Black Magic (1949)

Black Magic (1949) is an historical Orson Welles film noir hypnosis ham and history fest of magical and wildly entertaining crowd and close up, sumptuous set piece dark and magical fun-based frolics of the late forties, with some Dumas-based class projections as the piece adopts the narrative of the novel of the same by Alexander Pere.

For oddity and oddity alone the first scene of this spectacular cast of hundreds of extras spectacular festacular magicianical historical Francophile tale of society ambition and absolute Welles-ian pride of personality leading to a hubris-driven fall, has for no apparent reason other than the whimsie or the dandification of the reels, an entretemps between Dumas Snr played with bold waggery by Berry Kroeger, and Dumas Jnr, played with gentle ungruffery by the normally gruffed up Raymond Burr.

The two men gravely quip in the candlelight, both clearly having been coached by Orson Welles a few seconds earlier — so much is manifest.

Perhaps it is a fact among the noireaux and others in the know that if Orson Welles is in a movie it doesn't matter of someone else's name springs up on the directorial.

Initially conceived under the title Cagliostro, the film that would ultimately be released as Black Magic underwent a protracted gestation, reflecting both the intricate vicissitudes of 1940s Hollywood and the broader transatlantic film marketplace.

Producer Edward Small commenced development as early as 1943, attempting to secure luminaries such as Charles Boyer, Akim Tamiroff, and later George Sanders, while directors ranging from Irving Pichel to Douglas Sirk were intermittently associated. Numerous alternate casting ideas—such as J. Carrol Naish as the novelist Alexandre Dumas, Sr., or Louis Hayward as the titular protagonist—testify to the peripatetic nature of the enterprise. Hedda Hopper even proposed Orson Welles for the eponymous role as early as 1943, although this intriguing suggestion lay dormant for several years.

Cagliostro as Wellesian Doppelgänger or something like The Charisma of Fraudulence, some ideas for framing this, perhaps.

In considering Welles’s embodiment of Count Cagliostro, one is immediately struck by the extent to which the role functions as an uncanny echo of Welles’s own career.

Joseph Balsamo, reborn as Cagliostro, is a self-fashioned figure, his identity sutured from illusion, performance, and opportunism. Just as Welles—forever the wunderkind auteur of Citizen Kane — would spend decades oscillating between genuine artistic aspiration and the necessity of self-mythologizing, so too does Cagliostro navigate between healer, charlatan, mystic, and social climber.

This metatextual mirroring is all the more poignant given that Welles’s performance takes place within a film fundamentally concerned with simulacra: doubles, imposters, and false monarchs populate the narrative as it veers toward the infamous "Affair of the Diamond Necklace," itself a historical event mired in fraudulence and the manipulation of appearance.

This duality finds one of its most profound expressions in the performance style Welles adopts. His Cagliostro is not merely a man playing a part; rather, he is a man playing a man who has invented himself as legend.

Every smirk, every arching of the eyebrow, every hypnotic gaze into the camera becomes an act of meta-performance, a mise en abyme of theatricality. Welles, a lifelong student of magic, illusion, and artifice, brings to the screen an awareness of the con as an aesthetic practice.

Romany tragedy in Black Magic (1949)

In this way, Black Magic becomes a cinematic meditation on the ethics of performance itself—who deceives whom, and to what end? And does the efficacy of the deception outweigh the moral compromise inherent within it?

The Problematic of Auteurial Specter: Who Directs Black Magic?! Good question for the noirs to mull.

It is impossible to engage in a thoroughgoing analysis of Black Magic without broaching the contentious question of authorship. Though officially directed by Gregory Ratoff, numerous accounts suggest that Welles exercised a degree of informal, perhaps subversive, control over key sequences.

