Production
Welles cast Joseph Cotten in the lead role, with other parts going to Mercury Theatre actors including Eustace Wyatt, Edgar Barrier, Ruth Ford, Arlene Francis and Mary Wickes. Welles' wife, Virginia Nicholson, appeared in the film under the name Anna Stafford. Bit parts were given to Welles' Mercury Theatre producer John Houseman, assistant director John Berry, composer Marc Blitzstein and the New York Herald Tribune's drama critic Herbert Drake; Welles gave himself a small role as a Keystone Kop. Among the uncredited extras for a crowd sequence was a young Judy Holliday.
Paul Dunbar, a newsreel cameraman for Pathé News, was the film's cinematographer. Location photography took place in New York City's Battery Park and Central Park. Additional shooting took place on a Hudson River day-trip excursion boat and at locations in Yonkers, New York, and Haverstraw, New York. Interior shots were set up at a studio in the Bronx, New York. For the Cuban plantation, Welles created a miniature structure next to a papier-mâché volcano, with store-bought tropical plants to suggest the exotic Caribbean flora.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)