08

ORSON WELLES’ TRADEMARK: OVERLAPPING FILM DIALOGUE

FRANÇOIS THOMAS

Translation by Leah Anderst

Overlapping dialogue is one of Orson Welles’ main trademarks. Cinema favours the consistent alternation of spoken lines, which guarantees intelligibility and does not encumber the editing process with live recordings of simultaneous lines that cannot be disconnected from one another in post-production. Welles, however, is the filmmaker of the classical period who most challenged this convention. Citizen Kane (1941), where overlapping dialogue is used for 33 per cent of the lines, is famous for this practice, but Touch of Evil (1958) and The Trial (1962) make even greater use of the technique (40 per cent and 38 per cent respectively). When Welles adapts a novel or a play, he does not simply overlap two consecutive lines already found in the original dialogue. Rather, he creates occasions for overlapping dialogue just as in his original screenplays. The result calls for increased attention from the spectator, but most of the time it does not compromise the clarity of the dialogue. In Welles’ films, overlapping dialogue leaves nothing to chance; it requires adjustments and refinements, and if possible, rehearsals prior to filming. Welles said that ‘it can be taught in two hours. We need three very good actors and a little exercise in it … You have to drill them so that the right syllable comes at the right moment. It’s exactly like conducting an orchestra’ (Welles and Bogdanovich 1992: 89). Welles’ precision leads to concurrent, overlapping lines whose contrast, far from drowning both out, calls attention to and mutually emphasises both lines.

The simplest form of overlapping dialogue is the slight interruption of one line on the preceding line. This I will call ‘verbal intrusion’ – it intrudes on at most two syllables of a line. Over and above this, the result is no longer that of the intrusion of one line by that which follows, but rather the superimposition of two lines. One line may also be inserted within a longer rival line which began first but which ends after the inserted line. For example, a character attempts to interrupt before his turn but is unable to overcome an imperious opponent. There are other, more unusual variants such as beginning or ending two lines at the same moments. Welles mixes, moreover, successive overlapping speeches, and he does not limit them to pairs of characters. Trios inspire the most varied combinations of continual overlapping dialogue throughout the duration of a scene. For groups of four, five and six, Welles organises ‘shifts’, keeping certain characters in reserve to better manage their interruptions. He also mixes the simultaneous conversation of two distinct groups of people. In addition to the number of interlocutors, there is a range of intersecting factors (the length, the speed and the volume of lines, the contrast of actors’ ranges, their emphasis on particular syllables, and so on), so that the possible combinations and varieties of overlapping dialogue are seemingly infinite. I will follow the evolution of this technique in Welles’ work, tracing its roots even before Citizen Kane.

INFLUENCES AND EARLY EXPERIMENTS

Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane introduced a moderate form of overlapping dialogue to the stages of Broadway in the 1920s (see Naremore 1988: 44). Most importantly, it was an innovation in The Front Page, a comedy written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, staged in 1928 by George S. Kaufman. The play calls for the actors to deliver their lines at lightning speed. The play is a carnival of situations that cause lines to overlap, so much so that the acting edition published by the authors in 1950 specifically indicates the lines that should be spoken simultaneously and over which precise word or syllable the actors should take their cue. Other comedies followed this pattern.

In Hollywood, filmmakers began to experiment with overlapping dialogue in the early 1930s. Films such as Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code (1930) and Edmund Goulding’s Grand Hotel (1932) included short instances of overlapping dialogue. At the end of the decade, however, alternating lines remained the norm. Comedy led the field when it came to overlapping dialogue, and this was particularly true of the films of Hawks, Gregory La Cava and to a lesser extent, Frank Capra. Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1939), an adaptation of The Front Page, was the film that truly launched this technique. This is a virtuoso demonstration of overlapping dialogue; the exhilarating intensity of the film’s tempo wanes only in the final, more romantic minutes. Hawks did not aim to hinder our comprehension of the dialogue, however. He frequently cut off only the needless ends of sentences or added throwaway phrases such as ‘Listen to me…’ so that nothing important would be lost.