The notion that Welles ghost-directed portions of Black Magic—whether formally acknowledged or not—reinforces the specter of the auteur haunting a film to which he ostensibly only lent his physical presence. If we are to apply the more capacious definitions of auteur theory, which have evolved to accommodate collaborative and contested creative environments, then Black Magic becomes a palimpsest, overwritten with Wellesian flourishes despite its ostensible Ratoffian framework.

This surreptitious directorial imprint is perhaps most palpable in the visual grammar of the film. While its aesthetic oscillates between the sumptuous and the threadbare—a fact often critiqued by contemporary reviewers as symptomatic of its uneven production values—it is within the chiaroscuro lighting, the lingering close-ups on Welles’s face, and the baroque framing of certain set pieces that one discerns the auteur’s hand.

Indeed, the courtroom scenes, with their theatrical grandeur, their psychological tension, and their spatial dynamics, evoke memories of The Stranger (1946) and anticipate later Wellesian visual experiments in Touch of Evil (1958).

Thus, Black Magic exists as a liminal artifact, its direction officially attributed to another, but its soul undeniably inscribed with Wellesian motifs.

So goes, with or without Foucault, the discourse of hypnosis with its instant period ramifications surrounding the trickeries of power, subjugation, and cinematic spectacle. All of this is in vision in Black Magic (1949) and augmented by the Welles.

Hypnosis, both literal and metaphorical, functions as the organizing principle of Black Magic and serves as the narrative mechanism through which Cagliostro exerts his influence.

Yet, more than a mere plot device, hypnosis here becomes a meta-commentary on cinema itself: the act of watching Welles hypnotize his victims parallels the viewer’s own subjugation to the silver screen’s power.

In this reading, Cagliostro's mesmeric gaze is not unlike the cinematic apparatus, entrancing its spectators into willing belief, suspending their disbelief through the dexterity of performance and spectacle.

Welles's Cagliostro, much like the historical figure of the real-life Joseph Balsamo, weaponizes belief as a form of control. Through the mechanics of suggestion, he induces characters to act against their own volition, surrendering to narratives he constructs in real time.

This resonates uncannily with the position Welles himself occupied within the culture industry: the boy genius who persuaded the world to believe in him, the showman who orchestrated media events (such as the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast) that blurred the lines between truth and fiction.

Thus, and thusly thus, as the untidy user of the word thus likes to thusly state, thus, thus, thus Black Magic becomes a filmic meditation on the performativity of authority, with Welles not merely acting as Cagliostro but re-enacting the cycles of belief and manipulation that defined his own fraught relationship with public and critical reception.

The film, the self same and again of Wellesian interest, but also of course of note to all who recognise the taste of fantasy distinct to the 1940s frame, we may take of Black Magic and the Politics of Historical (Re)Construction.

The film's historical setting—pre-revolutionary France, on the cusp of cataclysm—invites consideration of its political subtexts.

At one level, Black Magic can be viewed as an exploration of societal decadence and the inevitability of collapse, its courtly intrigues and superficial grandeur masking systemic rot. But at another, more theoretical level, it interrogates the uses of history itself: to what extent are the past's narratives curated, manipulated, and repurposed for present ends?

Alexandre Dumas père, in his fictionalizations of Cagliostro and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, already engaged in a form of historiographic metafiction. Black Magic, as an adaptation of Dumas, becomes thus doubly removed from historical "truth," a simulacrum of a simulacrum, or what Jean Baudrillard might call a hyperreal event—a copy without an original.

Within this framework, Welles’s performance takes on added resonance. He is not merely playing a man who distorts reality but is himself part of a cinematic apparatus that re-inscribes historical memory according to the logics of melodrama, spectacle, and commerce.

The self-referentiality of the casting—Welles, the arch-fabulist, embodying the ultimate conman—reinforces the film’s interrogation of authenticity, and by extension, the reliability of all historical narratives, whether personal, national, or cinematic.

For too long, Black Magic has languished on the periphery of serious Wellesian scholarship, relegated to footnotes or dismissed as an incidental curiosity.

