A vocal faction insists that Welles never produced anything worthwhile after his milestone directorial debut, "Citizen Kane." Even those who find a hint of brilliance in "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Touch of Evil" dismiss the last decades of Welles' life as...
[more]A vocal faction insists that Welles never produced anything worthwhile after his milestone directorial debut, "Citizen Kane." Even those who find a hint of brilliance in "The Magnificent Ambersons" and "Touch of Evil" dismiss the last decades of Welles' life as a sad parade of impractical projects and self-parodying wine commercials. In the light of new footage of apr's-Kane Welles, however, a new assessment can begin.
Prior to his film career, Welles was an enfant terrible of theater and radio fame. Between 1936 and 1941, Orson Welles actively participated in over one hundred radio drama productions as writer, actor, and director. But the radio show that made him famous was his 1938 "The War of the Worlds," which caused widespread public hysteria among listeners who believed the production represented a real alien invasion from outer space.
At age 26, he was hired to fill the coffers of RKO Studios. He was given complete creative control and threw down the gauntlet with "Citizen Kane" (1941), a movie scripted loosely from the life of William Randolph Hearst. As is now legend, Hearst was infuriated by the production and had "Kane" panned in all his newspapers. It took years for the film to gain the reputation it deserved for its intricate narrative structure, innovative camera work, and powerful visual iconography.
The film opens with the death of Charles Foster Kane, and tells his story through flashbacks, revealing a paradoxical personality rare for 1940s cinema. Doomed by Hearst to a poor box-office showing, "Kane" caused Welles to be closely supervised on his next film, "The Magnificent Ambersons:" the studio cut it in half and tacked on a happy ending without his approval.
Fired from RKO with his staff, Welles began an odyssey from studio to studio, directing and starring in versions of "Macbeth" (1948), "Othello" (1952), and "The Trial" (1962). He also made the thriller "Touch of Evil" in 1958, which brought Film Noir to new heights. But Welles was washed up in Hollywood, and so he went into exile, wandering Europe for 20 years, acting in other people's productions to finance his own.
Epic films such as "The Odyssey," "The Iliad," "War and Peace," and "The Pickwick Papers" had all been visualized cinematically in his mind, but were never brought to the screen for lack of funds. Only recently, archival clips of unfinished potential masterpieces have resuscitated Welles' reputation as a genius. Outside the system, cut off from money, Welles "sustained himself on hope and enthusiasm." One can only imagine what his electric intelligence would have produced if the prodigy hadn't been so radical.
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