Welles was certainly an enthusiast of Hollywood comedies, but his chief inspiration for overlapping dialogue most likely came from the theatre. He began to use this technique on the stage, and he was probably the first director to bring it to a stage apart from Broadway comedies. Various accounts persuade us that, as an amateur director at the Todd School for Boys of Woodstock, Illinois and as a 16-year-old professional actor at the Gate Theatre of Dublin in 1931–32, Welles was already fond of verbal intrusions at the ends of lines. In any event, we can establish the strong use of overlapping dialogue in four theatrical works produced between 1937 and 1939 at the Mercury Theatre, Welles’ repertory company. These works comprise two Shakespearian productions, Julius Caesar and Five Kings (adapted from several of the history plays), an Elizabethan comedy, The Shoemakers’ Holiday by Thomas Dekker, and the farce Too Much Johnson by William Gillette from 1899. Over the course of multiple drafts of his very liberal adaptations, Welles shortened the lines and intermingled them with one another such that the dialogue was at times noted in the script simultaneously over two or three columns. This approach continued during intense rehearsals where Welles passed on to his actors a love of metronomic precision and teamwork. Overlapping dialogue remained a dominant feature of his theatre work long after his move to the cinema.

In his radio work, on the other hand, overlapping dialogue plays only a minimal role. Welles broadcast 78 one-hour-long, live, weekly radio dramas from July 1938 to March 1940, which is to say up until the first weeks of writing Citizen Kane.1 Unable to see the speakers’ faces and mouths, overlapping dialogue performed on the radio runs a much greater risk of unintelligibility. Welles’ earliest radio programme, The Mercury Theatre on the Air (July–December 1938), performed by his acting troupe, including character actors who had also performed on the stage for him, owed its vivacity to the rapid string of lines and the lack of lulls and comprised at most a few moderate verbal intrusions. Welles only took this technique farther in the radio version of Julius Caesar, although he considerably lessened the inordinate use of overlapping dialogue found in his stage production. Later, beginning in December 1938, when he produced The Campbell Playhouse, a program designed to appeal to a wider audience and in which Broadway and Hollywood stars joined his usual cast, Welles remained cautious at first. In January of 1939, however, he delivered a demonstration of frenetic dialogue in the satirical comedy I Lost My Girlish Laughter, based on a novel by Jane Allen. Welles himself played the role of an excessively intervening Hollywood mogul against George S. Kaufman’s screenwriter. The exaggerated confusion of the sharp and simultaneous dialogue made it a tour de force. According to a poll conducted later for the benefit of Campbell’s Soup, the program’s sponsor, this show was the least appreciated by audiences during the first season, and the rejection Welles felt must have been immediate. This bold move was thereafter dropped from his radio work. The Campbell Playhouse would last another year, and Welles at times gave up overlapping dialogue entirely, at other times using it episodically in a small number of shows, most of which were comedies. Two of these were Twentieth Century, based on a play by Hecht and MacArthur that was adapted to the screen by Hawks, and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, based on Capra’s film.

For his first Hollywood project during the summer of 1939, an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Welles conceived of the film’s overlapping dialogue from the earliest stages of writing. He included an unprecedented amount of details and directions in his screenplay. His shooting script includes declarations such as the following: ‘We begin to hear the voices of the Company men … The men talk and eat simultaneously. There is no attempt to focus on faces for definite speeches; all the speeches will overlap preceding ones so that we will hear a jumbled conversation with important words and phrases … standing out distinctly on the sound track’ (Welles 1977: 42–3). For the most part, however, Welles indicated with minute precision where an actor should step on another one’s line, whether on a specific word or even on a specific syllable within a word. This was not solely a case of moderate verbal intrusions – far from it. Successive overlapping lines abounded. Welles set up numerous rehearsals with the Mercury actors that he had brought with him to Hollywood, and he recorded parts of the dialogue in a radio studio to model the rhythm of the film on the dialogue before the shoot. The cancellation of this project marked the end of Welles’ desire to master everything at the writing stage. Following this, Welles’ screenplays made only a few allusions, if any, to overlapping dialogue.

CITIZEN KANE AND THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

Welles’ first two films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), were all the more ready for overlapping dialogue because Welles could cast his Mercury actors who were already experts at it. In both cases, pre-production included thorough rehearsals which undoubtedly explain why, in terms of mechanical precision and clarity, these two films are those where the overlapping dialogue is the most astounding. Very few of the lines concerned are, properly speaking, inaudible or frustrate the desire to comprehend. Apart from some monosyllabic exclamations such as ‘Why?’ the actors never cut one another off in the middle of a syllable. Rather, they interrupt either between two words or between two syllables of one word. Even when three characters speak at the same moment, each of their lines remains clear and intelligible. The spectator must choose which actor to listen to, but what he did not understand the first time, he will on a second viewing.

