Black Magic (Edward Small Productions, United Artists, filmed 1947, released 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

So is the film Charles and I watched immediately after it, the 1947 production (though not released until 1949) Black Magic, shot in Italy under the auspices of producer Edward Small, who designed a huge skyscraper-like logo topped with his initials in giant size to compensate for the literal meaning of his name. (Actually the big initials “ES” atop the skyscraper looked an awful lot like a swastika to me – an oddly Nazi-esque logo for an American producer to be using in the immediate aftermath of the war.) The credits list Gregory Ratoff as line producer and director, but according to Nancy Guild, the leading lady on the film, Ratoff spent the shoot sitting in his director’s chair reading newspapers while Welles blocked the actors, placed the cameras and did all the other normal functions of a director. So, as I commented the last time I wrote about Black Magic (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/09/rediscovered-orson-welles-classic-black.html), it seems odd that Welles fans and scholars have spent years attempting to locate and piece together such Welles arcana as Too Much Johnson, Don Quixote and The Other Side of the Wind while ignoring the “lost” Orson Welles film that’s been hiding in plain sight, like Poe’s purloined letter, all this time.

And while Nancy Guild’s account of its making has been questioned, it’s hard to see why she would have lied in Welles’ favor since through virtually all of the shoot she was fending off unwanted sexual advances from him; like her character in the film, she preferred the hunkier, more conventionally attractive second male lead, Frank Latimore – though here, as in The Third Man, Welles was still able to get his weight down to be a genuinely hunky, sexy leading man. Filmed in Italy (though most of the story takes place in France), Black Magic begins with a prologue set in 1848 in which Alexandre Dumas fils (Raymond Burr, who looks like odd casting indeed as a writer — one expects his dad to tell him to go to law school instead) visits Alexandre Dumas père (Berry Kroeger), and Dumas père complains that Joseph Balsamo, a.k.a. Count Cagliostro, the central character of his new book Memoirs of a Physician, seems to be taking him over and writing him instead of the other way around.

Kroeger’s voice appears throughout the film as a voice-over narration explaining the life story of Cagliostro, including how as a boy (played by Annielo Mele, whom Welles befriended on the set) Joseph had correctly foretold that a seemingly healthy baby was about to die. When the baby died Joseph and his Gypsy parents were arrested, and on orders of the Vicomte du Montaigne (Steven Bekassy) his parents are hanged and Joseph is whipped and is about to have his eyes put out when a Gypsy raiding party rescues him. He flees and ultimately he, his foster father Gitano (Akim Tamiroff) and Gitano’s natural daughter Zoraida (Valentina Cortese) join a carnival and use Balsamo’s powers of hypnotism to sell patent medicine. When a customer accidentally gets lamp fluid instead of the alleged cure and drinks it, Joseph is able to hypnotize her back to health. This is witnessed by Franz Anton Mesmer (Charles Goldner), who sees Joseph as a natural practitioner of the art he’s been studying for years – though the script has him describe the art as “hypnotism” when the real Mesmer himself called what he was doing “animal magnetism,” or sometimes just “magnetism.” (My husband Charles pointed this out to me the last time we watched this film together and I accordingly posted it as a “goof” on imdb.com. Another contributor noted that the nameplate on Dumas père’s door spells his name in the British version, “Alexander,” though the French “Alexandre” is listed in the opening credits, and one thing this film gets right that James Whale’s The Great Garrick got wrong is that the roadside sign telling how far we are from Paris is in leagues, not kilometers. The metric system was invented as part of the French Revolution.)

Mesmer tests Cagliostro’s abilities when a nobleman who’s shaking with palsy comes to see him for treatment and Cagliostro cures him. Mesmer hopes they’ll be partners and will explore the possibilities of their new science, but Cagliostro flees, leaving Mesmer a note saying, “I would rather have future rewards than future acclaim.” Cagliostro becomes a celebrated healer and mystic, traveling the world (or at least Europe) until he finally winds up back in France, where he finds his old enemy, the Vicomte de Montaigne – the man who ordered his parents hanged – up to no good. Montaigne has kidnapped a young woman named Lorenza (Nancy Guild) with an uncanny resemblance to Marie Antoinette (also Nancy Guild) and intends to use her for some intrigue against the French monarchy. At the time Louis XV is still on the throne so Marie Antoinette is simply the Dauphine (wife of the crown prince), not the queen, and the real power behind the throne is Louis XV’s mistress, Madame Du Barry (Margot Grahame, who turns in an impressive performance even though hardly in the same league as Dolores Del Rio in William Dieterle’s superb and little known biopic of her from Warner Bros. in 1934). Cagliostro becomes obsessed with Lorenza – much to the disappointment of Zoraida, who’s naturally had an unrequited crush on him all these years – and he determines to join Montaigne’s plot and double-cross him at an appropriate time, so he can get a place at the French court and get all his enemies – Montaigne, the guardsman Gilbert de Rezen (Frank Latimore) who’s Lorenza’s true love, and Marie Antoinette herself – disgraced and hopefully executed.

