Film Directors with their Shirts Off: The Enormity Of It All

Well, we’ve already seen him with his trousers down. Now as it must to all men, the time comes to see him with his shirt off. John Houseman gives us a swift verbal picture of what we’re missing ~

“He said he had been working all night and when I arrived he was still in his bath — a monstrous, medieval iron cistern which, when it was covered at night with a board and mattress, served them as a marriage bed. Orson was lying there, inert and covered with water, through which his huge, dead-white body appeared swollen to gigantic proportions. When he got up, full of apologies, with a great splashing and cascading of waters, I discovered that his bulk owed nothing to refraction — that he was, in reality, just as enormous outside as inside the tub which, after he had risen from it and had started to dry himself, was seen to hold no more than a few inches of liquid lapping about huge, pale feet.”

From Unfinished Business.

“He looks like Tiny Tears,” says Fiona. “He’s got a body like Tiny Tears.”

George Orson Welles Tiny Tears.

Coincidentally, we listened to Welles’s radio version of Dracula via YouTube, which goes like a train and is very spooky to boot. Funny how, in eschewing the languorous pace of the Lugosi, it kind of anticipates the bracing abruptness of the Hammer version. It does borrow the curtain call speech from the Universal version. This one is so fast it omits the brides of Dracula and Renfield altogether, but beefs up Mina’s part to make her a proper heroine and give Agnes Moorehead a chance to get her hysteria out again. Welles as Drac sounds like his JOURNEY INTO FEAR heavy played too slow, sonorous and powerful, but as Dr Seward he’s really great, adding a sense of authentic terror to the piece. The neurotic fervor of George Coulouris’s Jonathan Harker redoubles the effect (even with savage pruning, you can’t escape Stoker’s messy multiplying of protagonists!)

Thanks to RWC for the Welles skin.

How to Seduce Joan Fontaine. #2 in a series of 67845

Imaginary train ride!

Quote of the Day: A Walking Contradiction

 

‘Nick Ray, at thirty-five, had worked with me in theatre and radio. Our collaboration in film was about to begin. He was a stimulating and sometimes disturbing companion: garrulous and inarticulate, ingenious and pretentious, his mind was filled with original ideas which he found difficult to formulate or express. Alcohol reduced him to rambling unintelligibility; his speech, which was slow and convoluted at best, became unbearably turgid after more than one drink. Yet, confronted with a theatrical situation or a problem of dramatic or musical expression he was amazingly quick, lucid and intuitive with a sureness of touch, a sensitivity to human values and an infallible taste which I have seldom seem equalled.

‘From his year’s apprenticeship as a scholarship student with Frank Lloyd Wright, Nick had acquired a perfectionism and a sense of commitment to his work which were rare in the theatre and even more rare in the film business. But in his personal life he was the victim of irresistible impulses that left his career and his personal relationships in ruins and finally destroyed him. He was a handsome, complicated man whose sentimentality and apparent softness covered deep layers of resilience and strength. Reared in Wisconsin in a household dominated by women, he was a potential homosexual with a deep, passionate and constant need for female love in his life. This made him attractive to women, for whom the chance to save him from his own self-destructive habits proved an irresistible attraction of which Nick took full advantage and for which he rarely forgave them. He left a trail of damaged lives behind him — not as a seducer, but as a husband, lover and father.’

~ John Houseman in Unfinished Business.

Whew! Considering how little space Ray then occupies in Houseman’s narrative (there’s a great account of the first day’s filming of THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, then almost nothing) this is an excessively detailed and passionate account, also possibly the first published work to suggest Ray’s bisexuality.

(Mis)quoting from memory, there’s also a nice passage in Chuck Heston’s memoirs about Nick R. About to embark on the disastrous 55 DAYS AT PEKING, Charlton asked a friend’s opinion of the director. “Well, he’s very smart. Talented, imaginative. But… I’ve played poker with him, Chuck. And Chuck… he’s a loser.“