Yet, as this analysis has sought to demonstrate, the film is ripe for re-evaluation. Not only does it afford Welles an opportunity to channel his most extravagant performative instincts, but it also provides a thematic crucible in which his lifelong obsessions—illusion, power, performance, and authorship—coalesce with striking clarity.

In this respect, Black Magic may be understood as both a literal and symbolic expression of Welles's artistic predicament: an actor playing a magician who mesmerizes his audience, within a film whose very existence is a kind of cinematic sleight of hand, teetering between legitimate auteurist endeavor and opportunistic melodrama.

That Welles manages to render such a role not merely convincing but profoundly magnetic is testament to his unique, irreplicable alchemy as both performer and mythmaker.

Thus, again thus, perhaps it is time to accord Black Magic the recognition it deserves, not merely as a "minor" work in the Wellesian pantheon, but as an essential site where the blurred boundaries between performance and reality, history and fiction, actor and auteur, are laid bare in all their bewitching, hypnotic splendor.

Across the Atlantic, the prospect of a competing Cagliostro emerged in post–World War II Europe, where French producer Henry de Saint-Girons announced in April 1946 a modestly budgeted film to be directed by Robert Péguy in color.

This endeavor was soon superseded by a more ambitious initiative from André Paulvé’s DisCina. As details crystallized in mid-April 1947, Paulvé declared from New York his intention to co-produce the project with Italian entities, facilitated by director Francesco De Robertis and the Scalera studio.

While discussions advanced regarding potential French leads, the production timeline overlapped conspicuously with Small’s resurgent campaign in the United States, thus setting the stage for an eventual consolidation of efforts.

By the spring of 1947, American filmmaker Greg Ratoff was officially attached to helm Small’s version. Initially contemplating on-location shooting in France (notably at locales associated with Giuseppe Balsamo, a.k.a. Count Cagliostro) and exploring marquee stars such as Paul Henreid or James Mason, Ratoff soon discovered logistical and economic impediments.

Small’s inclination to film in Mexico was abandoned when soaring costs proved prohibitive, prompting a decisive shift to Italy. This move aligned with Scalera Studios’ parallel project on Cagliostro, enabling Small effectively to take over their production pipeline.

Ratoff, traveling from Mexico directly to Rome in mid-July, found the Italian filmmaking ecosystem conducive to considerable cost-saving measures. Equipment and human resources, including extras and specialized craftspeople, were markedly more economical than their North American equivalents.

Orson Welles formally entered the project in September 1947. Small’s strategy of allowing Welles to immerse himself in the Dumas source material before announcing Ratoff as director proved instrumental in securing his participation.

Welles, who had nurtured an enduring professional friendship with Ratoff, evidently relished the opportunity to collaborate. Supporting performers such as Frank Latimore and Nancy Guild were likewise imported from Twentieth Century-Fox, indicating a significant synergy between Hollywood studios.

Principal photography occupied Scalera’s Rome facilities from October 1947 through January 1948, supplemented by extensive location footage at evocative Italian landmarks, including the Villa d’Este gardens and the Royal Palace of Caserta.

Although Edward Small refrained from transatlantic travel due to a personal aversion to flying, footage returned to Hollywood for evaluation.

At this juncture, Charles Bennett—who had scripted the film—was summoned to author and direct additional scenes when some material was deemed unsatisfactory.

Despite rumors that Welles himself directed selected passages in Rome, he reportedly acquiesced to Bennett’s requests for reshoots with minimal objection, declaring himself “a very good soldier.”

Ultimately, Black Magic secured distribution from United Artists under particularly favorable conditions: the studio consented to a 25-percent profit share in lieu of their customary 27.5 percent. A $250,000 promotional campaign, orchestrated by Monroe, Greenthal and Company, underscored the film’s hypnotic theme by dispatching professional hypnotists to engage with journalists and replicate “buried alive” stunts featured onscreen.

