orson welles - Anthony Lee Collins

[Yesterday was Orson Welles’ birthday, and in honor of that I’ve decided to post my Orson Welles reviews here. Below is the original introduction I wrote twelve years ago. At the end is the list of the movies. My plan is to post one review a day until they are all up.]

Introduction (1999)

I’ve been a fan of Orson Welles’ films for many

years, probably since the first time I saw Citizen Kane on television,

a viewing which was interrupted right before the end by a drunken

driver crashing into our family’s car right outside the house, so I

had to wait impatiently for a second opportunity to see the film in

order to find out what the heck “Rosebud” was.

I’m not sure exactly why or when that initial desire

became a fascination with Welles’ films in general, but I was lucky

because in those days (the 1960s and 1970s) there were many revival

houses in New York City, theaters which showed only old movies, in

double bills. The movies were changed every day in some theaters, in

others they stayed a little longer, but the result was that, if you

paid attention to the listings, sooner or later you could see almost

anything. Even off the top of my head I can remember seven such

theaters, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some.

So, when I set out to see all of Welles’ movies, it

was not easy but it was certainly possible. Today, of course, it

would be impossible except on video, and difficult even then. So, in

the early 1990s, when I was posting messages on some local computer

bulletin boards (also now mostly extinct, the Internet has killed the

local BBS scene almost as completely as video killed the revival

houses), I realized that I was the only person there who had seen all

of Welles’ movies on the big screen (or, probably, on any screen). So,

I set out to write reviews of all of them.

By the way, when I refer to Welles’ films, I am

speaking of the films he directed. I have no special interest in the

movies he acted in (most of which he chose strictly on the basis of

how much they were willing to pay him), and have only seen two (The

Third Man, which is great, and Catch-22, which is not).

My memory is far from photographic, so I did utilize

some reference materials when I wrote the original reviews, and I

rented the films which were available on video in order to refresh my

memory on some points.

Interest in Welles and his films seems to be

increasing these days.

The 1998 re-edit of Touch of Evil was

the most successful revival ever at the
Film Forum in New York City,

running a total of five months, and at one point it was one of the

top-grossing films in the country (calculated on a per-screen basis).

Books about Welles continue to be published, and Tim Robbins’ newest

movie (Cradle Will Rock) depicts an
incident in

Welles’ early life. And, of course, today’s filmmakers continue to be

influenced by, and to steal from, Welles.

(Thanks to Bruce Goldstein from Film Forum for

confirming the specific details about Touch of Evil.)

George Orson Welles
(1915-1985)

There are two particular quotes from Orson Welles

which I’ve always thought were especially interesting, and they get

into some of the points I’ve been thinking about in relation to Welles’
films:

“Luckily, we know almost nothing about Shakespeare and

very little about Cervantes. And that makes it so much easier to

understand their works… It’s an egocentric,

romantic, nineteenth-century conception that the artist is more

interesting and more important than his art.”

Welles did not like to discuss his life, and

especially any connection between his life and his art, and it seems

like this reluctance is partially personal and partially because it

detracts from the work being taken the way it’s intended, as art. This

is, as he points out, a rather old-fashioned notion.

[When discussing his conviction that he had killed his

father:]
I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate

psychoanalysis. I think if you’re guilty of something you should live

with it.”

Welles has always seemed to me very unusual among

filmmakers in that his ideas about stories and characters and even

good and evil come from Shakespeare more than from any source in this

century (most filmmakers these days seem to draw mostly from other

films). Even the best directors today (Martin Scorsese comes to mind)

are film buffs, the product of film schools. Welles was always much

more interested in making films fit his ideas about telling stories

than he was in finding himself a niche in the history of

filmmaking.

I read an article which said that Scorsese has an

entire office, staffed 24 hours a day, just responsible for taping

movies off TV and cable, and keeping a running catalog of which ones