orson welles

May 7, 2011September 11, 2011 ~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

[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 they have, which ones they want, and which ones they want a better version of. It's impossible to imagine Welles doing anything like this, in fact he thought it was dangerous for a filmmaker to see too many movies. Not that he didn't study films, when he was about to start making Citizen Kane he screened Stagecoach every night for as couple of weeks, each time with a different person from the studio in attendance to answer his questions. But that was to learn as much about the technical side of filmmaking as he could in a short period of time. He didn't keep doing it after that goal was achieved.

The movies:

(I exclude The Stranger (1946) from Welles' filmography not because it's not credited to him but because he himself didn't want to take credit for it. There is no question that he directed at least some parts of it, and it is interesting to watch, but it's not on the same level as the other films I've written about here.)

Also: The Cradle Will Rock

Additional viewing, for confirmed fans only:

Orson Welles: The One-Man Band: A very interesting documentary, which contains footage from various unfinished Welles projects, including The Other Side of the Wind, Moby Dick, and The Merchant of Venice. It is included in the Criterion Collection DVD of F for Fake.

keep a-goin’

September 21, 2009November 9, 2013 ~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 3 Comments

(Thinking about the recent death of Henry Gibson, I remembered this piece from a bit over nine years ago, which I decided to post here. More below on why.)

keep a-goin' (August 1, 2000)

I've been thinking a lot about persistence recently.

A member of Really Deep Thoughts Right Now (the Tori Amos email list where Bethany and I met) recently saw Patti Smith for the first time, and he was blown away. As he said, "so i got home from patti smith last night spent and wasted and ready to fucking change the world." I think it's great that Patti is being discovered by a whole group of younger fans these days, just as Neil Young was a few years ago. Fads and trends come and so, but Patti keeps on making the music that matters to her. Every time the entertainment industry extrudes one more plastic pop star for our listening pleasure, Patti Smith looks just a little bit better.

And there's Robert Altman, one of my favorite movie directors of all time. He's been in and out of favor in Hollywood, but he keeps on finding a way to make movies. Some have been good and some have been bad, and a few have been masterpieces (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville, for two examples). He's usually not considered to be on a par with Coppola and Scorsese, though he's made more great movies than either of them. For a while, in fact, many of his best films were not even available on video. Somebody asked him how he dealt with that, and he said he dealt with it the only way he could, by making another movie. At seventy-five, he's still more interested in the next picture than in all the ones he's directed already.

And, finally, there's Orson Welles. He was 24 when he directed Citizen Kane, his first movie. It is widely considered the greatest movie ever made in the United States. Until then, everything in his life had gone right. He'd been a successful actor, director and producer on Broadway, and a popular actor and director on the radio, and he'd arrived in Hollywood with an unprecedented contract which gave him complete control over the films that he made.

Welles once said that he had the same amount of good and bad luck as anybody else, he just had all the good luck first, and then all the bad luck. And he did have terrible luck after he left Hollywood, and he made quite a few mistakes as well, but for whatever other mistakes he may have made, he never gave up. He could have lived quite comfortably by just working as an actor, but again and again he made money as an actor only to spend it as a director. But some of the movies he made in those later years were great Touch of Evil, Falstaff, and The Trial come to mind).

One of my favorite moments in the movie Ed Wood comes when Wood (at a particularly low ebb when the church that's backing his "grave robbers from outer space" movie decides to pull out, partly because they discover he's a transvestite) goes into a gloomy bar to drown his sorrows, and finds himself face to face with Orson Welles. They commiserate about how difficult it is to make a movie (Welles urbanely ignoring the fact that the other man is in drag), because somebody else always controls the money, and finally Ed Wood asks, "Is it all worth it?"

"It is when it works," Welles says, and tells about making Citizen Kane, the one movie where nobody could touch a frame of it except for him. "Visions are worth fighting for," he continues. "Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

I love that moment, partly because the idea of Orson Welles offering advice to Ed Wood (who had tremendous enthusiasm but no discernible talent) is hilarious, and partly because the message is true. And Wood, recharged by this encounter with his hero, goes back and makes the movie his way, and the end result is Plan 9 from Outer Space, widely regarded as the worst movie ever made by anybody.

But, as he says earlier in the film, "The worst movie you ever saw? Well, my next one will be better!"