Upon its August 17, 1949, U.S. release—spanning some 400 key cities—Black Magic garnered a mixed critical reception yet opened in first place at the domestic box office. Its cultural footprint extended beyond cinematic circles: Davide Ferrario’s 1995 novel Dissolvenza al nero (subsequently adapted into the 2006 film Fade to Black) recast Welles’s Roman sojourn within a murder mystery scenario.

Additionally, an issue of Superman (No. 62, January–February 1950) depicts a fictionalized Welles discovering a Martian incursion while filming Black Magic, thus weaving the project into a playful continuum of American pop-culture mythos.

Taken together, the transcontinental evolution of Black Magic—from multiple nascent Cagliostro adaptations to a consolidated production exploiting Italy’s cost-effectiveness—underscores the era’s hybrid studio practices, wherein Hollywood entrepreneurship meshed with European resources, and global marquee names like Orson Welles capitalized on the cinematic synergy emerging from postwar alliances.

Emerging in the milieu shaped by the New Deal and the populist momentum of the Federal Theatre Project, the Mercury Theatre constituted a valiant, if ultimately ephemeral, manifestation of Popular Front idealism in the performing arts.

Yet, yet, yet and more yet, yet again, and yet, despite its professed autonomy, the Mercury was inexorably tethered to the very economic and critical structures it had sought to transcend—reviews, corporate sponsorships, box-office exigencies, and Hollywood studios.

This structural dependency foreshadowed its eventual dissolution, curtailing the collaborative synergy that had defined Welles’s creative ethos in the 1930s. By the time he was directing Citizen Kane, the socio-historical tides were realigning, rendering the existence of such quasi-collectivist experiments ever more precarious.

John Houseman—Welles’s colleague from their Federal Theatre days—articulated the complex dynamic in his retrospections. Reflecting on a succession of politically engaged productions (including the Mercury’s), Houseman lamented the contraction of that immediate sense of historical participation as global crises superseded domestic tumult in the headlines.

The momentum that had once galvanized the theatre, bolstered by Depression-era cultural policies, seemed increasingly anachronistic. The intensification of international anxieties—Nazi aggression, the tribulations of Soviet purges, the Spanish Civil War, and apprehensions culminating in the Munich Agreement—rendered the once-galvanizing domestic impetus less resonant.

Houseman’s disillusionment anticipated the transformations that soon befell the Mercury and, more generally, the left-liberal theatrical coalition of the 1930s.

Welles, for his part, preserved a measure of his earlier show business maverick spirit as well as his inclination toward socio-political engagement, even once his collaborative ventures had fragmented.

Although the Mercury Theatre disbanded, Welles refused to retreat wholly into cinematic conventionality. Following Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, he explored topical narratives in films such as The Stranger (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

His adaptation of Macbeth on a modest budget further testified to his persistent commitment to artistic innovation. Meanwhile, he remained energetically involved in radio, stage, and sporadic attempts to resurrect some version of the Mercury aesthetic.

His abiding political activism continued unabated: he campaigned extensively for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth term, publicly aligned himself with progressive forces like Henry Wallace, and, in a singular move, substituted for FDR during a Hotel Astor debate against Thomas Dewey.

A critical window into Welles’s political mindset during this transitional era is afforded by the columns he penned for the New York Post from January to June 1945. Although they initially bore a folksy, almanac-style format replete with whimsical observations, household tips, and playful celebrity commentary, these columns gradually morphed into fervent editorials that mirrored Welles’s earnest liberal convictions.

Written against the backdrop of FDR’s final inauguration, the last phase of World War II, and the incipient formation of the United Nations, these commentaries showcase Welles’s apprehensions about the erosion of the New Deal’s social progress and the looming specter of global antagonisms—particularly between the Allied powers and the Soviet Union.

From the outset, Welles advanced the position that politics was not a specialized vocation reserved for professional politicians but a universal imperative.

