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Briefly, I mentioned a little of what I'd discovered about the
Unenthüllte
in Castle's films. “Ah, how very clever,” Claus said, at once fascinated. “I wonder if you will not find such things in the film Olga
is bringing. There is the same power. And one thing I noticed myself. Very odd, very clever. You will see. But this is also very dangerous, don't you think, such a power to sneak inside the mind?”

“Very.”

“You must write about this.”

“I intend to.”

Claus told me that soon after Olga settled in Amsterdam following the war, she'd brought him her small collection of Castle memorabilia, asking his advice about its care and handling. There were two reels, neither of them well produced. The first had a few salvageable scenes on it, plus a vast amount of waste footage which Claus would have scrapped. But Olga refused to see any of Castle's work destroyed, so Claus edited out the good stuff and spun the rest off onto a reel of its own. This was the material Olga finally donated to the Museum of Modern Art.

The second reel was very brief, but, as Claus put it, “very powerful.” He had spliced it together with the other small excerpt to make up a single short spool. “But as you will see,” he went on, “they are separate films. It would be best, I think, to watch them that way with an intermission between.”

Olga arrived about a half hour later, bringing the reel from the bank vault in which it was kept. I was eager to learn what we were going to see. She explained. Part of the material she had to show—the better part, she thought—dated from 1938. In the summer of that year, she and Castle, along with Zip Lipsky, had filmed a number of scenes in Europe for one of the independent productions Castle was always hoping to make when time and money were available. She had no idea what the movie was; Castle rarely discussed his plans with her. When he did, it was facetiously. For example, she remembered asking that summer what the name of the movie was. His answer: “
A Damnation Worth Waiting For.
What do you think? The title alone will win us the Academy Award.”

Olga gave a little shake of the head. “You see what he was like? Well, I made up my own title.
Prince of Exile.
You will understand why when you see it.”

Castle preferred to film in Europe, she told me, because he could find cheaper production facilities there as well as greater freedom. He had friends at a number of French, German, and Danish studios whom he could often persuade to help with equipment, editing,
process work. He spent a lot of time dickering with these people, cutting petty deals that involved loans, favors, barter. Sometimes, if he had to, he would grudgingly shell out minuscule fees, but only when he'd exhausted every chance of freeloading. Olga felt it was all very demeaning.

The second film we'd be seeing was, as I hoped, a fragment of the Welles-Castle
Heart of Darkness.
This was footage shot in Mexico by Castle and Zip Lipsky. Olga had been on location with them but didn't take part in the scenes filmed there. Her part of the movie was done at RKO—on the notorious closed set, as I knew but didn't mention. I noticed that in talking about this project, Olga was more than a little ill at ease. She finished by dropping a curious remark. “We can watch it if you wish, but I don't think I am in it.”

“You don't know?”

“I don't think so,” she repeated, a strange lame note in her voice.

I wondered if she knew of any other surviving segments of the film. She thought there might be. During the years she had known him, Castle was constantly juggling film canisters, moving them in and out of warehouses, studios, or the homes of friends. He carried a list with him at all times detailing which film was where so he could lay hands on this or that project whenever the chance arose to do a little more shooting, a little more cutting. As far as she knew, not a single one of these chronically stalled productions was ever completed. At the time of his death, he might well have left dozens of reels of unfinished work squirreled away with friends and co-workers around the world.

Castle had given Olga the remaining material from the film she called
Prince of Exile
as a memento when she left for Europe at the beginning of the war. She remembered what he said when he presented her with the reel. “You see how prophetic we were? Now there is no need to finish it. The world will finish it for us.” As for the segment of
Heart of Darkness,
that was a reel of film he'd entrusted to her in London in the fall of 1941, when they met for what would be the last time. He was hurriedly passing through on his way to Zurich to raise money (so he hoped) from the
Sturmwaisen.
Olga wasn't eager to have the film dumped on her. In fact, she felt irked with Castle for asking the favor. In England, the blitz was under way; in her homeland people dear to her had been killed or imprisoned. Making movies seemed a distinctly minor matter to her just then. But Castle was insistent and as usual got his way with her. He had
said he wanted to make sure that at least some of the work was in safekeeping while he was in Zurich. So she agreed to store the film for him until he got back.