I guess all of this has been on my mind because I've been thinking about a writing project I put aside a few years ago. It was a huge, open-ended story, with a ton of characters and plots, and I used to post it in installments on BBSs (computer bulletin boards). But then I decided it was getting out of hand, and that it really should be turned into a regular novel (you know, like the ones other people write).

Now I'm not so sure.

Anyway, thanks to Bethany for letting me sit in. I'll see you all in a month for the Hejira One-Year Anniversary bash. I'll be the one in the angora sweater.

(This was written as a guest entry on Bethany's online journal, and it's interesting to read it now, since it's about my decision to finish U-town, which was finished on my 50th birthday, four and a half years after I wrote the above. And the only reason I thought of it now was that Henry Gibson died, and I remembered his terrific performances in The Long Goodbye and Nashville, and inevitably I thought about "Keep A-Goin'," one of the songs he sings in the latter movie. And that reminded me that I'd written something with that title once, thought it took Google to help me locate it. So, I thought I should post it here.)

(Oh, and Bethany, who is mentioned above? She's persistent, too. Her current journal is ladypilot.org, where she says, "i have been writing online in one form or another since 1999 [that’s longer than you and way before the word 'blog' existed].")

Later: I wanted to add the story below, which I first told in a comment on this post on Jo Eberhardt's blog, The Happy Logophile:

Quick story about my ex. After she and I split up, she was living with this guy (we’ll call him Chuck). She called me one night, and as we talked she mentioned that she was taking karate lessons. She explained that it was just for exercise and because it felt good, that it’s very difficult to get a black belt when you start as late as she did (she was in her 30s), that most people who get a black belt start when they’re kids, etc. Then she paused and she asked, “Am I going to try for a black belt?”
I laughed. “Of course you are. And you’re going to get it, too.”
She laughed, and then she said quietly, “Chuck hasn’t figured that out yet.”
And she did get the black belt.

the cradle will rock

March 1, 1999May 15, 2011 ~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

In 1937, Orson Welles was producing (and directing and acting in) plays for the Federal Theater Project, which was part of the government's Works Progress Administration. His first three productions (an all-Black production of Macbeth, a surreal farce called Horse Eats Hat, and Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus) had been very successful, and then he announced that the fourth production from Project 891 (his Federal Theater production company) would be The Cradle Will Rock, a "labor opera" by a young playwright named Marc Blitzstein.

Welles had originally agreed to direct this show for the Actors Repertory Company, but when they couldn't come up with the funding, he decided to do it for Project 891. This caused quite a furor in Washington. They had already had to force Welles to change some lines in Horse Eats Hat which were considered too risque (they are very bland by today's standards, of course). But The Cradle Will Rock was considerably more troubling, since it was about the unionization of the steel industry, which was being violently disputed at that time. Then, as now, conservative factions in the government didn't want tax dollars to go towards promoting any radical art.

The government didn't want to appear to be censors, though, so they announced that because of budget cuts they weren't opening any new shows until the beginning of the next fiscal year. Welles was originally inclined to go along with this. Project 891 was a wonderful vehicle for his ideas, and also it employed a lot of people who needed the work, so he didn't want to rock the boat. And, much as he admired Blitzstein, Welles was nowhere near as radical as the playwright or the play.

Hoping to change the government's mind, however, Welles announced a special invitation-only preview of the show. This went well, but the next day the government padlocked the theater.

As Welles said, "I was very ambiguous in my feeling, and I wasn't sure that we weren't wrecking the Federal Theater by what we were doing. But I thought if you padlock a theater, then the argument is closed. If they hadn't padlocked the theater, I would never have taken that strong a stand. The padlock was an insult. That's what unified everybody, you know. The padlock was the thing that made us move."

Legally, they could put on the play somewhere else, not produced by the Federal Theater, but Actors' Equity told its members they were not to appear on stage in the show since it was the government's right to postpone or cancel a show if they wanted to, just like any other theatrical producer. Plus, by padlocking the theater the government had effectively impounded all the sets and costumes.

Both Welles and Blitzstein had mixed feelings, but they decided to go ahead and perform the show at another theater. They didn't managed to get a theater until the night before the premiere, so Welles went to the original theater and led the audience through the streets to the new location, where they were seated and the show was put on.

Since the actors were prohibited from appearing "onstage," the stage was bare except for Blitzstein himself, at the piano, and the actors were spread out through the audience, standing up as it came time to perform their parts.

