A newspaper tycoon dies alone in his pleasure palace, whispering the name of a childhood sled (1941)
Citizen Kane — his first feature, made at twenty-five; the sled is Rosebud.
Film · Hollywood
Orson Welles
1915–1985 · American
Classical Hollywood; deep-focus modernism
Orson Welles came to Hollywood at twenty-four after a career as a theatre and radio prodigy, and made a debut feature that is routinely called the best film ever made. Deep focus, ceilinged sets, overlapping dialogue and violent low angles were his signature. The studios recut or abandoned much of what followed, and he spent his last thirty years acting and narrating to finance films he often could not finish.
How to spot them
- ▸Deep focus and wide-angle lenses, with ceilings visible above the actors — Gregg Toland's photography on his debut
- ▸Overlapping, radio-trained dialogue and layered sound
- ▸A story told through the conflicting testimony of witnesses
- ▸Enormous bravura long takes, and later a jagged, fragmented editing style
- ▸His own voice: a bass instrument used for narration, advertisements and Shakespeare alike
Key films
The genteel decline of a midwestern family, taken out of his hands and recut while he was in Brazil (1942)
The Magnificent Ambersons — roughly forty minutes were cut and destroyed, and a new ending shot without him.
A shoot-out among mirrors in a funfair, and a wife who is not what she seems (1947)
The Lady from Shanghai — made with Rita Hayworth, whose red hair the studio was furious to see cut and bleached.
A Moorish general and a fatal handkerchief, shot piecemeal over three years, one scene staged in a Mogador bathhouse for want of costumes (1951)
Othello — it shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1952 under the Moroccan flag.
A car bomb on a Mexican border town, opened by a three-minute crane shot, with a corrupt and bloated police captain (1958)
Touch of Evil — he played Hank Quinlan; Universal recut it, and a 1998 restoration followed his 58-page memo.
Shakespeare's fat knight assembled from five plays, with a muddy, clanking battle filmed in Spain (1965)
Chimes at Midnight — he called Falstaff the greatest part he ever played and the film his best.
A playful essay on an art forger, a literary hoaxer, and the director's own promise to tell the truth for one hour (1973)
F for Fake — his last completed feature.
A radio play that convinced listeners the Martians had landed in New Jersey (1938)
The War of the Worlds broadcast, by his Mercury Theatre on the Air — not a film, but the event that made him famous enough to be given Hollywood.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on 6 May 1915; died in Los Angeles on 10 October 1985
- •His Mercury Theatre 'voodoo' Macbeth of 1936 was staged in Harlem with an all-Black cast and set in Haiti
- •RKO gave him an unprecedented contract with final cut for his first film — a freedom he never had again
- •Citizen Kane won a single Academy Award, for Best Original Screenplay, shared with Herman J. Mankiewicz; whether Welles wrote it is a long-running quarrel, argued over by Pauline Kael and Peter Bogdanovich
- •William Randolph Hearst, whose life the film echoed, tried to suppress it and banned mention of it in his newspapers
- •Citizen Kane topped the Sight and Sound critics' poll every decade from 1962 to 2002
- •He played Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949) and wrote the cuckoo-clock speech himself
- •He received an Academy Honorary Award at the 1971 ceremony and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1975
- •The Other Side of the Wind, shot from 1970, was finally completed and released in 2018
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- British Film Institute — Where to begin with Orson Welles
- Senses of Cinema — Great Directors: Orson Welles
- Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich — This Is Orson Welles