In Citizen Kane, 33 per cent of the lines are affected by overlapping dialogue.2 In nearly every case, the technique is the result of the actors’ work on set, and it is recorded live. Welles sets the tone as early as the newsreel, News on the March. There the overlapping dialogue reinforces the documentary sense of scenes such as Thatcher’s (George Coulouris) testimony before an investigation as he is heckled by congressmen and the radio interview given by an aged Kane (Welles). Welles provocatively maintains the impression of disorderly spontaneity from the first true dialogue scene of the film, where the journalists comment upon the newsreel they have just watched in the projection room.

Welles alternates three rhythms within the film’s dialogue: pausing between lines, instantaneous sequencing of lines, or overlapping dialogue. In each scene one rhythm predominates, and Welles distributes these rhythms to serve the arc of Kane’s life. After the speed and the verbal density of the early years of aggressive journalism that often verges on Hollywood comedy, this arc leads to the increasing scarcity and the slowing down of dialogue during Kane’s final, isolated years at Xanadu. The montage sequence that links six breakfast scenes to convey the progressive deterioration of Kane’s marriage to his first wife Emily (Ruth Warrick) reflects the structure of the film by passing from one rhythm to another. In the first breakfast scene, the two lovebirds speak quickly, one following the other, and they at times interrupt each other. In the next three episodes, the dialogue follows a similarly fast-paced rhythm with the exception of one verbal intrusion. There is a pause between the two spoken lines in the penultimate episode, and the final breakfast scene reveals the couple locked in a hostile silence.

Welles’ overlapping dialogue becomes a weapon in the power struggles between characters who affirm their domination by interrupting one another and stifling the interruptions of their interlocutors. Welles repeatedly exploits these oral power games in the big confrontation scene involving Kane, his young mistress Susan (Dorothy Comingore), his political opponent Gettys (Ray Collins) and his wife Emily following the discovery of Kane’s affair. The early scene at Mrs Kane’s boarding-house is even more significant in this regard. There the distinct levels within the soundtrack are strongly marked. In the living room, Kane’s parents (Harry Shannon and Agnes Moorehead) and Thatcher argue over the child’s future, while, outside, playing in the snow, the young Charles (Buddy Swan) hurls interjections and battle cries that – added to the soundtrack later – mix with the adults’ dialogue at a distance.

In The Magnificent Ambersons, 25 per cent of the lines overlap. With this film Welles creates again, in a less systematic manner, sequence types differentiated by their distinct dialogue rhythms. Again, the initial vivacity and speed gradually cedes to exhaustion and slowness.

Already in the prologue, which contains very little dialogue, the young George (Bobby Cooper), scolded for his impropriety toward a neighbour, but full of nerve, repeatedly interrupts his mother Isabel (Dolores Costello), who, as an adult, he will prevent from re-marrying. A highly complex sequence of overlapping dialogue begins after the ball, when the final guests bid each other goodnight. Welles then highlights as never before the conflict between a conversation in the film’s foreground with another in the background.3 In particular, the discussion between George (Tim Holt) and Uncle Jack (Ray Collins), whom he jealously questions about Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten), is clearly tied to the film’s foreground. A concurrent chattering conversation between Eugene, his daughter Lucy (Anne Baxter), Isabel and Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) resides in the background and is less audible. In this way, the visual depth of field is mirrored by the depth of the sound ‘field’ – a result achieved by mixing together different sound sources during editing. For technical reasons, the majority of this film’s sound was post-synchronised, and because of this, Welles dealt more with overlapping dialogue in the sound studio than on Citizen Kane. The dialogue editing in certain shots where we do not see the actors’ mouths (for instance because they are positioned at a distance from the camera) offers a good deal of freedom, and we see this in the exuberant dialogue between the six characters going for a wintertime ride in a snow-covered landscape. On the other hand, in the retakes filmed without Welles, after the film’s editing was removed from his control, overlapping dialogue is no longer included, a clear sign that this technique was not readily adopted by Hollywood.