(Some accounts say that the actors' participation was not planned. Blitzstein was on the stage, performing all the parts, and then Olive Stanton, the homeless actress who was the star of the play, stood up in the audience and started to sing her part. The other actors followed suit. This is the version that is shown in Cradle Will Rock, Tim Robbins' excellent film about these events.)

The news of the company's defiance of the government was big news, of course, and the show was packed. The next day, Welles attempted to get the government to back down and let them use the original theater, with the sets and costumes, but they didn't budge.

Actors' Equity dropped their ban after the first night, though. However, the show continued to be performed from the audience for the rest of its run. It has often been performed this way since, too.

This was the end of Welles' work for the Federal Theater (as you can probably imagine) and so he was forced to start his own company, The Mercury Theatre. He had just turned twenty-two, by the way.

(For a more complete account, please refer to Barbara Leaming's excellent Orson Welles: A Biography, from which this account was drawn.)

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f for fake (1974)

February 4, 1999May 14, 2011 ~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

"I am a charlatan."

(Orson Welles)

Welles' films are mostly quite somber in tone. There is little humor, except in Falstaff, but Welles had another side that came out in his magic act, and in interviews. He was a trickster, a ham, a gleeful illusionist. This side dominates this film, which is more or less a documentary (a film essay he called it, which he hoped would catch on as a new genre of filmmaking).

He set out to make a documentary about Elmyr de Houry, one of the greatest art forgers in history, whose paintings hang in museums throughout the world. Actually, Welles saw a documentary about Elmyr on French television and bought up all the footage, including outtakes, in order to expand it into a feature film. But the unpredictable element was that the expert on Elmyr in the documentary was Clifford Irving, and in the middle of the making of Welles' movie it was revealed that Irving was quite a forger and illusionist himself (he wrote a fake Howard Hughes autobiography which he sold for a tidy sum, and then the whole scam was discovered).

At that point, the film became much more of a meditation on illusion, trickery, and authorship in general, especially since Welles claimed that he had originally intended to make Citizen Kane about Howard Hughes.

But, as he said, if you told the story of Hughes' life in a film, nobody would believe it.

He also performs a bit of trickery on the audience, which is revealed at the end of the film. I won't give it away.

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the immortal story (1968)

February 3, 1999May 14, 2011 ~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

Isak Dineson was one of Welles' favorite writers (Hemingway's too, by the way) and this movie does perfect justice to her short story. It was made for French television and it's only an hour long, the only narrative film Welles ever made in color.

The story concerns an old man, a merchant, in Macao who finds stories disturbing because they portray events which never actually happened. His solution is to take a common sailor's tale and actually make it come true. A wonderful story, beautifully told. Starring Welles and Jeanne Moreau.

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chimes at midnight/falstaff (1966)

February 2, 1999May 14, 2011 ~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

"What is difficult about Falstaff is that he is the greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in all drama. His faults are so small and he makes tremendous jokes out of little faults. But his goodness is like bread, like wine..."

(Orson Welles)

The last of Welles' three Shakespeare adaptations was made between 1964 and 1965, and it's called "Falstaff" in the U.S., although its original title was "Chimes at Midnight." It's largely comprised of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, with additional material from Richard II, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The purpose of pulling scenes from the different plays is to tell, in one movie, the story of Falstaff's relationship to Prince Hal, to build up to the heartbreaking final scene where the prince, now crowned King Henry V, rejects his old companion.

The film stars Welles as Falstaff (of course), and I believe this is his finest screen performance. The movie also features Keith Baxter as Prince Hal, Norman Rodway as Hotspur (who is particularly excellent), John Gielgud as Henry IV, Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet and Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly.

The most striking thing about the film, outside of Welles' performance, is the way the battle scenes are filmed. They are shot from ground level, literally and figuratively, showing all the mud and confusion and futility of war in a way I'd never seen before. There is no chivalry or heroism in it, just brutality.

When I saw Mel Gibson's Braveheart, I thought the battle scenes were strongly reminiscent of those in Chimes at Midnight. I didn't mention this in my review of that film, however, since I thought it was just evidence that my Welles obsession was getting out of control.

Then, somewhat later, I read an interview with Gibson where he said he had deliberately modeled the battle scenes on the ones in Welles' Chimes at Midnight.

Chimes at Midnight was the last full-length narrative movie Welles made.

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