No sooner had Castle deposited the film with her than he was on his way, an abrupt, untender departure. He was having difficulty booking passage by land or air across occupied France. The last Olga heard of him, he was planning to fly to Lisbon and improvise an itinerary from there to Switzerland. He was a driven man, obsessed with the single-minded desire to make his movie. Even the war wasn't going to stand in his way.

Olga, meanwhile, was struggling with her own priorities. She was already deeply involved with the activities of the Dutch Resistance in Holland, work that would soon draw her back to her native land to join the underground. She stored Castle's film with friends, and didn't see it again until the war was over. By that time Castle was dead and these few poor reels of film were her only souvenirs of him. Since she appeared in the footage, however briefly, it assumed an emotional value for her. It commemorated her movie career as well as her love affair with Castle, both now part of a world forever lost. True, she'd made a few more pictures in Hollywood after taking part in Castle's final, abortive efforts, but those were trashy B-movies. She thought of these fragments as her last “serious” work.

From the outset, Olga had been referring to the films she was going to show me as “little pieces,” “just scraps,” “almost nothing.” Nevertheless, her story raised my expectations to a dizzy height. Perhaps I was finally going to see an example of Castle's film artistry at its best. But when I checked in at the projection booth to watch Claus setting up, my heart sank.

“Is that all?” I asked. The reel on the projector couldn't have held more than a few minutes of film.

Claus held up the box that had contained the movie, showing me the label. It read “Six Minutes Untitled.”

“Just an hors d'oeuvre,” he observed apologetically. “But it will give some idea what a feast there might have been.”

As we had agreed, Claus ran the
Prince of Exile
first. That made up the first four minutes of the program. He showed it once, then was good enough to roll it three times more for me, the last time clicking through frame by frame while I took rapid notes. But it was
the first showing that made all the difference. I simply let the film wash over me, opening every pore to its impact—the way I'd once watched the
Judas.

The first image, grainy and out of focus, was that of a bird caught in slow-motion flight against a blank, bright sky. It held the screen for nearly a minute, a mere blur of dark wings swooping, arcing. It was shot from the rear by an unsteady camera that struggled to follow it, focus-pulling into the distance as the bird diminished to a point, to nothing. There was, vaguely, a background sound through the sequence. A low rumble, maybe just empty sound track. When the bird was gone, there was a moment of blank screen, followed by a jumble of leader.

Then,
whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
an avalanche of images, double-exposed, overprinted, running at many times normal speed. It took me the better part of a minute to get a grip on this runaway movie carousel. When I did, I saw it was a collage of newsreel footage, some of it old as the Pathé Brothers. Scenes of war, mostly World War I, but here and there, material from the thirties. Horrors of the Spanish Civil War perhaps. The Japanese in China. Over and over, one saw soldiers marching, scrambling out of trenches, racing across fields. The tiny figures quick-stepped forward, backward, waved flags. Shells exploded. Planes fell from the sky. Things blew up, then—in reverse—reconstructed themselves. Refugees tore along roads, then reversed direction. The fast motion made everything comic in the extreme, lending it a silent slapstick quaintness, a visual humor only possible on film where human action can be made utterly, absurdly mechanical.

Overlaying and penetrating the battle sequences were other scenes, flashes of social violence. Riots. A lynch mob. Soldiers and police battering crowds of people. Suddenly everything stopped dead; the picture of a begrimed child alone and crying in a war-torn street held the screen. Then again the torrential rush of newsreel footage. On second viewing, I saw this was hardly as chaotic as it seemed; the images were carefully choreographed with rhythmic repetitions. Most memorably, there was a machine gunner (certainly not a newsreel excerpt but an actor shot in that mode) who sat firing directly into the camera. His image popped into view several times, mowing ‘em down on all sides. He was masked from brow to chin; the eyeholes showed no eyes.