In his earliest films, Welles established rules vis-à-vis his use of overlapping dialogue. He favours the technique during rather lengthy scenes, applying it to quick and relatively short lines. He nearly always combines monosyllabic lines with lines of medium or great length. He rarely overlaps two short lines of the same number of syllables so as to leave at least one syllable ‘in the open’. Parallel conversations aside, the two overlapping lines are usually of a similar volume so that one does not supplant the other. In moments during which the overlapping speech is the most intense, the dialogue frequently repeats terms in order to fix the vocabulary employed during simultaneous lines in the mind of the spectator.

These two unfailingly clear and comprehensible films persuade us that Welles’ overlapping dialogue was a highly, permanently regulated aesthetic technique. His later films reveal, on the other hand, that the technique is easily adaptable to a variety of divergent cinematic styles. Nevertheless, it is not a technique that Welles uses consistently from film to film.

THE END OF THE HOLLYWOOD PERIOD (1946–48)

In The Stranger (1946), the film where Orson Welles sought to recapture his standing in Hollywood after a three-year absence, the slowing down, the settling of Welles’ general style is also marked in the dialogue. Overlapping dialogue involves only 16 per cent of the film’s lines, and nine times out of ten, it is a question of slight verbal intrusions. Many of them serve only to accelerate scenes involving greetings and farewells when a character arrives or departs and scenes during which one character is introduced by another to a group in the course of conversation. More often than not, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young, the two stars of this film alongside Welles, carefully avoid stepping on their fellow actors’ lines.

In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), overlapping dialogue involves 28 per cent of the lines, even though the overall rhythm of the dialogue remains often quite measured. This is especially the case in the scenes between Michael O’Hara (Welles) and Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) where each word is heavily weighted. The film essentially carries on the work of Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, but it tends to disregard the rule that actors should not cut one another off in the middle of a syllable. Hayworth’s tendency to ‘swallow’ the final syllable of her sentences frequently renders the ends of overlapping lines barely audible. Welles gives greater space in this film to a madcap variety of overlapping dialogue that privileges the impression of a linguistic free-for-all over the clarity of the words spoken. The dialogue is partially lost, for example, in the confusion of the hordes of policemen who surround Michael when Grisby’s (Glenn Anders) dead body is discovered. Suddenly, however, and with a clever surprise effect, the cacophony ceases and the words we hear are ‘Yes, Michael?’ spoken off-screen by the very recognisable voice of Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), whom Michael believed to be dead.

Welles creates a carnival of intertwined overlapping speeches during Michael’s stormy trial, where the mastery of language is a mark of power. Bannister, acting as the defense lawyer, shows himself to be expert in that field when, questioned as a witness by the district attorney Galloway (Carl Frank), he asks the latter, who turns his back, to repeat the question just posed – a question easily understood by the spectator. When Galloway obliges, Bannister responds by quickly cutting him off. Let us look at a brief example that pits Bannister, Galloway and the judge (Erskine Sanford), overwhelmed by the goings on, against one another. During a first viewing of this scene, the effect of the chaotic voices wins out over the flawless intelligibility of the dialogue. Nonetheless, the following repeated terms fix the dialogue in the spectator’s memory: ‘drawing conclusions’, ‘gentlemen’, ‘improper questions’. In the passage cited, I mark overlapping lines alternatively with bold underline and waved underline; double underline marks instances where the three men speak simultaneously:

BANNISTER: The district attorney is again making speeches, drawing…

GALLOWAY: Premeditation and plan for flight?

BANNISTER: Making speeches and drawing conclusions!

GALLOWAY: I am not drawing conclusions!

BANNISTER: You are drawing conclusions! And he is…

JUDGE: Now, gentlemen, gentlemen!

BANNISTER: …asking improper questions in order to influence the jury. And I must ask your honor…

GALLOWAY: Improper questions? Your honor, I … I’m afraid…

BANNISTER: …to declare a mistrial.

This is clearly a parodic trial scene, and here Welles’ overlapping dialogue belongs to the Hollywood comedy tradition for the last time.

