Continuing...
The other film, Prince of Tyre’ is a much darker work altogether, so much so that it was never released at all, until 1998, yet in many way it prefigured films like ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Pretty Baby’, and had an extraordinary setting that highlights a play that would be very hard to turn into a regular movie of the time..
When Welles originally came on to the film, it was called ‘Before The Rain’, set in the American South, about a riverboat captain just before the Civil War, with a script by Charles B Griffith, trying to do something different to the Westerns and the Roger Corman-directed AIP films he usually wrote. “I wasn’t happy,” Griffith said years later, “I was hoping Welles would direct my script. But from what I’ve heard about ‘Prince of Tyre’… maybe it was for the best. And by then I was back with Roger to make ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’. Working with Welles was hard.”
Welles was disillusioned dealing with Hollywood. “I was determined to leave for Europe. ‘Prince of Tyre’ was my escape plan – I made money for directing it, so I could get back to ‘Don Quixote’ I was rereading the Shakespeare play ‘Pericles Prince of Tyre’ at the time, and realised this could be a powerful melodrama, and I’d leave them a film they could never forget.”
They might not forget it, but they could bury it, and did so for 40 years, until Peter Bogdanovich tracked down a copy and persuaded Universal to release it on DVD. Even today, it still raises controversy. Pauline Kael described it as “a fierce, hateful stab at the Old South, but done with such style that you can hardly feel the blade as it sinks deep.”
Welles looked at a number of actors, but William Shatner caught his eye after his role in ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, and asked him to audition. Shatner, flattered, worked hard, and was the first one cast. “Imagine if they had kept the original name of the riverboat,” Shatner said with a wry smile in a 2002 interview, “I would have been on the bridge of the Enterprise eight years early!”
So to the story. The year is 1914. The news of war is coming from Europe, but the United States is holding its distance from the conflict for now. Perry Lees is a young, up and coming businessman with his own riverboat, the Prince of Tyre. He knows that the United States will be involved in supplying Britain with weapons and other goods for the war, and is trying to secure delivery contracts. But in Antioch, Illinois, he finds much more than he bargained for, in the form of Mayor Tom Barkley, played by Welles himself. The reason for this was he couldn’t find any actor willing to take on the role of this evil man, lecherous, corrupt, and involved in an incestuous relationship with his daughter, Nell (Elizabeth Montgomery playing her as a drug-addled slut. She said later, “What I learned in that film, I took to The Untouchables,” in a guest role that won her an Emmy). Barkley challenges everyone in the meeting of contractors to guess what his greatest secret and his greatest love is. When Lees sees Nell, and the touches she exchanges with her father, he knows. And Barkley knows that he knows.
Aware of the threat from Barkely, who has in the past killed men to protect his secret, Lees leaves his business in the charge of a loyal lieutenant, John Hellman (Dick York), and takes the Prince of Tyre down the Hennepin Canal into the Illinois River, heading south Along the way, he stops to help another Mayor, Charles Bridge of Tarsus, Tennessee, whose town has lost the ability to kick-start its generator. Lees soon runs a cable from his ship’s engine, and the town soon lights up, erasing the creepy dark atmosphere oppressing the townsfolk. Bridge, with his wife, Clarice (Joan Blondell), are grateful, and promise to help Lees when they can, though it’s apparent to the audience their promise isn’t sincere.
Perry Lees continues his journey, and ends up at Greenville Mississippi, where the Prince of Tyre runs aground during a storm and is damaged. Lees, short of money, enters a big poker game, and manages to win big, not just the money to repair his ship, but from one of the city’s leading businessmen, Jack Simons, he wins the hand of his daughter Theresa. Simons disowns her, and tells her she can never come back.
To repair the Prince of Tyre takes a long time, and while Lees makes repairs, Theresa becomes pregnant, which overjoys him. At the same time, a letter arrives from Hellman, saying Barkley is in trouble and won’t be able to continue his vendetta, and so they set off back up the Mississippi. But a huge tornado sweeps through, and if that isn’t enough, Theresa goes into labour. She safely gives birth, but in a heart-rending scene is washed overboard, her devastated husband holding their child as he screams in vain for her.