The film—or the excerpted footage used within the film—looked to be in terrible condition, grainy and scratched, constantly jumping, going too dark, going too light. But I knew better than to take these seeming flaws at face value in a Castle movie. Every one of them might conceal a wealth of hidden imagery. As it was, Castle was drawing upon one of the unique expressive powers of film; the overall effect of the speed and inferior visual quality of what we were watching was to distance the viewer from the images, making them seem an old, old story that had been going on forever. Human folly so persistent and futile it became comic.

And there was sound, racing to keep pace with the rushing film. A superfast, very tinny tune performed on a frenzied calliope. It took me a while to register the piece. When it slowed down, I caught it. “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

The black-and-white contrast of the film began to oscillate wildly, the white becoming blindingly hot, finally filling the screen, becoming a blazing sun in the sky. The tinkling calliope faded. A crackling sound like radio static took its place. Below the sun-bright glare, a vast, empty plain appeared, a desert landscape. Then on it a long, endlessly long winding file of figures. This was a sharper version of the scene I'd just barely been able to make out in Olga's reel of waste footage at the museum. Even so, the process work here was quite poor. The marching line was obviously a superimposed shot; it jittered against the desert background.

The camera came in close, closer. The figures were children, shabby and shoeless, trudging across the Sahara waste. They were trailing behind a hooded leader who carried a heavy load on his back. All along the painful line of march, children were sinking down in the sand, expiring. As they did so, their images dissolved into the desert, devoured by the great pitiless dunes.

Then the hooded leader stopped, threw out its arms, welcoming some sight ahead. There was a rough cut, then a long tracking shot of a high stone wall that trailed off across the desert. Another rough cut. Now the children, on their knees, were lined up against the wall, holding hands. In front of them, their leader dropped his hood; it was the masked machine gunner again. He was unstrapping the heavy load from his back. It was his weapon; he was setting it up for use, an act of mass execution. His masked face filled the screen. The crackling sound grew loud and fierce, rose to a high-pitched animal
whine, then faded behind a cello performing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” now very slowly, dirgelike.

A woman's voice floated up out of the music, a mere whisper at first, speaking French. Overlapped on the sound track, it became its own counterpointing echo, repeating the words of a poem I could only catch in fragments. The voice, which I now recognized as Olga's, fell into a crooning chant, a single haunting line repeating and repeating until it was swallowed by the desert wind as the film ended. I could catch the phrase
“O Prince de I'exil”
before the voice faded away.

I spotted Olga in just the last few moments of the reel, at most a ninety-second appearance. She had indeed been a great beauty in her youth; but Castle wasn't using her for her looks here. He was after a purely dramatic effect. Heavily draped in a white robe, she sat in a bleak lunar landscape cradling a child. Their pose was that of the
Pietà.
Bleeding through the two of them in a double exposure, the desert landscape showed up as an implacable presence. But behind them, just barely visible against the darkening sky, I could pick out a pair of eyes gazing down on the scene with an expression of infinite pity. They weren't Olga's eyes; they were Sylvia Sidney's, finally placed in their rightful setting.

The expiring child stirred in Olga's arms. Her hand moved across its face, its body. Then up close, we see: she is picking at something. Worms. Maggots. They cover the child, a writhing shroud. The task is futile. The woman's eyes fill with tears. The limp body in her arms is withering away, eaten to the bone, to dust. The last shot shows her hands reaching out. The dust, all that remains of the child, blows through her fingers, swirling away, mixing with the anonymous sands of the wasteland. The scene goes dark. There is a rush of leader. End.

Thirty years after the scene had been filmed, Olga still remembered the text that accompanied it. I jotted the lines down as she repeated them for me before Claus rolled the next part of the reel.