By Stuart Mitchner

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

—Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

The consensus online is that while no one can find evidence that Freud actually made such a statement, he suggested as much in numerous texts. I’m putting it at the top of this column because I relate to finding poets and poetry, whether served up by Freud, who was born on May 6, 1856, or by Orson Welles (1915-1985), who was born on May 6, 1915, and who once said, “A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”

As for Freud being everywhere, a few minutes ago I picked up the bathroom reading copy of the March 30, 2026 New Yorker, which was open to Anthony Lane’s article on plagiarism. Midway down the second page: “It’s hardly news that the subconscious can exact a heavy cost, though even Freud would have raised an eyebrow at the amount.” Lane is talking about the “more than two million dollars” George Harrison was ordered to pay for allegedly borrowing a few notes of the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine” for his song “My Sweet Lord.” At least in this case Freud, who I emphatically do not love, helped bring the Beatles, whom I love, into the conversation.

Babe Ruth

The Babe looms large on May 6 because it was on that date in 1915 that he hit the first of his historic 714 home runs. Here’s where it gets tricky. Although I don’t love Babe Ruth, I love William Bendix, the actor who was born 120 years ago January 14 in New York City, where in the early 1920s he was a batboy for the Yankees, saw Ruth hit more than 100 home runs at Yankee Stadium, and ended up playing him in The Babe Ruth Story (1948). Put it this way: I love Bendix even more than I don’t love Freud. The closest I came to a glimmer of fondness for the author of The Interpretation of Dreams was through Randy Newman’s song, “Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America,” especially the verse beginning “Americans dream of gypsies, I have found” and ending “And little boys playing baseball in the rain.”

I just found a journal entry that explains how I feel about Bendix. I’d been jotting down my thoughts about a film noir called The Web (1947) and about my fondness for vintage Hollywood character actors, the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Gravediggers and Knockers at the Gate, the Bottoms and Bardolphs. After wandering off the subject during an inventory of the movie’s failings, I gave my attention to “the Buddha hero of the film, the great William Bendix.” My affection for Bendix derived from no single role; whether he’s playing a sadistic thug or a dope or a hard-boiled detective, what makes him loveable is knowing that he’s made of the same stuff as the guy I grew up with as Babe Ruth and Chester A. Riley (“What a revoltin’ development this is”) in the long-running radio/tv sit-com The Life of Riley.

Loving Movies

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes, “The dream is the liberation of the spirit from the pressure of external nature, a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.” Freud died in 1939, “Hollywood’s Golden Year,” which saw the release of Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, and numerous other classics that no doubt “liberated” audience spirits. Fresh in my mind at the moment, however, are the two extraordinary films my wife and I recently saw in two consecutive nights, both by the German-born Turkish director Fatih Akin. First, In July (2004), is a glorious road movie romance with elements of fantasy that provided a joyous “liberation of the spirit.” Next night it was Akin’s previous film Head-On (2000), a bruising, relentless, unsparing, fascinating adventure about people mired in something not unlike Freud’s unfortunate phrase “the fetters of matter.”

A Dream of Vienna

While I never “loved” Orson Welles, I loved what Welles once modestly referred to as “the greatest entrance there ever was,” meaning his first moment as Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949). For me, it was more than an entrance. It was an appearance. More still, it was a revelation, when all the romance and mystery I’d only been aware of at that point in my movie-watching life, then in its infancy (I was 11), found a face, a presence, a focus for my naive fascination. Until then, heroes on the screen were stock figures going through amusing motions: cowboys, villains, good guys, bad guys. This was something strange and new. Harry Lime was dead and buried, for one thing. Everybody in Vienna said so. He’d been hit by a car. Or had he?

What heightened and illuminated the moment was the bombed-out European city of night surrounding it, the stark vistas of crumbling terraces, deep shadows, the blackest deepest blacks I’d ever seen, the way light gleamed on cobblestone pavement, the sense of menace in the war-haunted metropolis, the excitement of the name, Vienna, and the zither music that seemed to anticipate and express every last nuance of intrigue. This was my first taste of the exotic, the unknown, the Other.

To appreciate the impact of his appearance, you have to believe that Harry was indeed dead and that he had a girlfriend, a sullen beauty named Anna (Alida Valli) whose cat was fond of Harry. And late one night, outside her building, you hear footsteps echoing on the pavement and see the cat in a pool of light at the base of a dark doorway where someone is standing. The cat is grooming itself, very much at home. Suddenly a window in the building opposite opens and a light falls on the face of the man in the doorway. It’s Harry Lime back from the dead, slyly almost smugly alive, his face bright and strange, lit with in a kind of cold radiance. The zither takes a run up your spine, putting a chill on the chill already climbing the back of your neck. Harry’s smiling, he seems about to speak, as if to say, “Yes, old friend, it’s me, and I’ve seen and done things you’ll never know or want to know.”

Loving Welles?

As for Freud’s “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me,” I can imagine Henry David Thoreau and Marlene Dietrich connecting with some version of the same idea. The author of Walden and the star of Shanghai Express both died on this day, Thoreau in 1862, Dietrich in 1992. Dietrich reminds me of one moment when you can almost love Orson Welles as the monster of corruption embodied by Sheriff Hank Quinlan in Welles’ crazed masterpiece Touch of Evil. And you have to love Quinlan’s old flame Dietrich when she gazes at him and says, “You’re a mess, honey.”

The Last Show

Orson Welles died on October 10, 1985, only hours after taping an interview with Merv Griffin. On a YouTube transcript he tells Griffin how it feels to be 70 and looks back on his life and career (“I was awful busy and awful lucky”). Such is the power of his presence, there’s no sense of a declining force; if anything, he gives the impression of entering his eighth decade still busy and still lucky. Nothing in his manner, his way of speaking, his frankness and clarity and his sense of humor about himself, would suggest that this is his last public appearance. And busy he was, right up to the end. After taping the Griffin show, he put in some time at the typewriter working on stage directions for the television special, Orson Welles’s Magic Show, then to bed never to wake.