He harked back to the “disaster” of the 1920s, when political disengagement among ordinary citizens ceded excessive latitude to entrenched elites. In this spirit, the early columns were intentionally lighthearted—peppered with raillery against Westbrook Pegler, defense of Frank Sinatra, and mild rebukes of figures like Noël Coward—thereby enabling Welles to cultivate a broad audience.

Yet, with Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, a discernible tonal pivot ensued. Welles’s columns, now under the heading “Orson Welles Today,” relinquished their mild anecdotal tenor in favor of a more urgent, polemical register.

The transformation of world affairs served as the catalyst. FDR’s passing, coupled with the intensifying Cold War dynamic, turned the United Nations Conference in San Francisco into a crucible for ideological factionalism.

Welles perceived in real time the emergence of a “Red Scare” discourse, wherein communism was cast as the paramount menace, overshadowing the continuing dangers of fascist ideologies that, in his view, had not been definitively vanquished by the Allied victory.

In The Stranger, for example, Welles dramatized the notion that fascist remnants might persist surreptitiously and needed to be confronted in mainstream American settings. His columns corroborate that impetus, reflecting his anxiety that reactionary forces at home and abroad would co-opt the rhetorical triumphs of World War II to impede the further expansion of democracy and social reform.

Consistent with his robustly left-liberal orientation, Welles exhorted the government to retain wartime economic regulations, particularly price controls, warning that an abrupt return to laissez-faire conditions would embolden predatory business interests and jeopardize gains made by labor and marginalized communities.

His endorsement of Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s successor epitomized his quest to ensure that the momentum of the New Deal would not be squandered. Nevertheless, the Truman administration’s more cautious approach worried him, prompting calls for ordinary citizens to exercise consistent, vocal pressure if they wished to continue progressive trajectories.

In the international arena, Welles’s prime concern lay with how the fledgling United Nations might fortify genuine global democracy rather than merely consolidate the power of a few hegemonic states. Attending the Pan American War and Peace conference in Mexico City, Welles critically observed how rhetorical enthusiasm for revolution and economic reform clashed with entrenched oligarchic interests and U.S. economic neo-colonialism.

He was especially disconcerted by the readiness of “State Department millionaires” to strike bargains with so-called revolutionary leaders, themselves often possessing considerable wealth and representing repressive governments.

For Welles, such contradictions echoed the incongruity between America’s self-professed commitment to liberty abroad and its ongoing racial injustice and violence at home. He lamented the proliferation of lynchings and pervasive segregation, underscoring that these domestic failures undermined U.S. moral authority in the international realm.

Welles’s commentaries on contemporary art and literature similarly betray a pronounced socio-political lens. He singled out the Mexican muralists—Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros—for particular attention, hailing their revolutionary zeal (especially Siqueiros’s) as emblematic of genuinely “committed” creativity.

By contrast, he took a critical stance toward cultural artifacts that, in his estimation, indulged American self-congratulation while overlooking systemic inequities.

Although he admired John Hersey’s narrative craft in A Bell for Adano, he found the novel’s popularity symptomatic of a complacent conviction that the United States held an exclusive claim to democratic virtue.

Far more deserving of public attention, he opined, was Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which he recommended as a much-needed corrective to facile assumptions about racial progress.

By the summer of 1945, as Welles composed his final dispatches from San Francisco, he exuded a foreboding sense that the year’s heady hopes would devolve into acrimonious superpower rivalry.

His reportage on the diplomatic intrigues around the formation of the United Nations highlights the ubiquitous anti-Soviet rhetoric among U.S. officials and journalists. Senator Vandenberg, Averell Harriman, and Representative Clare Boothe Luce epitomized the rightward shift in public discourse.

What had begun in January as an auspicious, celebratory phase of American history, heralded by FDR’s fourth inaugural, now seemed fraught with internal contradictions and unfulfilled commitments to genuine world democracy.

