe, a persistent sense of collapsed
empires.
a clear effort was made to make Heston resemble a Mexican whereas
virtually no effort at all was made to make Perkins resemble a
European
One possible contributing factor to this casting is Joseph K’s
prudishness, combined with the Puritanism associated with Perkins in
his most famous role, Norman Bates in Psycho. Perhaps if Welles felt
that Alfred Hitchcock had ripped off Touch of Evil a little in
Psycho_- a reasonable enough assumption, especially since some of the
same people at Universal worked on both pictures —- maybe Welles
decided it was only fair if he took a little of Norman Bates for his
version of Joseph K.

an important facet of Welles’ career that is often overlooked: as an
artist who started out as a mainstream figure, especially on the
radio, he was never quite able to see himself in other terms, which
sometimes handicapped him both in relation to the mainstream and in
relation to the arthouse circuits, specifically because he never quite
fit in either camp. Many American critics wound up criticizing Welles
harshly for the casting of Perkins precisely because he was
overstepping the borders of genre, one might say, as well as the
solemnity with which he was expected to approach Kafka-—forgetting, of
course, that Kafka himself saw his novels as comic, and was
disappointed when he read them aloud to his friends and they didn’t
laugh. On the other hand, the comedy in Welles’ version of The Trial
is of a particularly American kind, especially when it gravitates
towards lunatic farce; Joseph K.’s almost adolescent sexual hysteria,
quite different from that of Kafka’s Joseph K., may even be closer to
the sexual hysteria of Jerry Lewis, and in some respects the relative
prudishness of Welles starts to become unleashed in this film by this
hysteria —- a kind of unleashing that continues over some of his later
works, ranging from The Immortal Story to The Other Side of the Wind.
Even though this winds up contradicting the vision of Old Europe that
permeates this film, it clears the way for an alternate version of a
Joseph K. who fights back at his tormenters rather than succumb to
defeat. Welles argued that in a post-Holocaust context, no other
solution was possible in his view, and I agree with him; but arguably
this view would never have been arrived at, at least in the same way,
by an European.

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King Lear 800 BC Ancient Britain, before the Romans
Oedipus the King 500 BC Greece
Julius Ceasar 35 BC Rome
King of Kings 30 AD
Justinian and Theodora 535AD Byzantium (The Last Roman)
Macbeth 1000 AD Scotland Middle Ages
Henry IV (Pirendello) 1050 Germany
The Tartars 1200 Russia
The Black Rose 1215 England
Henry IV 1400 England (Chimes at Midnight)
Prince of Foxes 1480 Italy
Man For All Seasons 1535 England
Merchant of Venice 1540 Venice
Othello 1550 Venice
Don Quixote 1550 Spain
Shoemaker’s Holiday 1560 England
Treasure Island 1750 England
Lafayette 1785 France
Royal Affairs of Versailles 1790 France
Cagliostro 1790 France
Danton’s Death 1795 France
Czar Paul 1800 Russia
Santo Spirito 1805 Atlantic Ocean
Voodoo Macbeth 1805 Haiti
Moby Dick 1830s New England
Trilby 1860 Paris
Abraham Lincoln 1860 America
Marching Song 1860 America
Vanity Fair 1830 England
Tom Sawyer 1834 American Midwest
Huckleberry Finn 1840 American Midwest
Sherlock Holmes 1880s London
The Immortal Story 1890s China
Heart of Darkness 1890 Africa
Life with Father 1890 New York
War of the Worlds 1890 London
Dracula 1890 London
Magnificent Ambersons 1900 American Midwest
The Trial 1910 Czechoslovakia