Of Welles’ Shakespearian films, Macbeth (1948) is the least affected by overlapping lines (only 13 per cent).4 The actors recorded the entirety of the film’s dialogue before shooting, and Welles then shot the film in play-back, which allowed him to maintain a short shooting schedule without being slowed down by the hazards of sound recording and the actors’ delivery. Two-thirds of the film’s overlapping speeches constitute slight verbal intrusions. Among the stronger instances of the technique most are from the three witches.

EUROPEAN FILMS (1952–68)

In his European films, Welles often only recorded wild lines. At times he even filmed without sound, and he post-synchronised almost all of the dialogue during editing. In this way, he could work quickly and cheaply on location, gaining flexibility and freedom of movement on set. The rules of the game had thus profoundly changed. Welles dubbed the speaking parts of many of his actors with others’ voices. This generally applied to non-Anglophones, to those who were unavailable during post-production, or to non-professional actors. He even gave his own voice, dubbing himself partially or completely for some thirty supporting parts, and he frequently revised the dialogue after the fact. Welles’ actors dubbed their lines separately, at times with month-long periods separating them. In this way, Welles could not look for the immediate precision he obtained when using direct sound. During editing and re-recording, Welles constructed an effect of overlapping dialogue with all of these recorded bits: a line spoken off-screen would intrude on another line spoken on-screen or vice versa, and instances of overlapping dialogue would be spoken between two characters, situated at a far distance from the camera so that the viewer is unable to read their lips, and so on. He also overlapped two lines, the one and the other both spoken off-screen. It even happened that Welles’ voice overlaps Welles’ voice when the character he plays onscreen speaks with a supporting character he had himself dubbed.

The cut-up dialogue of Othello (1952), a film that takes many structural liberties with Shakespeare’s play, is all the more dynamic because of the way the actors swiftly pick up their cues. Overlapping dialogue, which involves 23 per cent of the film’s lines,5 is characteristic of the film’s style overall and does not favour particular scenes or characters. The instances of overlapping dialogue are almost always verbal intrusions of minor significance. A large number of them constitute interruptions either at the end of a single long syllable (‘Moor’), or at a final short syllable of a multi-syllabic word (‘daughter’). These final syllables are usually lengthened by the noble delivery of most of the characters so that an entire word or even a few words has time to be voiced therein. Welles did make one new bold move, however: many of these instances do not turn up in ordinary conversations. Rather, they link the lines of two characters far from one another, situated each on different sound ‘fields’, and who each address themselves to other characters.

In Confidential Report (1955), overlapping speeches (29 per cent)6 are often less complex. Less meticulously executed than in the earlier films, they are here more apt to cut a syllable in two. They rarely pit more than two characters against one another, and this is all the more so because the film’s dialogue is often limited to pairs, as when Van Stratten (Robert Arden) or at times his girlfriend Mily (Patricia Medina) meets witnesses during the investigation set in motion by Grigori Arkadin (Welles). This film’s overlapping dialogue heats up only at the end, at the Madrid airport when Van Stratten begs Raina Arkadin (Paola Mori) to lie to her father who calls her over the radio. At this moment everyone joins in to press the young woman to take the microphone. The new aspect in this film is Welles’ mixing, on more than one occasion, lines in two different languages. This reaches its pinnacle when two German police officers (Gert Fröbe and Eduard Linkers) speak at length and at the same time to Van Stratten, one in German and the other in English. Van Stratten understands what they say, but even with the best efforts, the spectator does not!

In The Trial (1962), Welles makes use of overlapping dialogue (38 per cent) in a very different form than those he had used previously. In this adaptation of Kafka’s novel, an adaptation that plays with the spectator’s disorientation and unease, the dialogue is frequently far away, for example drowned in the perpetual rain during Joseph K.’s (Anthony Perkins) first visit to the lawyer Hastler (Welles). The dialogue is willfully disembodied, spoken off-screen, and at times difficult to attribute to a specific character as Welles avoided synchronising the words with the movements of an actor’s lips, including when he dubbed himself the lines of almost all the male supporting actors. Joseph K., ever hesitating and stammering, and several characters he meets, express themselves disjointedly. Overlapping dialogue also illustrates this will to indeterminacy and blur. The Trial is, among Welles’ films, the one that most bends the rules associated with overlapping dialogue and that makes use of the totality of its possible variations, including those variations that are the least clear, such as when two lines begin or end at precisely the same moment. Welles even allows two lines to superimpose one over the other for their entire duration. Successive overlapping lines and the linguistic entanglements between several characters in this film are even more intertwined and pronounced than those of The Lady from Shanghai.

