“Conspiracies are melodramatic, my dear, especially when they’re made by rich people with too much money and time on their hands.”—The Smiler with the Knife, Nicholas Blake
*
Orson Welles arrived in Hollywood in July 1939 with a Mephistophelean beard and a clutch of potential projects. The facial hair was an artifact of Five Kings, a wildly ambitious synthesis of Shakespeare plays that had closed in Philadelphia. John Houseman, then Welles’s producing partner, wrote that “as a final token of defiance, Orson announced that he was retaining his beard and would not shave it off until he had appeared as Falstaff on a New York stage.” The affectation provided additional ammunition for carpers gunning for the 24-year-old wunderkind; at least one novelty song was written about the whiskers, and novelist Louis Bromfield offered a cash reward to anyone who “accidentally” singed them off Welles’s face. (Welles’s goatee is unscathed when he turns up as a character in The Sharpest Needle, the latest Edith Head mystery I cowrote with my wife Rosemarie Keenan under the pen name Renee Patrick.)
As for Welles’s debut film, the sky seemed to be the limit. RKO had signed him to a contract offering unprecedented creative freedom on the strength of his string of theatrical triumphs like the so-called “Voodoo Macbeth,” a landmark 1936 production with an all-Black cast transporting Shakespeare’s play to the Caribbean. The studio had hopes Welles would tackle a big-screen version of The War of the Worlds, which Welles had staged on the radio to stunning effect in October 1938. Highbrow properties like Cyrano De Bergerac were bandied about.
But Welles knew how he wanted to make a splash. As he absorbed all he could about film production, in part by watching Stagecoach (1939) repeatedly in the company of technicians who had worked on the seminal John Ford western, he readied a sprawling, complex adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He was familiar with the material, having already turned it into an episode of The Mercury Theatre of the Air. He planned on updating Conrad’s story to then-contemporary South America, using it to condemn Nazi Germany. He also intended to shoot the film subjectively, with the camera serving as the eye of the protagonist Marlow. A tall order for a tyro filmmaker.
Welles had often spent extravagantly on his theatrical productions. With RKO signing the checks, money was no longer an object. He dispatched a second unit crew to Florida’s Everglades as he had locations scouted in Louisiana. He put out a call for more Black extras than there were in all of Los Angeles.
It became apparent that Heart of Darkness would not be going before the cameras for some time. Welles needed another project to slot ahead of it. RKO had one in mind.
*
“She forced herself to remember that here, in the heart of England, England’s ruin was being planned.”—The Smiler with the Knife
*
Nicholas Blake’s 1939 novel The Smiler with the Knife opens with a dutiful homeowner finding a locket in a roadside hedge. This chance discovery leads directly to a nefarious plot to take over Great Britain, “a conspiracy organized by the friends of Fascism in the country to discredit this government and overthrow it by armed force—the last, desperate throw of those who saw the future slipping out of their hands.”
Blake was a pseudonym for Cecil Day-Lewis. In 1968, he would be named poet laureate of the United Kingdom. In the 1930s, he made his living primarily as a schoolteacher. Needing additional income, he set out to write a detective novel like those admired by his friend and mentor, W. H. Auden. 1935’s A Question of Proof introduced the gentleman sleuth Nigel Strangeways and made “Nicholas Blake” one of the premiere crime fiction authors of the era. Martin Edwards, in his definitive history The Golden Age of Murder, writes, “Tall, fair, and slender, (Day-Lewis) was described by Rebecca West as ‘a Greek Apollo,’ and his good looks and charm were inherited in due course by his Academy Award-winning son.” (Yes, “Nicholas Blake” is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.)
In Smiler, the fifth Strangeways novel, Blake changed his formula considerably. The protagonist isn’t Nigel but his wife Georgia. Once an explorer of some renown—Nigel regards her as “the Cat that Walked by Herself”—she finds herself feeling slightly restrained by the bonds of matrimony. The discovery of the locket presents an opportunity for her to return to her adventuresome ways by infiltrating an organization known as The English Banner. The E.B. is described by Nigel’s uncle Sir John, a Scotland Yard bigwig, as “a queer sort of semi-mystical society” dedicated to the notion “that they are really the best people in the country and therefore ought to be its rulers.” Sir John calls the group harmless but then adds, “if you wanted a good cover for a dangerous secret organization, what could you find better than a harmless ditto.” The English Banner is being exploited by a sinister cabal of people, the kind possessed of a conscience that “allows them to betray their country in white hoods but not in dinner-jackets.” Their intent is to establish a dictatorship in the U.K. What they need is the proper figurehead, a compelling figure who won’t appear to be a dictator. Sir John says:
“If the conspirators are as clever as we believe them to be, they’ll have chosen someone who can appeal to the ordinary Englishman’s romanticism and hero-worship.”
“Yes,” murmured Georgia, “there’s something in that. The inspired amateur. It’s part of our national romanticism to trust the amateur rather than the professional. But how do we find him?”
The answer is simple: Georgia will seek him out. She and Nigel stage a convincing break-up. Now apparently single, Georgia begins moving through society circles and soon encounters the man anointed by a shadowy syndicate to be England’s new ruler, one blessed with a singularly memorable moniker.