The plot involves an object that really existed – a fabulous and ridiculously expensive necklace commissioned from the jeweler Boehmer (Giuseppe Varni) by Du Barry, whom (as in the Dieterle film and apparently as in real life as well) Marie Antoinette has determined to drive from court because she finds her immoral. Montaigne and Du Barry plot a scheme in which they will embezzle one million livres from public funds to buy this insane bauble for Marie Antoinette (my understanding is the real Boehmer necklace had been commissioned by a super-rich Parisian nobleman either for his wife or a mistress, but he’d reneged on the deal and Boehmer sought to recoup his investment by unloading the piece on the Queen), and Lorenza will wear it in public so the people of Paris think Marie Antoinette used a huge amount of public money to buy this while many of the French people are starving. This will supposedly break up the marriage of Louis and Marie Antoinette and allow Du Barry to remain in court, but before the trap can be sprung Louis XV dies, Louis XVI becomes king, Marie Antoinette becomes queen and banishes Du Barry from court. Cagliostro intends to make it look like Montaigne organized the whole plot to buy the necklace for Marie Antoinette because they were lovers and this would please her, and he’s able to rouse the Parisian populace to the edge of revolt by spreading the story that the queen got this insanely expensive necklace as a love token, so she’s not only impoverishing the French people but she’s an adultress as well.

Along the way Cagliostro hypnotizes the unwilling Lorenza to marry him, and though he’s arrested he looks like he’s going to prevail at the court hearing – mainly because he’s hypnotized all the witnesses into saying what he wants them to say (as I noted when I wrote about this film before, Cagliostro gets plenty of speeches in which he boasts of his ability to shape and mold public opinion, and one can’t help but recall Welles’ similar boast in Citizen Kane that people would think “what I tell ’em to think!”) – and indeed he gets so narcissistic and self-absorbed that he’s convinced he will be able to stir up the masses into starting the French Revolution about a decade or so early and make himself king of France, with Lorenza as his queen. Then a deus ex machina shows up in the person of Mesmer, who’s able to use the Boehmer necklace to hypnotize Cagliostro in court and get him to confess both Montaigne’s and his entire scheme. Cagliostro tries to flee but he’s confronted by Gilbert and the two have a swordfight (with Welles pretty obviously being stunt-doubled; even at his most relatively slender, he was never an athlete), though it’s unclear who finally does kill him: Gilbert, his foster dad Gitano or Gitano’s daughter Zoraida. Anyway, Cagliostro ends with a spectacular fall down from a building whose roof had been the locale of his swordfight with Gilbert and his confrontations with the people who raised him (this too must have been stunt-doubled, with a fairly obvious dummy for the actual fall), and the restive people of Paris go back in their holes and wait for another decade or so to start their Revolution.

Black Magic is a typical Orson Welles movie – even though someone else’s name is on the directorial credit – with all its chiaroscuro lighting, vertiginous tracking shots, swirling aura of fate and almost operatic intensity of acting. Welles said later that making Black Magic was the most fun he’d ever had doing a film, and I can readily believe that; his performance is hammy and overacted, but in such a jubilant way it works. It’s also the sort of performance that deserves the term “theatrical” because Cagliostro, at least as depicted here, is so in love with his own sheer theatricality one expects him to ham it up both on stage and in supposedly “real” life. As part of Cagliostro’s act, Welles also got to do sleight-of-hand and other stage magician’s tricks on camera – Welles was proud of his skills as an amateur magician and often asked that scenes be written in his films where he could show off as a magician. I first saw Black Magic in my teens and missed the opening credits, so it took me a while to figure out what was going on and even longer to figure out what it was and where it fit in the Welles canon, so it was gratifying when I started reading the Welles biographies (notably Frank Brady’s, one of the few which gives this film the attention it deserves) and ultimately got a chance to see this excellent film again.

Black Magic is an Orson Welles-directed film in all but name, and the combination of fustian energy he gives to his performance and fireworks sparked by his direction make it fully a part of Welles’ directorial canon even though someone else got the directorial credit. And Welles makes the part of Cagliostro so much his own it’s hard to imagine the two other actors who were seriously considered for the role at one time or another. In 1932 Universal considered producing a Cagliostro film as part of their first horror cycle with Boris Karloff in the lead, and while that project never materialized bits of it ended up in John L. Balderston’s script for The Mummy – particularly the depiction of Ardath Bey, a.k.a. Imhotep the revivified mummy, as a master hypnotist who could control people’s minds long-distance. Then in the mid-1940’s Edward Small’s original plan for this Cagliostro project was to use Douglas Sirk as director and George Sanders as star – the Sirk-Sanders collaborations Summer Storm (1944), A Scandal in Paris (1945) and Lured (1947) had been artistic successes, and at least the first two had done well at the box office too – but after watching Welles in the role it’s hard to see the more sympathetic, pathos-ridden Karloff or the drier, more sardonic Sanders pulling it off as well.