The heterodoxy of Falstaff (1966) as a Shakespearian adaptation is striking, with its 31 per cent of overlapping lines. Certainly, if we compare Falstaff with the 1939 theatrical production of Five Kings, which covered the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, we see a radical lessening of the technique. On stage, Welles went so far as to have three characters speak at the same time, while in the film five-sixths of the instances of overlapping dialogue are verbal intrusions.⁷ Here overlapping dialogue lends a feeling of natural conversation, and it is applied much more to instances of prose rather than to instances of verse (the film’s lines are almost two-thirds prose). Nearly all of the overlapping speeches are connected to the tumultuous world of Falstaff (Welles) and his friends, who exchange brief lines in prose at lightning speed, interrupting one another and speaking simultaneously. A few overlapping lines also work their way into the world of the fiery rebel Hotspur (Norman Rodway). This technique is all but absent in the static and cold world of Henry IV (John Gielgud) where strict etiquette and dramatic verse are called for, and Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) employs different speech patterns according to the various universes he orbits.

Of his three Shakespearian films, Falstaff is the one with which Welles took the greatest liberty regarding the original text, recomposing the lines to create occasions for overlapping dialogue. Let us look at two examples.

To begin, following the trick they play on Falstaff in the forest of Gadshill, Hal and Poins (Tony Beckley) lead him to make up a series of tall tales to refute his cowardice, and Shakespeare writes:

FALSTAFF: Let them speak. If they speak more or less than truth, they are villains and the sons of darkness.

HAL: Speak, sirs, how was it?8

Welles’ Falstaff only speaks the first words of the line, ‘Let them speak’, and, as Hal immediately speaks his rejoinder off-screen, Falstaff’s ‘speak’ occurs simultaneously with the same word spoken by Hal. The two lines combine into a single vocal flow.

Later, before he sets off for the war, Shakespeare’s Falstaff is taken to task by his enemy, the Lord Chief Justice. Welles turns a line of Shakespeare’s prose, which is unique to the judge, into ten lines assigned alternatively to him and to another character, a Bishop invented by Welles. And, at the beginning of their quarrel with Falstaff, the judge cuts off his ally three times in order to forward his meaning:

BISHOP (to Falstaff): Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth?

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE (to Falstaff): You that are written down old with all the characters of age?

BISHOP: Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek…

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: …a white beard…

BISHOP: …a decreasing leg…

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: …an increasing belly?

As for Welles’ final fiction film, The Immortal Story (1968), the use of overlapping dialogue is negligible (8 per cent), and it applies only to verbal intrusions. The film’s four characters converse only in twos, speak rarely and in a measured fashion, and they often play with meaningful pauses between lines.

TOUCH OF EVIL

I have kept Touch of Evil for the end both because it is the one Hollywood film within Welles’ European oeuvre and because of all his films it makes the most use of overlapping dialogue (40 per cent).⁹ The overheated characters who engage in the film’s brisk and vivid repartee strive to make their presence felt. Even beyond the ‘arm-wrestling’ between the high-ranking Mexican official Vargas (Charlton Heston) and the American police captain Quinlan (Welles), the struggle for power is constant in the small border town disturbed by a bomb explosion. Welles implicitly advances overlapping dialogue as one of the primary reasons for the lengthy ‘clandestine’ rehearsals that he organised for this film in spite of union rules (see Welles and Bogdanovich 1992: 316). The film’s stars, Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh (in the role of Susan, the wife of Vargas), played Welles’ game magnificently.

In Touch of Evil, the dialogue, recorded live for the most part, deliberately emphasises chaos. Many of the lines are at least in part inaudible generally because one of the speakers prevails over the others. Welles himself, with his alternatively quick then drawled delivery, often lengthens the final f or s of the last word of a line. These lengthened consonants allow Quinlan to maintain his pervasive presence in the face of verbal intrusions from others without hindering the film’s clarity. Up to this film, Welles’ overlapping dialogue consisted of tightly organised exchanges that could have easily not overlapped. In Touch of Evil, on the other hand, the written dialogue is inseparable from Welles’ overlapping technique. Attesting to this are the many lines where a character changes his point along the way according to what the interrupting speaker says. The characters counter, they interrupt and attack right away, without listening to more, as if the spectator were not supposed to hear their interlocutor. In this respect, Touch of Evil is, of all Welles’ films, that in which the overlapping dialogue is the most realistic.