… Lord Chilton Canteloe. Chilton—‘Chillie,’ as he was affectionately known by the millions who had profited either directly by his philanthropies or indirectly from the way his horses justified their backers’ confidence—was a millionaire, still in his early middle age, but already something of a legend in the country, a figure as colorful in his way as the great Whig noblemen of the 18th century. Georgia, indeed, had suggested to her friend, half in fun, that he would be the ideal for the E.B. to have chosen as dictator, but Alison had replied, “Oh no. Don’t go barking up that gum-tree, my sweet. Chillie’s all right. He’s a grand chap. You wait till you meet him.”
Meet him Georgia shortly does, and an odd seduction ensues as she tries to ferret out Canteloe’s agenda. Blake generously supplies comic moments as well as camera-ready suspense sequences. His portrait of the aspiring strongman is particularly deft; Chillie is charismatic and even likable despite recurring flashes of sociopathic behavior. Georgia sizes him up early and accurately, observing, “Well, he was a millionaire: men did not accumulate all that money without hurting a lot of people, one way or another.” Cecil Day-Lewis had written extensively about the rise of fascism throughout the 1930s. As Nicholas Blake, he continued to sound the alarm under the guise of light entertainment, castigating his countrymen.
Like many highly intelligent people, Georgia was inclined to underestimate the enormous potential strength of stupidity. Like herself, millions of men and women in England, though the last ten years had given them so many object lessons in the way a few really determined, unscrupulous men can exploit this stupidity and apathy, were still saying “That sort of thing cannot happen here.”
Orson Welles biographer Simon Callow sums up the appeal of The Smiler with the Knife: “It was witty, topical—and cheap.” John Houseman, dismissing the book as “an English potboiler in the Hitchcock manner,” wrote that Welles “switched without protest but without enthusiasm” to adapting it. That diffidence seems unlikely, considering Welles’s affinity for the genre. “All his life,” Callow wrote, “he travelled with a suitcase full of pulp fiction, thrillers, gangster stories, crime stories, which he consumed at a rate of two or three a day.” Welles, who had bolstered his fame playing The Shadow on the radio, even claimed to have penned pulp stories under a pseudonym.
Welles immediately embraced the book’s potential. Biographer Patrick McGilligan writes that Welles viewed the story as a “cautionary tale about the spread of fascism,” one he would literally and figuratively bring home by transplanting the narrative to the United States, “turning it into an American political parable.” Georgia would become a madcap heiress out of a screwball comedy, with Sir John transformed into her G-man father-in-law. As for Chilton Canteloe, he would be rendered, in McGilligan’s words, as “a right-wing playboy industrialist who is active in the aviation industry.” Welles was upfront about his inspiration, telling writer Robert L. Carringer that his villain was based on Howard Hughes.
By late November 1939, Welles had completed a half-script consisting of a synopsis and several scenes. RKO was pleased enough to fold Smiler into the terms of Welles’s existing deal. Knowing he’d tried the studio’s patience, Welles refused a salary for his work on the film, taking only the share of the profits stipulated in his contract. RKO announced with fanfare that The Smiler with the Knife would replace Heart of Darkness as Welles’s debut feature. But Welles had already acquired the reputation that would dog him for the rest of his life; the Hollywood Reporter zinged Smiler as “Mr. Welles’s latest forthcoming picture.”
Welles had already acquired the reputation that would dog him for the rest of his life; the Hollywood Reporter zinged Smiler as “Mr. Welles’s latest forthcoming picture.”In a rare show of restraining his ambition, Welles said he would cast his Mercury Theatre colleague Joseph Cotten as Smiler’s villain, taking the smaller role of the heroine’s husband himself. But the prospect of Welles saying a few supportive words to his female lead then surrendering the spotlight seems dubious; after all, here was a man who planned on playing both Marlow and Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. It’s impossible not to picture Welles as Chilton Canteloe when reading Blake’s novel, from the “deep-set, audacious eyes that roved with interest among the company” to the bear-like clumsiness of his walk. When Canteloe makes his first appearance, “there was a stir and settling-down in the room as though some volcanic disturbance had taken place, cleared the air, altered every relationship there … (Georgia) felt the full force of his personality directed for a moment upon her, isolating them from all the others in the room.” The description calls to mind the quote by Geraldine Fitzgerald, Welles’s colleague and paramour, about being in his presence: “What was disturbing about this beautiful light was that it was rather like a lighthouse. When the beam turned, somebody else was illuminated, and you were back in the darkness.”
The prospect of a thriller blending suspense and comedy along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935)—which Welles regarded as “a masterpiece”—pleased RKO. What truly excited the studio was Welles’s choice for the lead role: Carole Lombard, the first lady of American screen comedy. Sadly, the in-demand actress wasn’t available. Welles had a viable alternative in mind, an actress already under contract to RKO. The problem was convincing their employer it was a good idea.