Convinced she is dead, the distraught Lees continues on, and ends up back at Tarsus, where he gives the child Marina into the care of the Bridges, who have just had a child of their own, a girl, Jenny. Once again, Lees repairs his ship and continues on.
Back in Antioch, Lees discovers to his dismay Barkley is out on bail, and the ex-mayor knows Lees’s testimony could condemn him utterly. His daughter is already dead, and probably at his hand, to keep her voice silent. Lees know there is only one way out of this. In a thrilling hunt, he catches Barkley out and shoots him dead. To evade the law, Lees flees over the border into Canada, and joins the Army, to fight in France.
Twelve years pass. We learn that Lees was involved in reconstruction work after the war, then came home to reclaim his business, which has grown huge with trade during the war, and part of that is to repair the Prince of Tyre and take to the river once again, and take his daughter back. But when he gets to Tarsus, he’s told by the Bridges that Marina has died.
But this is not so. Over the years, Marina had grown up into a pretty girl, prettier than Jenny, and her parents, worried her daughter would be overshadowed by their stepchild, sold her to a brothel further away. Child prostitutes were prized but rare, and Marina’s beauty made her very sought after. But she is also an articulate and wise child, and each night, like Scheherazade, talks her ‘clients’ out of violating her, and they go away feeling a little wiser and moire virtuous for it. She gains a reputation as the “Sweetest Virgin”, and to this town Lees arrives. The Mayor of this town, looking to gain Lee’s business, tells him about the girl, and buys her for him, but stresses not as a sexual favour, but as someone with stories who might help him forget his troubles. As they talk, the realise their stories match up, and it bursts upon them they are father and daughter, and are happily reunited. (There’s a dark scene in the script, not filmed, that has Lees almost following Barkley’s footsteps, until realisation hits).
But as they journey home, the Great Flood of 1927 starts to exert its terrible influence, and in another storm, the Prince of Tyre is driven aground and a huge tree pierces its hull. Father and daughter escape ashore and reach a place called the Tempelhof Diner. Here, they talk to the waitress, telling her their story… and she tells them she is Theresa! She didn’t die when she was washed overboard, but thought her husband and child lost forever, and decided to stay on with the lady who took her in, the diner’s owner. And so they are all reunited, and even thought the Prince of Tyre is lost, they have each other.
Great moments: The intercut shots of Lees and Barkley, as the greasy smile spreads across his face and Lees’s spreading horror and disgust, is one of the best character moments in the film. And on a dark waterfront, Lees and Barkley stalk each other, bait each other, handguns glinting and flashing in the moonlight, until Lees strikes him down. The storm scenes, as the water strieks the riverboat again and again, show that Welles may have made a fine director of action movies. And the devastation on Lees’s face at the loss of his wife is some of Shatner’s finest acting.
With its story elements of child prostitution and semi-consensual incest, ‘Prince of Tyre’ was much too controversail for Universal to even think of releasing. Any cuts they made simply made the film incoherent, and in the end they simply wrote it off. But like many films that are, for one reason or another, never released, 'Prince of Tyre' went on to have a life separate from the people who created it.
Universal sold the concept of a series about a riverboat, including the ‘Enterprise’ which stood in as the Prince of Tyre, to Revue Studios, which later evolved into Universal Television. Revue produced the series ‘Riverboat’ from 1959 to 1961.
It was occasionally shown at private screenings on the Universal lot, and greatly influenced those who saw it. Some argue ‘Chinatown’, with its own dark story about incest, and Louis Malle’s ‘Pretty Baby’ would never have been made by a mainsteream American studio without its existence. In the last year of his life, Welles was heard to say, “’Chinatown’? Polanski, Towne and Nicholson owe me big”. Rumour has it Jimmy Page was at such a screening in 1971, and was inspired to take the old Memphis Minnie blues tune ‘When The Levee Breaks’ and rearrange it for Led Zeppelin IV.
So, two amazing films, little known today but still powerful, still drawing on the Bard after all these years. I hope you’ve enjoyed these reviews.
-- Claude Hudsucker, Lost Film Reviews’
Makes me want to write the whole thing.