This verbal intertwining does not exclude the premeditated highlighting of important words, but that highlighting is much more concealed than usual. This is the case, for example, toward the end of the opening long shot, a shot during which a stranger leaves a time bomb in the truck of the car belonging to the entrepreneur Linnekar (uncredited). While Linnekar and his passenger, Zita (Joi Lansing), wait at the border guard station at the same moment as Vargas and Susan, one of the immigration officers interrupts Zita’s first two lines while no one listens to her. After some ten intermingled lines from five characters, Welles drowns once again a portion of Zita’s final attempt to make herself heard. She begins to say: ‘No, really…’; the immigration officer says ‘Good night!’ to Linnekar and Zita while she adds: ‘… this ticking…’, and the end of her line finally emerges: ‘…noise in my head’. These words are sufficiently ambiguous to be neglected by the other characters but sufficiently clear to the spectator who is thereby reminded that he alone knows of the bomb’s existence. Another example occurs after the police car carrying Quinlan returns without Sergeant Menzies (Joseph Calleia) who offered to drive Susan to her motel. Menzies begins: ‘Oh gee! I forg…’ over Susan’s insignificant line; then he accentuates the words that come out ‘in the open’: ‘…HIS CANE! I forgot to give him his cane.’ Welles prepares here the dramatic turn that will find Quinlan betraying himself by leaving his cane in the hotel room where he just committed a murder.

The dialogue of the three sequences in the apartment of Linnekar’s daughter Marcia (Joanna Moore), where the interrogation of the Mexican suspect Sanchez (Victor Millan) takes place and where eight then ten characters face off verbally, hardly borrows from Whit Masterson’s 1956 novel Badge of Evil. Actually, Masterson wrote a much less dramatic conversation between only two characters. From this Welles created a staggering density of voices. The first and the last of these three sequences are filmed in two long takes of five-and-a-half minutes each during which the dialogue is recorded live by numerous microphones placed on the set. Several times Welles mixes two simultaneous conversations between two groups of people. In this scene overlapping dialogue pits against one another the lines spoken in English by the police officers and the lines exchanged in Spanish between Vargas and Sanchez.

At the beginning of the search, Quinlan speaks only to Marcia for as long as he can, ostensibly ignoring her lawyer, Howard Frantz (Keenan Wynn), who had advised her not to answer any questions. When Frantz attempts to interrupt him, Quinlan speaks with scornful indifference to the lawyer while Sanchez tries, vainly, to cut in. (Once again, I use the double underline when two or three voices speak simultaneously):

QUINLAN	FRANTZ	SANCHEZ
(to Marcia) Er – You had a little quarrel with your dad and moved out on your own? (to Frantz) I know who you are.	(to Quinlan) Perhaps I should introduce Linnekar’s attorney. Howard Frantz.	(to Quinlan) Shall I introduce myself?

Later, in a shot lasting one minute, Quinlan leaves the crucial confrontation scene with Vargas, a confrontation that just ended with Quinlan’s angry resignation. Quinlan is infuriated with Gould, the chief of police (Harry Shannon), and the district attorney, Adair (Ray Collins), and the very dense overlapping dialogue plays an important role in the mise-en-scène. The three phases of the shot are delineated at once by the interaction of the camera and the actors and by the treatment of the dialogue. Quinlan yells his first sentences while, preceded by the camera that dollies out, with Gould and Adair behind him, he rushes like a bull in a narrow hallway: ‘Thirty years! Thirty years of poundin’ beats, ridin’ cars! Thirty years of dirt and crummy pay!’ Then the dialogue overlaps, and the visual depth of field is replaced with a sonic depth of field as the camera stops on the three men standing together in the centre of a large empty hall while Gould and Adair each take turns attempting to calm Quinlan down:

QUINLAN	GOULD	ADAIR
Thirty years I gave my life to this department and you allow this foreigner to accuse me! (a pause) Answer!	But Hank… (a long pause) We were just giving you a chance to answer him.	Now, Hank! Watch your blood pressure! (a pause) Your blood pressure, Hank!