Lucille Ball had appeared in Stage Door (1937) with Katharine Hepburn but in the 1930s was primarily known for comic turns opposite the likes of The Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers, as well as starring as pampered movie star Annabel Allison in a pair of RKO B-pictures. Welles was a fan—he squired Ball to various premieres in late 1939—and had no doubt she possessed the chops to handle Smiler’s dramatic moments. Welles had a flair for such counterintuitive casting; in 1941 he approached Charlie Chaplin about playing the notorious serial killer Henri Désiré Landru. Chaplin was sufficiently intrigued to purchase the idea, which became Monsieur Verdoux (1947), a challenging film that subverts nearly every aspect of Chaplin’s beloved “Tramp” persona. Welles vigorously lobbied his studio bosses to let Ball carry his debut feature. He also set about completing the script, enlisting a collaborator.
Herman J. Mankiewicz was already working for Welles. Laid up with a broken leg after a September 1939 automobile accident, Mankiewicz had accepted a job writing for the Mercury Theatre radio show The Campbell Playhouse, adapting Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd among other literary works. He didn’t receive credit for these scripts; Welles insisted on being billed as writer/producer/director. The acerbic Mankiewicz had torched many Hollywood bridges while amassing an impressive list of screenwriting credits, and working with Welles represented his last best chance at keeping his career afloat. Asking Mankiewicz to doctor his script, Welles jovially walked straight into a buzzsaw. Mankiewicz biographer Richard Meryman explained: “Smiler put Welles on Herman’s own turf. For Herman, a self-destructive personality who worried that he was a washed-up hack, the chance to deflate this boy wonder proved irresistible. According to Welles, despite their genial relationship, Herman set out ‘to show that writing a film script was one thing I couldn’t do and also one thing I had better come to him for. He destroyed my confidence in the script, sneering at everything I did.’”
Welles’s enthusiasm for Smiler waned. Having rejected Lucille Ball in addition to Welles’s other, lesser-known suggestions Dita Parlo and Uta Hagen for lead actress, RKO also soured on the project. The studio began to think that the film might be too political, and that a mere thriller would serve as an insufficiently prestigious introduction for their prized acquisition. Executives talked up Jane Eyre, or perhaps a drama about the Borgias. Unless Welles had any ideas?
He responded by pitching a film he and Mankiewicz discussed when they were meant to be polishing the Smiler script. A drama of suitably grand scale, detailing the life of a powerful American businessman. In February 1940, RKO chieftain George Schaefer shifted the money earmarked for script development and planning on The Smiler with the Knife to a project then called John Citizen U.S.A. The title Citizen Kane would come later. As it happened, Mankiewicz didn’t hate everything Welles had dreamt up for Smiler. The script opened with a newsreel recounting the life of the Hughes-like heavy; Mankiewicz found the idea clever and kept it in Citizen Kane. It’s worth noting that one of the coup plotters in Welles’s Smiler script was a press baron along the lines of Charles Foster Kane—and William Randolph Hearst. (Hearst also turns up as a character in The Sharpest Needle.)
*
“The man in the street doesn’t give two damns for expert verdicts.”—The Smiler with the Knife
*
Lucille Ball would prove her mettle in dramatic roles, achieving surprising success in film noir. She scored in The Dark Corner (1946), a funhouse mirror version of The Maltese Falcon in which her resourceful Effie Perrine must rescue a railroaded Sam Spade, and is even better in the Douglas Sirk-directed Lured (1947). As for Welles, thrillers would become a staple for him. His final film at RKO was the 1943 adaptation of Eric Ambler’s Journey into Fear. He directed The Stranger (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947). His greatest success as an actor came in the near-perfect example of the form The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed. That film’s screenwriter Graham Greene readily acknowledged that Welles concocted his most memorable speech as the villain Harry Lime. (“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”) But in later years, Welles falsely claimed to have written all of Harry’s dialogue, as well as directed his own iconic on-screen introduction. He knew quality when he saw it, and couldn’t help taking credit for it.
Ball and Welles did work together, and not just on an episode of I Love Lucy. Ball and husband Desi Arnaz suggested Welles as the host of an Alfred Hitchcock Presents-style anthology series. Only a single episode was made, in 1956. It didn’t air until two years later, when NBC needed an emergency replacement for an allegedly rigged quiz show. The Fountain of Youth won Orson Welles a Peabody award, and is every bit as inventive with the nascent medium of television as Citizen Kane was with film. (The show is available on YouTube.) By the time the Peabody was bestowed, Ball and Arnaz owned the old RKO lot, which become home to Desilu Productions, and Welles had directed his final Hollywood film, another thriller, the baroque Touch of Evil (1958).
“What if” is a foolish game, but a difficult one to resist. Suppose Orson Welles had made The Smiler with the Knife in 1940 as he’d envisioned it. An early crowd-pleaser could have set his career down a different path. It’s possible we wouldn’t have Citizen Kane—or I Love Lucy. But it’s equally possible audiences would have spurned the film amidst the drumbeat of war. Certainly, a movie about homegrown fascism would have proven costly to Welles during the blacklist era. Still, the audacity to consider making that project at that time is breathtaking, and typical of Welles.
The Smiler with the Knife has never been filmed. But its dark message, hidden under deceptively bright packaging, about the ease with which demagoguery can overwhelm a nation remains relevant.
You can watch The Fountain of Youth here.
***