And some of this is magic too, or at least the second entry in the tag-alogue of lobby and advertorial fantasy that was intended in its day to tease and tempt one on, hypnotically to the cinema seat, and look and listen:

...It Will Hold You in its Spell!
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In sum, the Mercury Theatre’s dissolution and Welles’s subsequent arc typify the trajectory of leftist cultural activism in the face of mounting institutional realignments. Though initially energized by New Deal frameworks and radical collectives such as the Federal Theatre Project, the Mercury and its kindred projects encountered systemic dependencies that proved insurmountable in an era increasingly dominated by corporate media and shifting geopolitical imperatives.

Welles’s own evolution, as documented in his public commentary, foregrounds the tension between the high hopes of 1930s Popular Front engagement and the stark realities of postwar conservatism. His columns furnish vivid testimony to his enduring conviction that art, if authentically attuned to its epoch, must serve as a vehicle for scrutinizing power relations, advocating social justice, and catalyzing political introspection.

Yet, by mid-1945, the forces coalescing around the nascent Cold War had begun eroding the bedrock of that conviction, signifying a more fractious cultural-political landscape in which Welles would henceforth operate as an increasingly isolated, if still irrepressibly vocal, agent of critique.

Black Magic (1949) is tagged as a mob noir, which follows crowd movement in the movies of the 1940 to 1960 vintage, and there are substantial crowd movements in this picture, as there tend to be in the historical film — a fascinating but true semantic.

The idea and it is a fair one, that a mass of humanity, in pose, in fig and in type, acting as it does as a character, is a perfectly sound way of representing the notion of history itself.

As a man of the theatre, Welles was also in a very fundamental way a magician, and most of the theater, film, and television shows he directed have a spellbinding quality, making use of black art, mirrors, trap doors, hypnotic lighting, and various sorts of camera trickery. Where his work as an actor is concerned, one place where this tendency is especially evident is Gregory Ratoff ’s somewhat campy but enjoyable film Black Magic (1949), a few scenes of which Welles also directed. Welles stars as the eighteenth-century mountebank Cagliostro, who brings Marie Antoinette’s entire court under his hypnotic spell. He’s repeatedly seen from a low angle, towering over the other players, wearing black tights and earrings, flashing his eyes, giving full vent to quasi-Shakespearian rhetoric. He must have relished playing an ego-maniacal, carnival-show actor who makes everybody believe he has magical powers. The movie even gives him a chance to exhibit a few sleight-of-hand effects unaided by camera or cutting.

The Magic World of Orson Welles, James Naremore

Black Magic (1949) and its shadowy, contested place within film noir history is that the film functions as a phantasmic inversion of noir itself—a genre obsessed with moral ambiguity, deception, and fate—by transposing these quintessentially modern anxieties into the ornate, deceptive theater of 18th-century France.

Here, Orson Welles’s Cagliostro becomes not merely a conman, but the ultimate noir antihero displaced in time: a man whose trauma propels him into a self-destructive pursuit of power, a figure of hypnotic manipulation whose gaze ensnares both his victims and the audience itself.

Yah my noireaux buddies, Black Magic is less a costume melodrama and more an allegory of noir’s darkest philosophical preoccupations: identity as performance, the inescapability of the past, and the fatal seduction of illusion.

Welles, embodying the magician who believes his own lies, mirrors the doomed noir protagonist chasing an unattainable dream, spiraling into existential ruin. If The Third Man locates noir in the ruins of postwar Vienna, Black Magic does something more daring: it smuggles noir’s fatalistic heart into the powdered wigs and candlelit chambers of the ancien régime, exposing the genre’s true essence as a timeless nightmare of duplicity, desire, and inevitable downfall.

Black Magic (1949)

Directed by Gregory Ratoff and Orson Welles (uncredited)

Screenplay by Charles Bennett, Richard Schayer | Based on Mémoires d'un médecin: Joseph Balsamo