Quinlan protests vehemently: ‘Answer!’ before Gould even pronounces the word, but the overlapping is such that the spectator cannot notice it.10 That Gould and Adair overlap Quinlan’s line while he remains unshaken lends an increasing violence to the final sentences that Quinlan shouts ‘in the open’ as he moves into the depth of the shot, to the other side of the hall filmed in a very short focal length: ‘Answer? Why do I have to answer him? No, sir! I won’t take back that badge until the people of this county vote it back!’ The dialogue continues again with less extreme overlapping speeches.

Only two characters in Touch of Evil refrain from the circle of overlapping dialogue: Schwartz (Mort Mills), the highly composed deputy district attorney, and the fortune-teller Tana (Marlene Dietrich). In the two scenes where Quinlan pays a visit to the relative haven of peace that is Tana’s house, the dialogue takes its time and Tana almost becomes an oracle. In this way, the contrast is highly marked at the end of Quinlan’s first visit to Tana when he returns outside where the other detectives await him, and where immediately, the voice of the district attorney, mumbling, mixes with Quinlan’s voice.

***

Welles’ overlapping dialogue represents a truly audacious gesture in the majority of his films. His audaciousness is in his application of this technique on a large scale, outside of Hollywood comedies, in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons; his daring is in its use, though tempered, in his Shakespearian films; his boldness is in the aesthetic of confusion that reigns in various guises – a confusion that verges on derision in The Lady from Shanghai, on incandescent tension in Touch of Evil, and on disintegration in The Trial. From one film to the next and even within the space of a single film, Orson Welles continually varied the rhythms and the densities of his dialogue, giving his films a destabilising quality that hangs his spectators more and more upon his characters’ every word.

notes

1    Only 65 of these broadcasts have been preserved and are available for listening today (and this includes on various websites), but the others have little chance of altering the assessment that follows.

2    I have dedicated several pages to this subject elsewhere (see Thomas 2004); I touch on only a few elements from those pages here.

3    From this point of view, the film owes nothing to Welles’ October 1939 radio adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel from 1918. However, in a few scenes during the May 1939 broadcast of Our Town, based on Thornton Wilder’s play of 1938, the various levels in depth of simultaneous voices foreshadow the style of the film.

4    This percentage applies to the longer version that benefitted from an early release in a few American cities in 1948 prior to the general release two years later of a version that, at the insistence of the production company, Welles shortened by 21 minutes. For this later version he re-recorded more than half of the film’s dialogue.

5    I base this on the version released in continental Europe in 1952. Welles later shortened the film by three minutes, and this version was released in English-speaking countries in 1955/56. Only a so-called restoration produced in 1992 that retains the dialogue from the 1955 soundtrack but does away with the music and effects track is available today.

6    This percentage refers to the version released in continental Europe in 1956, which is different from the version shown in the UK in 1955, a version missing today.

7    The documentation is, on the other hand, insufficient for a comparison with Chimes at Midnight, the theatrical production that Welles staged in Ireland in 1960 and which contains the general conception of the film. Moreover the complete title of the film is Falstaff (Chimes at Midnight).

8    1 Henry IV, II.4.165–8.

9    I base this on the preview version, which was reduced by 14 minutes by the production company prior to release. This earlier version was rediscovered in the 1970s. The film includes retakes shot by another director who, as in The Magnificent Ambersons, abstained from overlapping dialogue.

10  In some of his other films, Welles at times has his characters respond before their interlocutors have spoken the words prompting a response. Most of the time, we should not view these instances of ‘premature’ overlapping lines as accidental, but rather as poetic licence, as an attempt to accelerate the dialogue in the extreme. The proof is the fact that in Welles’ European films, many of these ‘premature’ overlapping lines were confirmed, even created, during editing even though lip-synch did not require it.

bibliography

Naremore, J. (1988) Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Shakespeare, W. (1980 [1598]) The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Thomas, F. (2004) ‘Citizen Kane: The Soundtrack’, in J. Naremore (ed.) Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 161–84.

Welles, O. (1977) Heart of Darkness, Revised Estimating Script, November 30, 1939, Revue internationale d’histoire du cinéma, microfiche.

Welles, O. and P. Bogdanovich (1992) This Is Orson Welles. New York: HarperCollins.